Because it's a math problem that seems to turn on whether you're talking about the mean or the median. Booooring.
The message here is that there is an elite corps of women who are having sex with virtually everyone they know in order to keep the ladies' average up.
It's not a math problem. They just ignored the gay sex.
Really, the relevant questions are these: is there an elite corp of female sexxors, and if so, does anyone have a number?
We are trained from a young age at The Academy. Our mission is simple. We often have russian accents and dresses with long slits up the leg.
Men inflate their number; women deflate it. (Flaccid l'il numbers.)
Men inflate their member; women deflate it.
I thought you were supposed to double the number given by women.
there is an elite corps of women who are having sex with virtually everyone they know
The few. The proud. The sluts.
The NYT should also run a correction to/article on this idea that single men live on the West Coast and single women live on the East Coast. Those numbers simply don't account for 1) the large populations of gay men on the West Coast, which inflates the number of eligible bachelors, and 2) the large populations of incarcerated black men on the East Coast, which decreases the pool of eligible bachelors.
1: Well, the 'logically impossible' bit turns on the difference between the mean and the median. If they're the same, as they would be if number of sex partners formed a bell curve, then it's impossible either way.
Randomly extrapolating from personal experience -- among people I know, there seem to be more men who've had very few sex partners than women. Say, for a man in his thirties, I'd find fewer than five lifetime sex partners not all that surprising, while I would be surprised for a woman (limited, of course, by the socioeconomic factors that determine the sort of person I'm likely to know.)
You'll know the elite corps of women by their Members Only jackets.
Oh god, that dot over Western Pa is depressing.
College years don't count in your tally, right?
It looks like one of the studies was using the median, and at least one study was using the mean, so the mean-median distinction doesn't entirely explain things.
Now we've got to decide who is lying more.
LB, you realize there's no way that "number of sex partners" forms a bell curve, right? It's bounded on one side, a side not all that far away from the median. This is very like the dead-Iraqi problem. The mean very likely could be higher.
While it is certainly plausible that men overstate their numbers and women understate theirs, the NYT write-up is hardly conclusive proof of that proposition.
Without having reviewed the research methodology, the casual dismissal of the prostitution angle seemed a little too cavalier to me. Are the researchers really certain that prostitutes are not underrepresented in the sample data? Because the addition or subtraction of a single industrious prostitute could make an enormous difference in the sample mean.
Also, could such a person be reasonably expected to know or accurately report her total number of sex partners if that number were, say, in the thousands?
Or the simple explanation. There is a population of women looking askance at these men and asking, "Really? You called that sex?"
Well, LB, all a oman has to do is pass out drunk, and voila! -- instant sex partner. Guys have to work at it.
Oh, true, it's not going to form a real bell curve, but it's possible for it to be symmetrical enough for the median not to be too far off the mean. I'm not saying there's any strong reason to think that this is true, but it could be, and it would be obvious one way or the other from the original data.
20: I don't know about how much work the 'prostitution effect' is going to do for you. While I'm sure there are more johns than prostitutes, I'd also expect the population of men who have ever had sex with a prostitute is a reasonably small percentage of the population, and that it largely consists of men who've had sex with a number of prostitutes. If we're talking medians, then, (and this is all pulled out of my ass), johns are going to predominantly be in the right-hand, more sex partners part of the graph, and won't move the median number of sex partners up significantly, because the median guy hasn't ever patronized a prostitute. (Patronizing a prostitute: "Really, on you, the vinyl miniskirt is very flattering.")
"No, I don't think your a slut. Of course not. Now give it here."
27: "That's a big word for a nine-year-old."
People who patronize can't spell "you're".
"Here, I bought us popcorn to share during the movie."
21: Taking this idea seriously, I wonder if women might be more likely than men (or vice versa) to use a clintonian definition of sex for purposes of reporting the number of partners.
I don't know about how much work the 'prostitution effect' is going to do for you.
Until you're willing to cough up more dough.
31: Well, first, what definition of "sex partner" were the studies using?
