The Impact of Culture and Gender on Sexual Motives: Differences among Chinese and Americans

Recently, social scientists have begun to investigate the myriad of reasons why young men and women engage in sexual activities. As yet, however, scholars have not begun to investigate the impact of culture on people‘s sexual motivations. In this paper, we will address three questions: Does culture have an impact on sexual motives? Does gender have an impact? Do culture and gender interact in shaping motives? In this study, we asked Chinese and American college students to indicate the extent to which communal and individualistic sexual motives had influenced their decision to participate in sexual activities. As predicted, both culture and gender had an impact on young people‘s endorsement of various sexual motives. The findings were not always entirely as we had predicted, however.