According to a recent poll of 3,000 people by online marketing firm onepoll.com, men think of sex 13 times a day, or 4,745 times a year.
Seem like a lot? Well, that’s nothing compared to thinking about it every 52 seconds as Dr. Louann Brizendine claims they do in her book The Female Brain. Other results through the years have placed the frequency of men’s sexual thoughts everywhere from “every three minutes,” to “every 15 seconds” with “every seven seconds” topping the heap.
In their book Don’t Swallow Your Gum: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health, pediatricians Dr. Aaron Carroll or Dr. Rachel Vreeman point out just how ludicrous this latter seven-second claim is.
“If we assume that the average male is awake for 16 hours a day, each man would have to think about sex more than 8,000 times a day. That’s about as many times as a person breathes while awake,” they write.
It’s not just the math that makes these claims ridiculous. How can you accurately calculate how often someone thinks about sex in a day anyway? After all, if a poll asked you to keep track of how often you think about sex, wouldn’t you then be thinking about how often you think about sex, and therefore be thinking about sex constantly, thus skewing the results? Which raises another problem with these claims: What exactly constitutes a sexual thought?
So what’s the point of our constant obsession with how often men have who-knows-what-kind-of-fleeting thoughts about sex?
The only thing these sketchy statistics ever seem to want to prove is that men have more who-knows-how-fleeting sexual thoughts than women. By comparison, in the onepoll.com poll, women think of sex just five times a day or 1,825 times per year.
And compared to once every 52 seconds in Brizendine’s book, women only think of it once a day.
Instead of constantly perpetuating this ultimately unfounded idea that all men are walking around with nothing but sex on the brain while women —with their dearth of dirty thoughts — are clearly more sexually repressed, wouldn’t it be a lot more helpful to have more quality-over-quantity analysis about the nature of men’s and women’s sexual thoughts?
Then again, if that were the case, what would lame comedians and sitcom writers come up with as a premise for all their jokes?
