237 reasons we have sex

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WORLD / Health

237 reasons we have sex

(AP)
Updated: 2007-08-01 09:20

WASHINGTON - After exhaustively compiling a list of the 237 reasons why
people have sex, researchers found that young men and women get intimate
for mostly the same motivations. It's more about lust in the body than a
love connection in the heart.

College-aged men and women agree on their top reasons for having sex -
they were attracted to the person, they wanted to experience physical
pleasure and "it feels good," according to a peer-reviewed study in the
August edition of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Twenty of the top 25
reasons given for having sex were the same for men and women.

Expressing love and showing affection were in the top 10 for both men and
women, but they did take a back seat to the clear No. 1: "I was attracted
to the person."

Researchers at the University of Texas spent five years and their own
money to study the overlooked why behind sex while others were spending
their time on the how.

"It's refuted a lot of gender stereotypes ... that men only want sex for
the physical pleasure and women want love," said University of Texas
clinical psychology professor Cindy Meston, the study's co-author.
"That's not what I came up with in my findings."

Forget thinking that men are from Mars and women from Venus, "the more we
look, the more we find similarity," said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, director of
sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego. Goldstein, who wasn't
part of Meston's study, said the Texas research made a lot of sense and
adds to growing evidence that the vaunted differences in the genders may
only be among people with sexual problems.

Meston and colleague David Buss first questioned 444 men and women -
ranging in age from 17 to 52 - to come up with a list of 237 distinct
reasons people have sex. They ranged from "It's fun" which men ranked
fourth and women ranked eighth to "I wanted to give someone else a
sexually transmitted disease" which ranked on the bottom by women.

Once they came up with that long list, Meston and Buss asked 1,549
college students taking psychology classes to rank the reasons on a
one-to-five scale on how they applied to their experiences.

"None of the gender differences are all that great," Meston said. "Men
were more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were
there and available they would jump on it, somewhat more so than women.
Women were more likely to have sex because they felt they needed to
please their partner."

But this is among college students, when Meston conceded "hormones run
rampant." She predicted huge differences when older groups of people are
studied.

Since her study came out Tuesday, people are coming up with new reasons
to have sex.

"Originally, I thought that we exhaustively compiled the list, but now I
found that there should be some added," Meston said.

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