Men ponder food and sleep as much as sex

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The median number of thoughts about sex by college-age men was 18 times a day to women's 10 times a day, the study found. But the men also thought about food and sleep proportionately more.

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The "men think about sex every seven seconds" axiom is an urban legend, Fisher said. But there is little reliable research on how often men and women really do have sexual thoughts. Most studies have asked people to think back across their day or week and try to remember how many sex thoughts they had — a method that doesn't always provide reliable results.

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On average, Fisher wrote, the men in the study thought about sex slightly more than once each waking hour and women about half that. However, men paid no greater attention to sex than they did food and sleep, Fisher found. That difference could be a real one in which men are just more aware of their physical state at any given time, she said, or it could be that men are more comfortable clicking the tally counter to record their body-centric thoughts. The study has limitations, including the fact that people tend not to have isolated thoughts. The data also doesn't show whether an individual thought is a one-second passing notion or a full-on 10-minute sexual fantasy. The study was limited to college students, but Fisher currently has research under way on adults ages 25 and up. She said she hopes to get to the truth of the sex difference stories that get passed around in popular culture.

"When people hear about some of these differences, I think sometimes they don't question it because it fits the stereotypes we have of men and women," Fisher said. "When you stop and take a closer look at the origins of some of these alleged differences, they sometimes have no empirical support."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42922879/ns/health-mens_health/