What Made You Want To Do It?

MayorBob.

Posted to SciTech on Mon Aug 06, 2007 at 06:00:32 PM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

It's a question that seems almost intuitive.  Do we really need a scientific survey to be performed on why people want to have sex?  I mean there's the feel good factor.  Then there's the want to please him or her factor.  Then there's the let's try to have a kid reason.  Wait a minute, this business of why people want to have sex might be a bit more complex and varied than you originally thought.  So a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found out as they managed to identify 237 different reasons why people had sex.

Drs. Cindy Melton and David Buss believe the study (31 pg pdf doc), published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the "most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation" ... ever.  Difficult to argue with a list with so many different reasons ranging from "I was attracted to the person" (tops for men and women) to "I wanted to give somebody an STD" (bottom for men and women).  Actually, Melton and Buss started out with 715 different reasons but boiled them down to an easily manageable 237 for purposes of their survey.  Then they asked close to 2,000 people to rate how important the 237 reasons were.

They took the answers and grouped them into four general categories: Physical; Goal Attainment; Emotional; and Insecurity.  They also measured for what worked for the men and what worked for the women who participated in the survey.  The bottom line was that, as far as the most frequent reasons for having sex, there weren't that many differences between genders.  There were reasons where men and women differed as to importance.  Men would cite revealing clothes worn by females as a reason to have sex ... women not so much.  And one thing the study dispelled was the notion that women use sex as a tool to get ahead. "Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women" said Dr. Buss observing that men tended to reveal they had sex more frequently than women as a way of gaining social status.

At any rate, the writer of the NY Times article invited readers to contribute their reasons for wanting to have sex.  These are included here.