Show Me!

For decades I have been hearing this claim: " men think about sex more often than women". Sometimes this is quantified , such as : "men think about sex every 52 seconds opposed to every 96 seconds for women" etc...

To me, this is an absurd thing to claim as fact. How do you measure thoughts? I once challenged a friend who claimed men had a 'sex thought' every seven seconds ( 9 for women) to show me some scientific proof.

She said: " but everyone knows it."

They do? I don't.

"I read it somewhere."

Where? I've looked a lot.

"It's a well-known fact."

If it's so "well-known" why won't any credible sources lend their backing to it?

I recently had a fave penpal make the same claim in general terms...and here it is again in yet another permutation (every 30 seconds for men) in my previous post's comments...aarrrgh!

Everyone knows it, but no one knows how they know it.

I have never read of a conclusive, scientifically valid experiment that can objectively measure the frequency and occurrence of specific thoughts.

A simple survey will not work- merely asking "how often do you think about water?" skews the results because it immediately forces the subject to think of water.

Asking people to honestly and objectively measure and report their own thoughts about sex is pure folly; people lie about sex and it's damned near impossible to be objective on the subject of self.

If someone thinks of water, are they thinking of rain? Thirst? A car wash? What is a water thought?
What constitutes thinking about sex? This crucial element is undefined in the "common wisdom".

Note that for this exercise, it doesn't matter which gender thinks about sex more often- ( my guess is that it's roughly equal-with many, many variables)- the only thing that matters is the methodology used in the experiment that proves or disproves the statement.

How would you set out to measure how often a human thinks about sex?

My first idea would be to measure the electrical brain activity in humans in a sexually dormant state and compare it to measurements taken from sexually aroused subjects.

(Sexual arousal can be measured- if you don't know how, you are too young to be reading this)

Activity present in Group A brains (horny) but not in B brains ( unhorny) might offer some insight as to what regions of the mind control sexual impulses, but to prove that , you'd need a numerically significant control group- subjects who through accident or design were missing that specific area of their brain- and only that portion- if they had damage or modification to any other cerebral regions, they would be unsuitable test subjects.

(If such a control group ever existed, it was probably in Germany circa 1940.)

Then you would have to prove that disabling that specific mind-region inevitably, absolutely led to the cessation of all sexual 'thoughts'; but again, you are stuck with trying to devise a way to measure thoughts- not generalized brain activity , but specific thoughts...how?

Measuring brain activity does not equate measuring 'sexual thoughts'- in any case , who would be thinking about sex while they were having their brain scanned?

So how was this fabled "study" conducted?


Vulcan mind-meld?

A friend suggested experimenting on animals, but animals don't think about sex, it's entirely run by instinct and hormonal cycles.

I did find a blogger who had attempted to answer the question of who had proved this "common knowledge" and how they proved it. This blogger put a lot of time into it and came up empty:

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From Language Log: (w/ comments and emphasis by me)

Well, I wasn't going to blog this, because it's got nothing directly to do with speech and language. But it does have to do with rhetoric, and with the use of authoritative-sounding assertions backed up by empty references to scientific studies, a topic that we've been featuring recently. And several readers have asked me about it, based on my earlier posts about the "emerging science of sex differences". So here goes:

On page 91 of The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine writes (emphasis added):
Males have double the brain space and processing power devoted to sex as
females. Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion
while men have a small country road, men have O'Hare Airport as a hub of
processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands
small and private planes. That probably explains why 85 percent of twenty- to
thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think
about it once a day -- or up to three or four times on their most fertile days.

This striking different in rates of sexual thoughts is also one of the bullet points on the book's jacket blurb -- but there, female sex-thought frequency is downgraded from "once a day" to "once every couple of days":

Thoughts about sex enter a woman's brain once every couple of days but enter a man's brain about once every minute .

(Women only think about sex every few days? Does ANYONE believe that?)

Whatever the exact numbers, it's an impressive-sounding difference -- scientific validation for a widespread opinion about what men and women are like. And this is interesting stuff, right at the center of social and personal life, so you're probably wondering about the details of the studies that produced these estimates.
(YES! YES! SHOW ME!)

The end-notes for the quoted segment from p. 91 yield the following references:
1. Bancroft, J. (2005). "The endocrinology of sexual arousal." J Endocrinol 186(3): 411-27

2. Laumann, E. O., A. Paik, et al. (1999). "Sexual dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and predictors." JAMA 281(6): 537-44.

