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The 237 Reasons To Have Sex

The 237 Reasons To Have Sex	427 Views
posted on Wednesday, August 01, 2007

THE 237 REASONS TO HAVE SEX
By Judy Peres
Chicago Tribune
July 31, 2007

Original Link

If you think people have sex for pleasure and for procreation, you're right. They also have sex to get rid of a headache, to celebrate a special occasion, to get a promotion and to feel closer to God.

New research published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior has come up with a list of 237 reasons that motivate people to have sex.

Who knew?

Cindy Meston, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the paper, said most people assume there are a few simple reasons for having sex: "It feels good, you're in love, or you want to have a child. We found that people are having sex for lots of other reasons."

Knowing that, she said, could boost sex education, help devise more effective strategies for preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and lead to improved treatments for people with sexual problems.

"You need to know why people are having sex if you're trying to put into place a safe-sex program," Meston said. "If you assume people have sex because they're in the heat of the moment, then [you tell them to] carry condoms. But if they're doing it for revenge or because they want to enhance their social status, that will require a different strategy."

Meston and co-author David Buss conducted their research in two stages. First, they asked a group of more than 400 students and volunteers to simply list "all the reasons you can think of why you, or someone you have known, has engaged in sexual intercourse in the past." That produced 715 reasons. After deleting identical or very similar entries, the researchers were left with 237.

Some were "pretty shocking," Meston said, such as "I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease." She said she also was surprised that some people said they had sex because "I wanted to get closer to God."

"Most of the literature shows that religious people have more sexual problems," she said. "But several people endorsed the idea that religion and sexuality were actually closely linked."

In the second stage of the research, they asked 1,500 other students to rate how important each of the 237 reasons was in their own sexual behavior.

The students were asked to indicate how frequently each reason had led them to engage in sexual intercourse in the past, on a scale from 1 for never to 5 for all the time. Those who had not had intercourse (27 percent of the women and 32 percent of the men) were asked to indicate the likelihood that each of the reasons would lead them to have sex in the future.

Men, women share reasons

Most of the students gave the usual reasons for having sex: "I was attracted to the person," "It feels good" and, "I wanted to show my affection" were high on the lists of both men and women. Lesser priorities on both lists were reasons such as, "Someone offered me money to do it," "I felt sorry for the person," "I wanted to punish myself" and, "Because of a bet."

Meston said she was somewhat surprised by the similarities between the genders. Men were more likely to endorse having sex for physical reasons (such as, "The person was too hot to resist") and to boost their social status ("I wanted to brag to my friends about my conquests.") But there was no difference in the emotional reasons, such as, "I wanted to express my love for the person."

"The stereotype that men have sex for physical reasons and women have sex for love -- our data didn't really support that," Meston said. "These young men and women were having sex for physical pleasure and also for emotional attachment, feeling connected to another person."

Meston and Buss said their findings contradict the stereotype that women, more than men, use sex to obtain special favors. In their study, men were more likely to endorse reasons for having sex that involved utilitarian goals ("To get a favor from someone").

Leonore Tiefer, a sex therapist and psychologist at New York University School of Medicine, said the findings did not really answer the question, "Why Humans Have Sex," as the title of the paper asserts.

"It's why Texas students say they have sex," Tiefer said.

Nevertheless, she said, it's "useful to discuss motives, as opposed to just counting."

Meston acknowledged the limitation of her research and said she planned to look at other populations.

"This is just the start," she said. "The next step is to see how these motivators change across time, how they differ between genders across the age range, how they differ by ethnicity."

Another limitation of the study, Meston acknowledged, was that people might have been reluctant to cite socially unacceptable motivations, such as the desire to make money or punish a partner. Conversely, they might have exaggerated their response rates to socially desirable reasons, such as expressing love.

Survey may aid therapists

But she said the survey, dubbed "YSEX?," already could be used to start developing new treatments for people with sexual problems. "Just giving the list to people to check off would give a therapist more to work with," she said.

In addition, Meston noted, people in therapy often are hesitant to talk about sexual experiences they're not proud of. "Learning you're not the only one who has had sex for a stupid reason might bring a bit of relief," she said.

Another benefit could be for people with very low sex drive. A recent landmark survey found that nearly one-third of women aren't interested in sex.

