Evidence of Change in Men's Versus Women's Emotional Reactions to First Sexual Intercourse: A 23-year Study in a Human Sexuality Course at a Midwestern University

Abstract

With a large sample (N = 5,769) of university students obtained over a 23-year period (1990–2012), which represented three decades of first sexual intercourse experiences, the present study examined gender differences in pleasure, anxiety, and guilt in response to first intercourse. Men reported more pleasure and anxiety than women, and women reported more guilt than men. Anxiety decreased over the three decades for men; pleasure increased and guilt decreased for women. As a result of these changes, the differences between men and women in emotional reactions decreased slightly over time. The magnitude of the gender differences overall and in the most recent years of data collection, however, suggests that emotional responses to first sexual intercourse should be included in a small list of sexuality variables that are exceptions to Hyde's (2005) gender similarities hypothesis.

Notes

¹The decision was made to not include participants beyond normative ages for college students because such adults likely would either have had their first sexual intercourse many years earlier or, alternatively, would be outliers on age at first sexual intercourse.

²For some participants, the year assigned for first intercourse was only an estimate. This is because the question about age at first intercourse had a first option of Under 14 (n = 188) and a last option of Over 21 (n = 13). In these cases, the ages were assigned to age 13 and age 22, respectively, to provide an estimate of the year at first intercourse.

Note. The response scale for each emotion ranged from 1 (Not at all) to 7 (A great deal).

***p < .001.

³Therefore, these data included the data from the first few years of data collection, which had been included in Sprecher and colleagues (1995).

Note. df = 5,769 for overall; 2,078 for males; 3,691 for females.

*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.

⁴Partial eta-squared is an estimate of effect generated by SPSS to supplement traditional significance tests.

^a The variation in number of participants across years was due to many factors, including whether data were collected in only one semester versus both semesters and how many other similar courses were offered.

Values of t without an asterisk were significant at p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05; n.s. = not significant.