We found that the median number of sexual thoughts for men was 18.6 and for women it was 9.9. In contrast, the average for men was 34.2 and for women it was 18.6. Statistical tests indicated that the number of thoughts about sex was not statistically larger than the number of thoughts about food and sleep. Men had more thoughts about all three of those areas than did women. These findings paint a rather different picture of men than does the urban legend of thinking about sex many times per minute. The typical men in this sample were thinking about sex once or twice an hour, and statistically no more and no less than they were thinking about eating or sleeping.
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We can't know from our study if men really had more thoughts about sex, food, and sleep than women did, or if they were just more likely to recognize and/or record those thoughts. There is some evidence that at least some women were reluctant to report certain types of thoughts.
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Another scale that we administered to the participants measured their degree of comfort with sexuality (erotophilia). Participants with higher erotophilia scores also reported more sexual thoughts. In fact, if you could know only one thing about people in order to best predict how often they think about sex, you would be better off knowing their degree of erotophilia rather than whether they are male or female.
