Men of any age prefer women from 20 to 29 years
Another one clear evidences that men and women perceive sexual relations differently.
When it comes to choosing a sexual partner, men of all ages fantasize about only one type of woman — 20-year-olds, according to a new study. Researchers from Finland surveyed 12,656 men and women aged 18 to 49 in an attempt to study the age preferences of sexual partners. Each participant in the experiment was asked about what age group during the last year seemed to him the most sexually attractive, and with representatives of which age group the subject has sex in fact.
As the researchers expected, the answers to these questions varied depending on the sex of the subject. Women tended to be interested in men of their own age or slightly older. In particular, girls in their late teens and women in their early twenties prefer partners who are four years older, and this preferred age difference increases as the woman gets older. But men, as a rule, are interested only in one age group — in women in their third decade. This rule applies even to those in their late teens.
The researchers argue that the sexual preferences of both men and women are based on features of evolutionary biology. They believe that women are looking for older men because of the «resources» they have to offer, including the ability to help with offspring: «Men mature later than women, and in our evolutionary past, it was two parents who were needed to put offspring on their feet.»
The researchers also believe that male sexual preferences are shaped by the opportunity of birth of future offspring. In particular, men are interested in those women who can be most prolific.
«The highest ability to reproduce offspring is observed at the age of 20 years, and after 35 years, it begins to decline steadily,» – the researchers explain.
And what about the researchers' second question, which they used to try to find out whether the participants in the experiment had sex with members of their preferred age group? The answers again depended on gender.
«Women showed matching objects of their sexual interest and objects of their actual sexual activity, while men showed frequent mismatch of sexual preferences and real objects of sexual activity,» the researchers wrote.