Study Confirms Men And Women Have Different Expectations For Sex

According to a new study, men and women have different expectations when it comes to sex – specifically what should happen next when you take a date home after a good night out. Groundbreaking, we know.

Confi, a digital health startup founded at Harvard Business School, conducted research among 1,200 people ages 18 to 25 on college campuses across the U.S. The results (which focus on encounters between men and women only) show that 45 percent of college-aged men expect to have penetrative sex if they take someone home after a party, while only 31 percent of women expect the same, proving that there's “a significant gap in what collegiate men and women expect to happen sexually.” That's pretty worrying, especially since it could lead to unwanted or nonconsensual sex.

But it doesn't stop there. About 60 percent of men and 49 percent of women said they have at least one friend who has gone to a party “determined to have sex, no matter who the partner would be.” And, almost a quarter of men agreed with the statement that women “usually have to be convinced to have sex,” as opposed to 11 percent of women. A staggering 28 percent of men said that “many” sexual assaults are just cases of women regretting sex after the act.

As the #metoo campaign served to exemplify, our society, specifically the men in our society, seems to have a massive problem wrapping its head around consent. Expectation works just like confirmation bias; just as a person can believe something is true because they want to believe that it's true, for some people, if there is an expectation of sex, consent is a given.

As Teen Vogue reports, according to Rachel Hanebutt, a co-founder of Confi, the report showed that one-third of women have experienced unwanted sex because the other person was so persistent – the majority of these instances do not fit into the standard buckets of “extreme physical force” or “incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.” “People were all over the board on expectations when going home together, making it more confusing,” said Rachel. “There just isn't a clear social code for this common scenario.”

“These expectations come from mainstream TV and movies, porn, a culture where increasing your sexual count is viewed as a reputation factor. Inadequate sex and relationship education is a missed opportunity to reshape these expectations and help people talk about sex more broadly. Effective sex education would drastically reduce the amount of unwanted sex,” Rachel continued. “Overcoming misaligned expectations means rewriting the stereotypical sexual script that is full of assumptions. If you've had sex coercively without consequence, you've confirmed your own expectation of how sex plays out; it's a vicious cycle.”

Next up, we walk through the pros and cons of different contraceptive methods. 

Preview image via favim.com , top image via pinterest.com.