男人每隔多久就会“性”趣盎然？

 　　It's a stat that gets bounced around as e-mail-forward wisdom: men think about sex every seven seconds. Even when the idea lacks this mythical¹ specificity and grandiosity² (that's 7,200 times a day!), the idea that men think about sex basically all the time is widespread. And so, it is possible to attach all kinds of bogus statistics to the feeling that men are sex-crazed pigs.

　　But the actual number of times that men think about sex in a day is not clear-cut in scientific research. There is no perfect technology that taps into one's sexy brain waves.

　　What researchers really do is come up with clever ways of asking people what they're thinking about. They call it "experience sampling." So, in a recent study, Ohio State University researchers gave people a clicker and were asked to hit one of three buttons on it—sex, food, sleep—every time the thought of one of those things came to mind. Their study showed that the average man had 19 thoughts about sex in a day.

　　But the design of the study could have influenced the frequency count, writes cognitive³ scientist Tom Stafford in a new column. If you tell people to try to notice every time they think about something, you might very well increase the frequency of their thoughts about that thing. (Researchers call this the "white bear problem.")

　　男人每隔多久就会性趣盎然？

　　Other researchers—who use different sampling methods—get different results. So, a phone-based survey that asked participants more free-form questions seven times a day found that men think about sex less than they think about "food, sleep, personal hygiene⁴, social contact, time off, and (until about 5 p.m.) coffee."

　　If you put these two studies together, as Stafford does, it's obvious that the technique influences, if not outright⁵ dominates, the phenomenon being studied.

　　And yet the experience sampling method has gotten more popular, in part because everyone has a little computer in their hands all the time, which makes surveying much, much, much easier. "Smartphones are an ideal platform for conducting Experience Sampling Method (ESM) based studies," a recent review of sampling techniques found.

　　But it's difficult to judge a person's thoughts, no matter what technology people use. The lead researcher in the Ohio State study, Terri Fisher, provided a self-critique of her study, which applies to many of them.

　　"We weren't able to study how long the thoughts lasted or the nature of the thoughts. We also don't know if all of our participants followed the instructions and really clicked every time they had the sort of thought that they were supposed to track," Fisher wrote. "However, even if they didn't, the fact that they were supposed to be clicking probably made them more aware of their thoughts about their assigned topic than they might otherwise have been, and that would have been reflected in their daily reports."

　　The perfect technology would directly measure one's brain activity and somehow translate that into the number of sexual thoughts one had, but even that might prove very difficult. What we call "a thought" is not the discrete⁶ thing that we like to pretend. "There’s also the tricky⁷ issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement," Stafford writes. "Thoughts aren’t like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and kilometres. So what constitutes a thought, anyway? How big does it need to be to count? Have you had none, one or many while reading this?"

　　Perhaps the more interesting question is why we want to quantify this kind of thing at all. Does it matter if men think of sex—however defined—12 times a day, or 19, or 7, or 400?

　　These numbers reduce a whole set of arguments about the relative sexualities and norms of men and women, detaching the feelings from the lived experience of people.

　　That may be useful rhetoric⁸ for proving that men are pigs or women should be chaste⁹ or whatever, but the data says more about the limitations of our survey technologies than the nature of human sexuality.

1 mythical   

adj.神话的；虚构的；想像的

参考例句：

• Undeniably,he is a man of mythical status.不可否认，他是一个神话般的人物。
• Their wealth is merely mythical.他们的财富完全是虚构的。

2 grandiosity   

n. 宏伟, 堂皇, 铺张

参考例句：

• Integral designed with novelty, delicate style and comprehensive function, the hotel and considerably grandiosity. 酒店整体设计新颖，风格别致，功能齐全，无论是主题建筑，还是装饰装修，都构思巧妙，气势宏大。

3 cognitive   

adj.认知的，认识的，有感知的

参考例句：

• As children grow older,their cognitive processes become sharper.孩子们越长越大，他们的认知过程变得更为敏锐。
• The cognitive psychologist is like the tinker who wants to know how a clock works.认知心理学者倒很像一个需要通晓钟表如何运转的钟表修理匠。

4 hygiene   

n.健康法，卫生学 （a.hygienic）

参考例句：

• Their course of study includes elementary hygiene and medical theory.他们的课程包括基础卫生学和医疗知识。
• He's going to give us a lecture on public hygiene.他要给我们作关于公共卫生方面的报告。

5 outright   

adv.坦率地；彻底地；立即；adj.无疑的；彻底的

参考例句：

• If you have a complaint you should tell me outright.如果你有不满意的事，你应该直率地对我说。
• You should persuade her to marry you outright.你应该彻底劝服她嫁给你。

6 discrete   

adj.个别的，分离的，不连续的

参考例句：

• The picture consists of a lot of discrete spots of colour.这幅画由许多不相连的色点组成。
• Most staple fibers are discrete,individual entities.大多数短纤维是不联系的单独实体。

7 tricky   

adj.狡猾的，奸诈的；(工作等)棘手的，微妙的

参考例句：

• I'm in a rather tricky position.Can you help me out?我的处境很棘手，你能帮我吗？
• He avoided this tricky question and talked in generalities.他回避了这个非常微妙的问题，只做了个笼统的表述。

8 rhetoric   

n.修辞学，浮夸之言语

参考例句：

• Do you know something about rhetoric?你懂点修辞学吗？
• Behind all the rhetoric,his relations with the army are dangerously poised.在冠冕堂皇的言辞背后，他和军队的关系岌岌可危。

9 chaste   

adj.贞洁的；有道德的；善良的；简朴的

参考例句：

• Comparatively speaking,I like chaste poetry better.相比较而言，我更喜欢朴实无华的诗。
• Tess was a chaste young girl.苔丝是一个善良的少女。