"A lot of people have low desire," Meston explained. "It's not a problem if their partner also has low desire. But if their partner wants to have sex much more often than they do, it could become a problem in the marriage. Some women really resent having sex, because they're not getting physical pleasure.

"If they learn that they're not so unusual -- that not everyone is having sex because it feels good -- they might find another reason that makes them feel less resentful, like 'Oh, yeah, having sex does make me sleep better.' "

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THE WHYS OF MATING: 237 REASONS AND COUNTING
By John Tierney
New York Times
July 31, 2007

Original Link

Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren’t so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions. Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies -- to find better genes, to gain status and resources -- but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations.

Perhaps you didn’t lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people’s minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately.

For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons -- everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.

Who knew, for instance, that a headache had any erotic significance except as an excuse for saying no? But some respondents of both sexes explained that they’d had sex “to get rid of a headache.” It’s No. 173 on the list.

Others said they did it to “help me fall asleep,” “make my partner feel powerful,” “burn calories,” “return a favor,” “keep warm,” “hurt an enemy” or “change the topic of conversation.” The lamest may have been, “It seemed like good exercise,” although there is also this: “Someone dared me.”

Dr. Buss has studied mating strategies around the world -- he’s the oft-cited author of “The Evolution of Desire” and other books -- but even he did not expect to find such varied and Machiavellian reasons for sex. “I was truly astonished,” he said, “by this richness of sexual psychology.”

The researchers collected the data by first asking more than 400 people to list their reasons for having sex, and then asking more than 1,500 others to rate how important each reason was to them. Although it was a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texas, nearly every one of the 237 reasons was rated by at least some people as their most important motive for having sex.

The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: “I was attracted to the person.”

The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including “I wanted to express my love for the person,” “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “It’s fun.”

No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, “I wanted to express my love for the person” and “I realized I was in love.” This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents’ reluctance to admit to less lofty motives.

The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.

“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ”

Dr. Buss said, “Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement.”

But then, men were also more likely than women to say they’d had sex because “I was slumming.” Or simply because “the opportunity presented itself,” or “the person demanded that I have sex.”

If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.

To make sense of the 237 reasons, Dr. Buss and Dr. Meston created a taxonomy with four general categories:

¶Physical: “The person had beautiful eyes” or “a desirable body,” or “was good kisser” or “too physically attractive to resist.” Or “I wanted to achieve an orgasm.”

¶Goal Attainment: “I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner” or “break up a rival’s relationship” or “make money” or “be popular.” Or “because of a bet.”

¶Emotional: “I wanted to communicate at a deeper level” or “lift my partner’s spirits” or “say ‘Thank you.’ ” Or just because “the person was intelligent.”

¶Insecurity: “I felt like it was my duty” or “I wanted to boost my self-esteem” or “It was the only way my partner would spend time with me.”

Having sex out of a sense of duty, Dr. Buss said, showed up in a separate study as being especially frequent among older women. But both sexes seem to practice a strategy that he calls mate-guarding, as illustrated in one of the reasons given by survey respondents: “I was afraid my partner would have an affair if I didn’t.”

That fear seems especially reasonable after you finish reading Dr. Buss’s paper and realize just how many reasons there are for infidelity. Some critics might complain that the list has some repetitions -- it includes “I was curious about sex” as well as “I wanted to see what all the fuss was about” -- but I’m more concerned about the reasons yet to be enumerated.

For instance, nowhere among the 237 reasons will you find the one attributed to the actress Joan Crawford: “I need sex for a clear complexion.” (The closest is “I thought it would make me feel healthy.”)Nor will you find anything about gathering rosebuds while ye may (the 17th-century exhortation to young virgins from Robert Herrick). Nor the similar hurry-before-we-die rationale (“The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none I think do there embrace”) from Andrew Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress.”

From even a cursory survey of literature or the modern mass market in sex fantasies, it seems clear that this new taxonomy may not be any more complete than the original periodic table of the elements.

When I mentioned Ms. Crawford’s complexion and the poets’ rationales to Dr. Buss, he promised to consider them and all other candidates for Reason 238.

You can nominate your own reasons at TierneyLab. You can also submit nominations for a brand new taxonomy: reasons for just saying “No way!” Somehow, though, I don’t think this list will be as long.

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NHNE Male/Female/Relationship Research