STUDY: Why men and women lie about sex

Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Editor Megan Gannon (LiveScience.com)

PERVERT FAIL: sexy illusion (UhOhBro/YouTube.com)

   

Sex vs. meditation (Life in Hell)

For decades, stereotypes about gender and sex were bolstered by surveys in which men reported far more sexual partners than women. 

But a 2003 paper in the Journal of Sex Research found that if study participants thought they were hooked up to a lie detector, men and women would report the same number of sexual partners on average.

Lying about sex may be similar, but guilt rates differ greatly (livescience.com)

  

The results suggested women were the ones lying when they thought they could get away with it, likely being coy about how many people they'd had sex with to avoid being seen as promiscuous.

  

Apparently, not much has changed in the past decade. Even as many stereotypes fade, both men and women still feel pressure to meet gender expectations when it comes to sex, a new study shows. 

• Busted! 6 gender myths in the bedroom and beyond
• Why men report more sex partners than women
  Most surveys about sex find impossibly that men have had far more partners than women... About 5 percent -- both men and women -- said they lied.

Nearly 300 college students participated in the research, completing a questionnaire that asked how often they engaged in 124 different behaviors.

  

A previous study determined which of those habits were thought of as stereotypically masculine -- for example, wearing dirty clothes and telling dirty jokes -- and which were believed to be more common among women, including writing poetry and fibbing about body weight. More