Men ‘as they are’

As we all know, the average man thinks about sex every 7 seconds. Or is it every 17 seconds? Or every 52 seconds? Perhaps it's every 2 minutes, or 9 minutes or 20 minutes. A Google search will find you all these ‘facts’ repeated thousands of times with very great certainty. You will even find the confident assertion that when the average man does think about sex he does so for the suspiciously precise duration of 1 minute 50 seconds. The academic literature offers rather more measured observations on this matter and – because the subject is one that presents a number of obvious challenges to the researcher – it tends also to couch its findings in rather less specific terms. Across all ages, for example, it is suggested that around half of men may have sustained thoughts about sex once a day.1

Whether you go for the popular stereotype or the learned analysis however, you can be sure of one thing – and that is that men think about sex itself much more often than they think about their sexual health. In fact, to be precise, men think about sexual health with only 0.19 times the frequency with which they think about actually having sex. Scientists have proved this.

In 2003, the Men's Health Forum (MHF) conducted a series of focus groups with young male students and young male soldiers about their attitudes to sexual health.2 At the end of the process, we concluded that these young men in quite different settings were similar in many ways: “They are quite likely to leave discussion of contraception with a new partner to the last desperate fumbling moment. They know it is ridiculous even to think it but they believe they can make an educated guess about whether a …