Lust, not love, the driving factor behind sex

RESEARCHERS in the US have found that the motivation for having sex is largely the same for men and women, seemingly shattering the myth that the genders have different reasons for racing to the bedroom.

The researchers compiled a list of 237 reasons given by US college students for getting frisky - and the top reasons for men and women were more to do with lust than a deep love connection.

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The findings would apparently contradict the assumption by some that it is only men who are motivated by lust, whereas women only want sex as an expression of a deep emotional feeling.

Seven of the top 10 reasons for men revolve around the pleasure of the act. The top response was "I was attracted to the person", while "It feels good", "It's fun" and "I wanted to experience pleasure" were also in the top four.

For women, the top response was the same: "I was attracted to the person". Six of the remaining nine answers in the top 10 were also centred on the women feeling pleasure from the act.

Three of the top 10 reasons for men and women involved providing pleasure to the partner. For women, those reasons rated slightly higher on the leaderboard.

The study was compiled - and paid for - by researchers at the University of Texas over five years and published in the August edition of the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour.

"It's refuted a lot of gender stereotypes ... that men only want sex for the physical pleasure and women want love," University of Texas clinical psychology professor Cindy Meston, the study's co-author, told the Associated Press.

"That's not what I came up with in my findings. None of the gender differences are all that great.

"Men were more likely to be opportunistic towards having sex, so if sex were there and available they would jump on it, somewhat more so than women. Women were more likely to have sex because they felt they needed to please their partner."

Another expert who was not involved in the study said its findings backed up other research suggesting the often-assumed sexual differences between men and women were only factors for those with sexual problems.

Prof Meston did concede, however, that the study's focus on university students - whose "hormones run rampant" - might have affected the findings.

She said more differences may emerge as people grow older.

The bottom five reasons given by men and women were surprisingly vindictive, ranging from "I wanted to punish myself" or "I wanted to end my relationship" to "I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease".

Benefits also figured in the bottom rungs of the list. "I wanted to get a job" was fifth from bottom for men, while "The person offered to give me drugs for doing it" was the very lowest ranked.

"I wanted to get a job" and "I wanted a raise" were among the bottom reasons given by women.

Technorati : factor behind love, factor behind sex

Most people have loves of varying types - of Love and Lust

Thinking a lot about love. Like almost any human being, I've had plenty of encounters with love - but I'm not really sure I understand what it is. Love takes many forms. A parent loves a child, a child loves a parent, a sister loves a brother, a man loves his wife or partner, and people love their pets, etc. A person might love chocolate, or gardening, an automobile, a sport, sex, clothes, tools, wine or poetry - or a religion, an intellectual pursuit, a language, or physics.

Most people have loves of varying types - and often love feels like a positive thing, but not always. Love can feel suffocating, hurtful, toxic or destructive to the lover, the beloved, or both. Love contains a complex range of emotional possibilities - it can feel like a cuddly bundle of joy one moment and a howling terror the next. Love can gestate over months or years, or appear suddenly on an unsuspecting person's doorstep… wanted or unwanted. It takes love to provide a blueprint and job experience for a family.

I've known men who said they loved me, and a few whose actions demonstrated affection whether they professed love or not. At times I've believed that I loved a man, only to discover the illusory nature of the experience and the selective or deceptive nature of my perceptions. I suspect that men inflict as much harm on fellow men in the name of love as they do in the name of war, only subtly. Some folks speak of "tough love," and some people speak of a nebulous "love for humanity" as though love constitutes a God-given or universally recognized permission slip to inflict one's desires and demands upon others.

When a man forces his sexual will onto an unwilling partner, we call that rape - or a gang rape, when a group of men participates. Yet when a man or a group of men force their political demands onto unwilling people folks call that good citizenship. A group of men who demand a society free of drugs stop at nothing to achieve it - even when the old and the terminally ill suffer, and they may soon insist on regulating people's vitamin use too. "We'll hurt you and you'd better thank us for it" seems an apt motto for this sort of lusty fanaticism. A drug-free society means a lot of unhappy people forced to endure a lot of pain, or driven to black market dealers - that's brotherly unkindness, not brotherly love.

A group of men determined to free the world of other people's tyrannies will enslave the world for the sake of their own and call that freedom. They're good citizens, and when I exercise self-restraint by not voting, I'm a slacker. At least I'm still free to OD on disgust. If abstinence from casual sex is responsible, how can abstinence from sleazy politics be irresponsible? If I refuse to show up at the voting booth to take my marginal crap-shot at infecting an entire society with politically transmitted social afflictions, I'm irresponsible because I prefer not to inflict high-risk political behavior onto everybody else? Get thee away from my backside, Satan… please keep your dirty political leverage to yourself.

I'm ready to reclaim the word "love" for general usage by reclaiming the word "lust" for general usage as well. What does "tough love" mean, if not unbending lust for assuming positions of political dominance or moral superiority over other people? What does "love for humanity" usually mean, if not condescending lust to nourish one's ego at the expense of a bemused world which might prefer benign tolerance to inadvertent ego-stroking for smugly paternalistic philanthropists of any and all persuasions or orientations?

Lust gets a bad rap as one of the seven deadly sins, and for good reason - yet lust drives the sensible man toward admirable behavior, while love tows the silly man into foolish behavior. If lust can challenge a man to behave well while love can provoke a man to behave badly, does it seem reasonable to consider lust bad and love good? Maybe some deeper meaning got lost in translation… maybe so many tongues stirring the pot spoil the alphabet soup called language that people use to communicate. How can the dead letter kill unless people voluntarily or involuntarily swallow it as a poison? How can the spirit or the Word give life unless people ingest it as an antidote to dead letter poisoning?

I'm tired of seeing lust masquerade as love, giving love a bad name, when lust and love cohabitate along the same spectrum of emotions. Apparently lust - in the "deadly sin" sense - represents a debased form of love that ceases to observe conscientious boundaries and forces itself onto others in unloving, and not necessarily sexual, ways. Conversely, love represents a refined form of lust capable of elevating a mere human being beyond lowlier forms of lust, and above coercive expressions of human desire or affection.

Lust forces itself on unwilling partakers, in other words, while love doesn't - or what's the meaningful difference? It seems wise to preemptively master our own deadly lusts long before they betray us into attacking genuine forms of love that we may not be capable of recognizing because we can't accurately distinguish love from lust. Perhaps that's not our judgment call anyway. The forms of love that busybodies seem most eager to stick their uppity noses into appear to be consensual adult relationships where busybodies are least wanted - and that's obscene.

Technorati : Love and Lust