Do men really have more dirty thoughts than women?

It's a question as old as time. Do men actually think about sex more than women? The general belief is that men, who tend to have a higher libido than women, think about "the act" about every seven seconds. However, there has yet to be any research to back that claim, so researchers decided to put together an experiment to find out for sure.

Survey shows how often women really think about sex

The British website for extra-conjugal relationships IllicitEncounters.com asked 283 psychology students (between the ages of 18 and 25) from Ohio State University to count how many times a day they think about food, sleep and sex.

The groups of participants were divided and asked to track thoughts of food, sleep or sexwith the help of a tally counter. Each group was then supposed to reset their tally counter each day. Prior to this, all participants were asked to complete a survey analysing their attitudes to each of the three activities as well as how many times in a day they believed they might think about them.

And it turns out that the results among the men and woman were very different. The study showed that men think about sleep roughly once every 33 minutes and about food once every 38 minutes. And women? They think about food once every 62 minutes and about sleep once every 72 minutes.

But what about sex? Men were found to have an erotic thought once every 28 minutes while women have one every 50 minutes, namely 18.6 times a day. It’s a bit less, but all the same, it's safe to say that women also think about sex a lot more than we previously thought!

The survey isn't what it seems

Leader of the study, Dr Terri D. Fisher, Professor of Psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield explained that while the study does show that men think about sex more than women, it doesn't show other important factors such as how long each dirty thought lasts or the nature of the thoughts. He wrote in Psychology Today that there are many more factors in play than initially thought:

We can't know from our study if men really had more thoughts about sex, food, and sleep than women did, or if they were just more likely to recognize and/or record those thoughts. There is some evidence that at least some women were reluctant to report certain types of thoughts.

Looks like he might need to conduct another study just to be sure!

Check out the video above for the details of this study!