FWIW, here's Wikipedia
According to the paper "Estimating the prevalence and career longevity of prostitute women" (Potterat et al., 1990), the number of full-time equivalent prostitutes in a typical area in the United States (Colorado Springs, CO, during 1970-1988) is estimated at 23 per 100,000 population (0.023%), of which fraction some 4% were under 18. The length of these prostitutes' working careers was estimated at a mean of 5 years. A follow-up paper entitled "Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners" (Brewer et al., 2000) goes on to estimate a mean number of 868 male sexual partners per prostitute per year of active sex work, and offers the conclusion that men's self-reporting of prostitutes as sexual partners is seriously under-reported.A 1994 study found that 16 percent of 18 to 59-year-old men in a U.S. survey group had paid for sex (Gagnon, Laumann, and Kolata 1994).
I don't know if LB considers 16% to be "a reasonably small percentage of the population" or not.
How do you calculate a prostitution FTE? Are the FTEs the ones with full fringe benefits and a pension plan?
what definition of "sex partner" were the studies using?
I knew a girl who claimed to be a virgin. When everyone pointed out the bed thumping noises coming from her room, she said "but he always pulls out!"
I would expect that unless the study were done by idiots, they put some work into defining 'sex' unambigiously and symmetrically. Doesn't mean there isn't some such confusion going on, but it shouldn't be huge.
Backtracking on my earlier comment, if the numbers that Wikipedia cites are close to correct, then the prostitution effect would only raise the women's mean by 1 or so partner. So I guess LB has a point.
Colorado Springs? That choice doesn't surprise me.
I'm reluctant to generalize from my own culture and age-cohort, but it seems there must be a systematic reporting bias, and that the averages for both men and women seem suspiciously low for mine.
"The prostitution effect" s/b "the domestic prostitution effect", because it still wouldn't account for the sex-holiday-in-Thailand/business-meeting-in-Amsterdam type situation.
Hoping to deflect away from the boring questions about distributions, lying, and outlier individuals: Do men and women forget former partners differently? That is, consider the partner just barely worth remembering. Does such a marginal partner differ for men and for women? Is shame or indifference or maybe something else the primary driver of forgetting? Please include a topic sentence in your response.
For whatever it's worth, I find that changes in how I feel about memories are one of the most surprising things about aging. I'm beginning to see the outlines of a trajectory to befuddled oldster who occasionally confuses present and past; this disturbs the reasoning parts of me, but it is not frightening for some reason. Paying attention to other people in the present is an obvious remedy, an exogenous benefit of love. I would expect there to be good poetry about this, but nothing in Shakespeare or Donne. Does Montaigne have any memory essays? Aside from love, sometimes hard to come by, a habit of lying, which forces one to remember what was said to whom, might also serve as an anchor.
34: For the purposes of my point, I think it is. I need to assume that the vast majority of that 16% goes to enough different prostitutes to insure that they have more than the male median number of sex partners, but I think that's a reasonable assumption. (Maybe I'm wrong, and that 16% is 80% guys who've been to one prostitute, once, and 20% habitual patronizers of prostitutes. If so, the argument fails.) Under that assumption, then, the presence of johns won't move the male median much, because there aren't any significant number of johns under the median.
The message here is that there is an elite corps of women who are having sex with virtually everyone they know in order to keep the ladies' average up.
I know a few people like that.
The median/mean thing is all very well but I do think it's the straightforward 'men tend to round up/women tend to round down' thing, much of the time.
Whenever I've had these conversations with friends in real life I am always struck by the widespread egregious lying. With people I know to have only recently had sex for the first time confidently claiming a dozen partners or more, for example, and vice versa. I called someone on it once; that's apparently not something people take kindly to.
There is a population of women looking askance at these men and asking, "Really? You called that sex?"
Hypothetically speaking, of course.
estimate a mean number of 868 male sexual partners per prostitute per year of active sex work
Jesus Christ, that's the mean??
I think 42 is really interesting.
What's the underlying issue here? We all pretty much agree, I think, that
* men have incentives to overreport
* women have incentives to underreport
* men are, for one reason or another, more comfortable with random sex than women
* women have an easier time finding a sex partner than men.
So doesn't it make a certain sense that there are probably a larger proportion of women who put up big numbers and a larger proportion of women who put up small numbers, as well as some lying in the relevant direction by each? And couldn't that be the circumstance be described by the numbers here?
re: 42
Certainly whenever I've tried to count my number of partners I always get to some number and then begin remembering people I've forgotten and each time I try there's someone else I've either remembered this time or failed to remember that I didn't before, etc.
