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The "Why" of sex. Who knew?


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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.

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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This line is funny, "Men .. more likely to be opportunistic ... if sex were there and available they would jump on it ..."

Ain't love grand?

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:laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

When I was a student I met many other students, some from psychology University. They complained that there was mainly two kind of people studying there: people who was interested in psychology and people with crippled minds, flirting with everybody, whose only aim seemed to be meeting people like themselves to have sex and get rid of their trauma...

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This so-called study is not up to the very low standards set by the Kinseys. (The Kinsey folk asked people about sex in the hothouse atmosphere of a university town and got hip/flip answers.) If they'd asked this question at the local public high school, they'd have had something to work on...in prison. I prefer an observation made about the movies: "It's the old story of boys taking pictures/movies of girls."

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