Debunking Stereotypes - What Men Want When It Comes to Sex and Relationships

The stereotype of young men, college-age men, is that all they want is sex, sex, and some sex. In this view, they are not interested in a relationship - having a girlfriend - or even sleeping with the same woman more than a couple of times.

Annemarie van Oosten, writing for United Academics magazine, summarized a 2009 study of college age men and their thoughts about "hooking up". Here are some of the findings:

Epstein and colleagues found that non-relational, no-strings-attached sex was rare among college men, as was the phenomenon of ‘friends with benefits’. When men hook up, it is often with someone they have emotional connections with or used to be in a relationship with, or they hook up with the same person consistently, relating hooking up to dating. Some men engaged in hookups but struggled to remain detached, or they used the term hookup to describe sexual encounters at the beginning or ending stages of dating. When men call their sexual encounters hookups, it is often to save face when rejected, and when the sexual encounters did not turn into a relationship. Some men even regretted hookups (Epstein et al., 2009).

This is not the stereotype of the sex-crazed college guy (which is not to say that those guys don't exist, but they are more likely to be found in fraternities, where the group pressure toward that type of behavior is intense).

What Men Want when It Comes to Sex and Relationships

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Annemarie van Oosten

In my previous blogs I have mainly discussed casual sex and the hookup culture from a female perspective. But how do men feel about hooking up? It’s easy to rely on stereotypes: “Men are only out to have casual sex, they do not want commitment. They are only in relationships because girls want to.” But how true is this stereotype?

Marina Epstein, Jerel Calzo, Andrew Smiler, and Monique Ward (2009) interviewed 19 college-age men about how they defined and enacted sexual scripts of ‘‘hooking up’’ and ‘‘friends with benefits.” Their study is inspired by previous research that has shown that only a minority of men actually enjoy hooking up, and that the goal of having sex with ‘no strings attached’ is often difficult for men to achieve. Some men set out to have sex without emotional commitment, but end up experiencing emotional vulnerability and a desire for a romantic connection. Men may thus seek and enjoy close emotional ties with their sexual partners as much as women.

In their study, Epstein and colleagues found that non-relational, no-strings-attached sex was rare among college men, as was the phenomenon of ‘friends with benefits’. When men hook up, it is often with someone they have emotional connections with or used to be in a relationship with, or they hook up with the same person consistently, relating hooking up to dating. Some men engaged in hookups but struggled to remain detached, or they used the term hookup to describe sexual encounters at the beginning or ending stages of dating. When men call their sexual encounters hookups, it is often to save face when rejected, and when the sexual encounters did not turn into a relationship. Some men even regretted hookups (Epstein et al., 2009).

Thus, for men, hookups are not always simply casual. It seems that just as women have to negotiate between societal standards of sexual behavior and their own needs and desires, men too have to negotiate the pressure to conform to traditional masculine norms with their need to form meaningful romantic relationships (Epstein et al., 2009). Of course, not all men are the same, and there is a lot of variation in what men expect from sexual encounters. However, it could be that this variation within men is bigger than the variation between men and women. Overall, men and women may not differ much in what they want when it comes to sex and relationships.

Full Citation:
Epstein, M., Calzo, J., Smiler, A., & Ward, L. (2009). “Anything From Making Out to Having Sex”: Men’s Negotiations of Hooking Up and Friends With Benefits Scripts. Journal of Sex Research, 46 (5), 414-424. DOI: 10.1080/00224490902775801