I don't know if that's gendered, though. I've read a column by a female journalist describing exactly the same phenomena.
46: Kind of sheds a new light on the discussion of prostitution as possibly a reasonably humane way of earning a living, as demonstrated by cheerful and personally fulfilled professionals like the English Courtesan. Of course, maybe the median is much lower, and the mean is being dragged up by a few women with tens of thousands of partners in a year. But at some point you're going to run into time constraints.
* women have an easier time finding a sex partner than men.
Doesn't this have the same asymmetry problem as the original study?
* men are, for one reason or another, more comfortable with random sex than women
And this one too?
49: Sounds familiar. And I wouldn't be surprised if this does explain the discrepancy in terms of more men being invested in 'getting credit for' each distinct partner, and more women feeling more comfortable glossing over partners that weren't memorable or important, as lw suggested in 42.
The underlying issues seems to be whether it's plausible that people continued to lie in an anonymous survey. I am a little skeptical, because people seem to tell a lot under anonymity (or Presidential pseudonymity) that they wouldn't otherwise. I can see believing that people would lie to their friends, or fudge if 'sex partner' was ambiguous in polite conversation, but I'm having a harder time believing that in a survey.
43. Maybe I'm wrong, and that 16% is 80% guys who've been to one prostitute, once, and 20% habitual patronizers of prostitutes.
I shouldn't be at all surprised, actually. There are or were, at least over here, delightful male cultures where it's considered amusing to buy your mate a woman on his 21st birthday or his stag night or whatever. I'd like to think this sort of thing was dying out, but if you're going up to age 59, it would certainly be reflected in the numbers.
offers the conclusion that men's self-reporting of prostitutes as sexual partners is seriously under-reported
Does this mean not reporting them at all, which means the men's score should be higher, or not reporting them as prostitutes, while nonetheless counting them, do you think?
51: I don't think it does, if you mess around with assumptions like 'reasonably attractive women' that can grow or shrink the relevant population as you need to to avoid asymmetry.
The question is, why are these people lying to SCIENCE? If some guy I'm dating asks me in that Now, honey, how many? way (no one ever has, but I can imagine it), I might shave a few off the top. But for science, I'll do a recount.
I hate to say it, but I do agree with the elite corps theory, for both sexes, which can really skew things in surprising ways. Most men and women have not had a great huge number of partners because they're busy being in relationships that last year upon miserable year. Then you have a small percentage on both sides who are getting their groove on, some to an alarming degree. Is it not possible that this messes with the math?
54: that's true enough, but the problem is the numbers are clearly wrong, and given that, lying seems the most likely--indeed, the only plausible--explanation. (Using "lying" generously to include forgetting, miscounting, etc.)
There are or were, at least over here, delightful male cultures where it's considered amusing to buy your mate a woman on his 21st birthday or his stag night or whatever.
That's not unknown here, but I have the (vague, unsupported, I really have no idea) impression that it's the sort of thing that happens among guys who do that sort of thing, if you see what I mean on a non-tautological level. Someone whose buddies are hiring him a hooker for a special occasion, is probably someone in a social group where hooker-hiring isn't unusual, so probably not the 'under the median number of sex partners' guy. But I'm really making this up here, I just don't know. You could be absolutely right.
The question is, why are these people lying to SCIENCE? If some guy I'm dating asks me in that Now, honey, how many? way (no one ever has, but I can imagine it), I might shave a few off the top. But for science, I'll do a recount.
I think people lie in surveys all the time, to paint themselves rosier.
Most men and women have not had a great huge number of partners because they're busy being in relationships that last year upon miserable year. Then you have a small percentage on both sides who are getting their groove on, some to an alarming degree.
And the large swathe of people who alternate between lengthy periods of monogamy and shorter periods of busy shagging.
51: I suppose it would, assuming equivalent feelings of horniness, permissability of promiscuity, etc. among both genders. The typical explanation, I believe, is that since men want more sex partners, more often, while women are societally or naturally predisposed to sleeping with new guys less often, the men will feel that it is difficult to find a willing partner when they go out seeking sex while women do not, because men do so more often (all in relative senses and allowing for far greater intra-gender variance than inter-gender variance).
So it's not a difference in the number of willing partners, it's a difference in the success rate of seeking new partners, or at least that's the perception.
Is it not possible that this messes with the math?
