However, this accounting is clearly an exaggeration , following some recent studies. In fact, sexual thoughts are not as frequent as is believed, although it is difficult to give an exact figure. The available research yields lower numbers than what we have in mind when we talk about it. According to a 2011 Ohio State University study that applied counters to participants, men think about sex nineteen times a day and women ten . For its part, a survey carried out by social psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann for the Booth School of Business records even lower figures. In any case, we are far from the hackneyed “men are always thinking about the only thing”.
Where then does the idea that erotic thoughts are omnipresent come from? The psychologist Terri Fisher, director of the aforementioned study carried out on the internet together with her research team from Ohio State University, ventures a hypothesis: erotic obsession is well regarded and the people who most fantasize about sex – in her research a man it reached 388 daily thoughts and a woman, 280 – brag about it. To carry out their experiment they used “click counters”. They gave them to 283 college students divided into three groups and asked them to press and record every time they thought about sex, food, or sleep. In the study, the average man had 19 thoughts about sex a day. A higher figure than that of women, who registered approximately 10 thoughts a day.
However, the men also had more thoughts about food and sleep, suggesting that perhaps they are more likely to have pleasurable impulses in general. In any case, Fisher concluded, having your mind occupied with eroticism and speaking it in public is often falsely associated with an intense sex life. This is not the case, for example, with food or sleep, two basic needs that occupy a large part of our mental life and which we normally do not brag about.
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