When it comes to your sexual health and wellness, you want to appear normal, and will even lie to make sure you do. This is according to new research appearing in a recent issue of the journal Sex Roles, which found that both men and women fib about their sexual behaviour to match cultural expectations.
According to Terri Fisher, author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University, ‘There is something unique about sexuality that led people to care more about matching the stereotypes for their gender.’ Men wanted to be known for having many sexual partners and a lot of experience, while women lied about having less sexual experience than they actually had, to match cultural stereotypes. However, this was the only area in which gender stereotypes reigned supreme.
For the study, the researchers identified typically male and female behaviours, such as wearing dirty clothes, telling obscene jokes and singing in the shower (male) and writing poetry, lying about your weight (female). Then they asked 293 college students between the ages of 18 and 25 how often they engaged in 124 different behaviours (from never to a few times a day). Some of the participants were hooked up to a “lie detector”, which wasn’t switched on, and were asked the questions again.
Fisher noted, ‘Sexuality seemed to be the one area where people felt some concern if they didn’t meet the stereotypes of a typical man or a typical woman,’ as men were willing to admit that they sometimes engaged in behaviours seen as more appropriate for women, such as writing poetry, and women didn’t hide the fact that they told obscene jokes, or sometimes participated in other ‘male-type’ activities.
Generally, men reported more typical-male behaviours and women reported more typical-female behaviours, regardless of whether they were attached to the lie detector or not. However, for non-sexual behaviours, the participants didn’t seem to feel any added pressure to respond in stereotypical ways for their gender. ‘Men and women didn’t feel compelled to report what they did in ways that matched the stereotypes for their gender for the non-sexual behaviours,’ Fisher explained. ‘Men and women had different answers about their sexual behaviour when they thought they had to be truthful.’
