This has to be about the dumbest — and then most badly misrepresented — study of the last few years. Some researchers surveyed a bunch of college students about why they have sex, and to hear the co-author of the study tell it, this is what they found:

“The stereotype that men have sex for physical reasons and women have sex for love — our data didn’t really support that,” [said University of Texas professor Cindy Meston]. “These young men and women were having sex for physical pleasure and also for emotional attachment, feeling connected to another person.”

She also told the AP:

“It’s refuted a lot of gender stereotypes…that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love…That’s not what I came up with in my findings.”

Well, first of all, if that were true, it might be because Meston only talked to college students.* And two, it’s not true.

From Meston’s very own study:

An astonishing 123 items, or 52% of the items, showed significant gender differences…Men showed significantly greater endorsement of having sex due to physical reasons, such as ”The person had a desirable body”; ”The person was too ”hot” (sexy) to resist,” and simply because the opportunity presented itself: ”The person was available”; ”The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of them.” Men exceeded women on many items that pertained to physical pleasure such as, ”I wanted to achieve an orgasm,” and ”It feels good.” Men more than women reported having sex as a way to improve their social status ( e.g., ”I wanted to enhance my reputation”; ”I wanted to brag to my friends about my conquests”) and their sexual experience (e.g., ”I needed another notch on my belt”; ”I wanted to improve my sexual skills”). Finally, men exceeded women on endorsing a variety of utilitarian reasons for sex: ”I wanted to change the topic of conversation”; ”I wanted to improve my sexual skills.”

Women exceeded men on only three of the 237 reasons…”I wanted to feel feminine”; ”I wanted to express my love for the person”; ”I realized that I was in love.”

These paragraphs use “significant” in the statistical sense, so you can argue that while the differences were perceptible, they weren’t all that severe, or at least not as severe as one might have expected. Still, it makes Meston’s comment to the AP that ” [n]one of the gender differences are all that great” sound a bit disingenuous, no? After all, they were “astonishing.”

The researchers did a poor job of eliminating overlapping reasons, like “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “I wanted to achieve an orgasm,” so they grouped the reasons together and performed factor analyses. The results were basically the same, with statistically significant gender differences on physical, goal attainment and insecurity, but not emotional, reasons. The researchers note that 20 of the top 25 reasons for having sex overlap between the genders, but write:

When examining endorsement frequency of reasons for having sex, however, substantial gender differences emerged such that men reported substantially higher frequencies than did women for the majority of individual items and subfactors. Men, significantly more than women, endorsed reasons centering on the physical appearance and physical desirability of a partner…These findings support the evolution-based hypothesis that men tend to be more sexual aroused by visual sexual cues than are women, since physical appearance provides a wealth of cues to a woman’s fertility and reproductive capacity…

Yup, that sure shows how men and women are exactly the same! I’ll have to reexamine my ignorant stereotypes!

These researchers used an unrepresentative sample (exclusively college students), and when that didn’t tease out the PC results they were looking for, one of them just started misleading the media about what she found.

I will say, though, that the articles I cited here did a reasonable job of including alternate views. It appears that John Tierney of the NYT actually read the study, too.

By Robert VerBruggen

*For the record, the study had two phases. The first phase simply had people list all the reasons they could think of for having sex. This phase included some non-students. But when it came to ranking those reasons — the results discussed in this post and elsewhere in the media — only students were involved.