Guys feel more attractive after first sex. Women don’t
Posted by staff / March 24, 2011
After having sex for the first time, college-age males report they felt more satisfied with their appearance. Females, on the other hand, felt less satisfied with how they looked.
Researchers surveyed 434 students asking them about their “attitudes and experiences in relationships with other people.” All students were traditional freshmen—age 17 to 19 years—at the start of the project. The researchers administered the same survey to these students four times over the course of their college careers. Of the students surveyed, 100 engaged in sexual intercourse for the first time during the four-year study period.
“We’re not talking about 12-year-old girls having sex, so it’s striking that even among these young women—who are 17 or older when they first had sex—their images of themselves went down,” says Eva Lefkowitz, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State. “If on average they’re feeling worse about themselves, it says something about their development of healthy sexuality and healthy sense of self and being.”
Full story at Futurity.
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