The reason why
(August 19th 2007) A recent survey by two US psychologists revealed 237 separate motives why people have sex. Susanne Dorn takes a closer look.
Picture the scene: a candlelit dinner, a table for two, an expensive bottle of wine, romantic music in the background, and a man and a woman staring lovingly into each others' eyes. The next course seems obvious, right? Sex! But why?
Granted, this sounds like a subject for the silly-season, at least in a life-science journal like
Lab Times. But even here it deserves to be dealt with, because, as it turns out, it is also a question of scientific interest. One might assume that the answer is obvious: to reproduce, to experience sexual pleasure, or to relieve sexual tension. But humans are not as primitive as was once thought. Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss from the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, recently addressed the "extremely important, but surprisingly little studied question" of why people have sex (Arch Sex Behav, 2007, 36:477-507). Their astonishing conclusion was that humans have sex for manifold and psychologically complex reasons. The authors asked about 450 men and women between the ages of 17 and 52 why they had sex, and identified 237 (yes, 237!) separate motives. Those ranged from the mundane "to experience physical pleasure" to the spiritual "I wanted to get closer to God"; from the altruistic "I wanted the person to feel good about himself/herself" to the vengeful "to get back at my partner for having cheated on me".
In a second step Meston and Buss evaluated the degree to which each of the 237 reasons had prompted people to have sex by interviewing about 1500 college-aged students. Both men and women agreed on their top reason for making love: being attracted to the other person. This was reassuring, as was the fact that the more hair-raising reasons, such as "to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease" or "the person offered to give me drugs for doing it", were the answers least frequently given by women and men, respectively.
After factor analyses, the human motivation for sex boiled down to four large factors. As expected, there are a lot of physical reasons, including stress reduction, pleasure, physical desire and experience seeking. Emotional motives such as "to express love" or "to become one with another person" are also unsurprising. But besides this, people also have sex to attain a goal: for example to get rid of a headache, to burn calories, or - yes, this still exists - to get a job, promotion or raise. Insecurity factors such as preventing a breakup, infidelity, or to boost self-esteem, are the fourth category.
In contrast to widespread opinion, Meston and Buss found gender differences to be insignificant. Unsurprisingly, male lust is more often linked to physical motives and if there is the opportunity for sex, men take it - somewhat more often than women. And women are more likely to be led by emotional factors, such as aspiring to deepen a relationship. However, twenty of the top 25 reasons for getting intimate with someone were the same for men and women, at least in the studied sample of college students.
So, thanks to this study we now know why we do it if we do it - or we can at least identify a plausible reason.
Has anyone ever studied why some people have no sex? Well, several possible reasons for abstaining come to mind, but before I start to hold forth about this, I'm going to switch off my computer and have a look at what my boyfriend is doing.
