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Archive for July, 2007

So, Why do you have sex? Basking in Blockquotes.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Bas­king in the block­quo­tes for lunch, excuse me.

In the NYT today John Tier­ney wri­tes of the study/survey done by psycho­lo­gists at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas Aus­tin Cindy M. Mes­ton and David M. Buss. A study to be published in August issue of Archi­ves of Sexual Behavior.

They basi­cally asked nearly 2,000 peo­ple why they’d had sex, Buss was sur­pri­sed “by this rich­ness of sexual psycho­logy”. Ori­gi­nal Study PDF

Some of the reasons:

I wan­ted to feel clo­ser to God

I was drunk.

the desire to have a child

to get rid of a headache.

help me fall asleep

make my part­ner feel powerful

burn calo­ries

return a favor

keep warm

hurt an enemy

change the topic of conversation

It see­med like good exercise

Someone dared me

I thought it would make me feel healthy

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

Thank god for that I say.


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.”


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.”

And they call women sluts? The truth is out there baby.

Tier­ney, on the other hand, feels the list is just not com­plete enough. He seems stuck on Herrick’s “To the Vir­gins, to Make Much of Time”.

I just hope he is not gathe­ring too many rosebuds.

To help him out you can also add your own rea­sons at Tier­ney Lab

My favo­rite of course is “to change the topic of con­ver­sa­tion”. It works well when get­ting in too deep, una­ble to pro­vide back-up for an argument.

So, why do you have sex?

Talk among yourselves.