Study Debunks Myth That Women Want Sex Less

Bachelors might have sex on their minds more than their single female counterparts, but once in a committed relationship, men and women have similar attitudes toward the act, a new study finds.

The results, published in the April issue of the journal Sex Roles, reveal how sexual stereotypes, in which guys want to go for it and gals tend to resist, don’t hold when romantic feelings come into play.

“Men experience a lot of pressure in our society to have sex with a number of different partners,” said one of the study’s researchers, Paul Perrin, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Florida, “the opposite of what women experience as kind of the gatekeepers of sexuality.”

Past studies, the scientists point out, have shown that compared with women, men are more sexually permissive, endorse casual sex at higher rates and masturbate more often.

And even in dreamland, men are from Mars and women from Venus. A recent study showed men were more than twice as likely as women to report dreams about multiple sex partners.