THERE’S A FAMOUS old anecdote which suggests – depending on who you heard it from – that men think about sex every six, or seven, seconds.

A university in Ohio decided to put that to the test – and found that men are a lot less rowdy than you may have thought.

Researchers at Ohio State University asked 283 students – not all of them male – to track their thoughts on sex, food and sleep for a week: asking them to record each time that the thought crossed their mind on a small handheld clicker.

They found, WebMD says, that while some men can think about sex hundreds of times a day (the rowdiest subject of the experiment recorded 388 sexual thoughts in one day – that’s the equivalent of every 2.5 minutes – the average man only thought 19 sexual thoughts each day.

“While men were thinking more about sex [than women],” lead researcher Terri Fisher said, “they were also thinking more about food and sleep.”

What’s more, the variation between individual people taking part was so varied that some women “thought about sex as much as men”.

ABC News, giving more data, said the average woman thought about sex 10 times a day – that’s every hour-and-a-half, compared to every 50 minutes for men – while men thought about food 18 times a day, compared to a woman’s 15 times.

Fisher explained that it would be more accurate to relate the frequency of thoughts about sex to how comfortable they were with their sexuality.

“We used a sexual opinion survey to measure erotophobia and erotophilia,” she said.

“Individuals who scored higher in erotophilia tended, not surprisingly, to report more sexual thoughts.”