3. Laumann, E. O., Nicolosi, et al. (2005). "Sexual problems among women and men aged 40-80: Prevalence and correlates identified in the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors." Int J Impot Res 17(1): 39-57.

4. Lunde, I., G.K. Larsen, et al. (1991). "Sexual desire, orgasm, and sexual fantasies: A study of 625 Danish women born in 1910, 1936 and 1958." J Sex Educ Ther, 17:62-70.

Well, if you've been reading my earlier posts on (the popular presentation of) the "emerging science of sex differences", you can guess how this is going to come out.

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Well, if you've been reading my emails, you can also guess how this is going to come out. Not a single one of the quoted studies even approached proving anything about the frequency of sexual thoughts according to gender. Curiously,one study referenced was limited to women only.

Really, it doesn't matter. Everybody thinks about sex all the time, more or less. If an academic study was done that proved this in a quantifiable way, the authors of that study would make darned sure they got their academic props in a publicized forum.
It also combines prurience and pop psychology, perfect meme material- it would be all over the internet if it existed. Publish or perish and all that...

The point is: we accept too many "facts" without checking the sources. Iraqi WMD is a great example. Judith Miller ring a bell? It should. Check her source- his code name was 'Curveball'...we want our critical intelligence from 'Curveball?

There never was any evidence, just talk about evidence. People actually believed that an unmanned drone airplane could somehow escape what was the world's most heavily controlled airspace ( remember the no-fly zone?) , cross an entire ocean and wind up in Kansas, spewing anthrax on our wheat. (In reality, we are in more danger from tainted food imported from China than we ever faced from Iraq.)
That balsa wood attack plane was an idiotic premise, easily debunked , yet people accepted it without question.
When I pointed out the fact that it was impossible, technologically or militarily , for Iraq to attack America ( those 9/11 planes were piloted by our allies, the freedom-loving oligarchs of Saudi Arabia) nobody listened.
I was insulted and threatened and lost a few friends. A man at a stoplight wanted to know why I didn't have a Flag on my Honda...he wanted to fight me. He had accepted the "common knowledge" that you are either with us or against us. It's not black and white, but to him it was clear.

Everyone knew Saddam was involved in 9/11. They just knew because everyone did, so when it came time to invade, well hell yeah, vengeance is ours...except we were wrong. Iraq was pretty helpless in 2003, and had nothing at all to do with 9/11/01, but Saddam at least kept Iran in check.Now Iraq is no longer a nation at all and it's getting worse, not better.

"But Saddam was known to murder his own citizens", squeal the War Pigs, "if we don't kill them , he will- we must destroy the country to save it".
America has killed a lot more Iraqis than Saddam, that's for sure...although the Americans don't count civilian casualties - that was one lesson the neo-cons learned from 'Nam- civilian bodycounts are bad for morale at home. Better to ignore and suppress them.

There are no surprises in this war. Everything that has happened was easily predictable. If we, as a people and as a government, had bothered to check our facts and verify our information, we would have found no reason to invade Iraq. Would the world be a better, safer place had we stayed in America? I say yes.

After the invasion, terrorism has steadily increased, not decreased.
After 9/11, most of the world considered America as the victim. That impression is long gone, now we are perceived to be in the business of creating victims.
Fox News says the other networks don't give the good news from Iraq- but Fox doesn't report the good news either, only the other media's failure to do so. This is because there is damned little good news to report.

But everyone knows the world is better without Saddam.
"They" say so.

I say show me. Show us.
Give me the methodology of the' sex thoughts ' experiment. Who conducted it; when, where and how? Scientists publish their papers, they want people to read them. If it exists, it's not hidden. Find it.

Failing that, explain how the world-and especially the Middle East- is safer now than in 2000.
Dick Cheney just said it's better now, but he didn't say why. I want the why. Car bombs kill 30 is not a sign of progress, not after four years of occupation. Were the West Germans using car bombs in 1949, four years after we defeated Hitler? No.

Beware what "they" say , check the sources, and show me.

Consider this: If there is a conclusive way to measure specific sexual thoughts, it follows that the same method could be used to measure thoughts of any sort...one can imagine a polygraph machine that not only tells you that you are lying, but also spills the details. A Police State would thrive with this sort of technology- thoughtcrime would become reality.

Are you loyal to the State? Prove it to the telepathic guillotine.