It is not possible that this messes with the mean, no.
men want more sex partners, more often, while women are societally or naturally predisposed to sleeping with new guys less often
The older I get the more convinced I am that particular stereotype is a crock of shit.
64: Assuming perfect sampling. If the elite corps is pretty small, then slightly over or under sampling them could mess with the stats. (See The Prostitute Effect.)
Isn't this all because of Wilt Chamberlain?
Fine, I'm kind of in with the lying theory. Or, more specifically, that the men with super-high numbers count lovers in their credit, while women with super-high numbers tend to forget forgettables.
Those dots are weird. There are a lot of single people in places, including where I'm from, where I would have assumed the majority of people were all paired up nice like.
Sexual math wise, I'd just like to point out that if a man is unwilling to commit, he's probably a serial non-committer who has not-committed with several or many women, whereas a man who is willing to commit commits to one woman and is taken out of the pool. So single women vastly overestimate the proportion of men who are unwilling to commit.
If you lie to Science, only God knows. And God hates science. Fact.
65: Generally, I'd agree that it's a crock of shit. In practice, I'd guess that safety considerations cut down on most women's promiscuity. (That is, very promiscuous guys I've known would screw pretty much anyone, with very little screening. Promiscuous women I've known, on the other hand, seem (I believe for safety reasons) much more likely to restrict themselves to acquaintances, or at least people they've interacted with enough to get a strong personal impression of. This is going to cut down on your rate of partner acquisition.)
Also, could such a person be reasonably expected to know or accurately report her total number of sex partners if that number were, say, in the thousands?
Simple, just require all the responses to be to only two significant figures.
I too believe it's a case of "men round up, women round down".
men want more sex partners, more often, while women are societally or naturally predisposed to sleeping with new guys less oftenThe older I get the more convinced I am that particular stereotype is a crock of shit.
Maybe it's more likely to be a crock of shit for thirtysomethings than teens and twentysomethings.
I get that people could lie to make themselves look good, but I don't see that sort of explanation being trotted out for other survey-based discrepancies. We normally take these things as reasonably reliable, don't we? It's not usually a trump to postulate that people are lying.
Does Wolfson have a rule about parentheses within parentheses?
The question is, why are these people lying to SCIENCE?
I'm sure Heebie's right at 61, but also I think a lot of people would lie to God about sex. It's an area where irrational behaviour isn't restricted to the core activities.
I get that people could lie to make themselves look good, but I don't see that sort of explanation being trotted out for other survey-based discrepancies. We normally take these things as reasonably reliable, don't we? It's not usually a trump to postulate that people are lying.
It's common knowledge that any survey that asks people whether they voted in the past election will end up with a vastly inflated number, like 60% when the real number is 40%.
The older I get the more convinced I am that particular stereotype is a crock of shit.
1) The truth of this stereotype could be changing with the age of your peers, as I've heard it does especially in the 30s.
2) I was explaining why SCMT may have made the statement
3) I hedged the hell out of everything, as I always do on these subjects because I know it's a delicate subject where pretty much everyone lies and all the research tends to be biased either in intent or by the nature of their data sets
Grrr... stick in synonyms for "subject" where appropriate to make me sound like less of an illiterate
Maybe it's more likely to be a crock of shit for thirtysomethings than teens and twentysomethings.
It's particularly my experiences in my teens and twenties that lead me to that belief. With the getting older part being about contextualising and confirming the relative common-place nature of said experiences.
re: 74
It's not necessarily just about lying to others, it's about lying to oneself, I think. In the sense that the person counting every possible past partner in order to inflate their numbers and the person dismissing some might both be giving what seem like truthful answers to them, in the sense that those answers bolster their self-image and sense of self.
72: That's interesting. Most of the promiscuous women I know have had, by the age of 30, not more than like four partners a year on average since age 18, so about 50 partners. I'm nowhere near that number, but I tend to describe myself as a pretty promiscuous person (evidence, apparently, notwithstanding). A man who considers himself very promiscuous, by the age of 30, can get a great deal more done by that point. It's not really that he has a freer attitude toward sex; it's that he's not thinking things like "Oh, god, if I turn up pregnant, I'm going to want to know who I have to call."
I also have to note that the 'girlfriend in Canada' thing cracks me up. Honest! I do have a husband!
72: But there's the countertendency, as observed by Werdna and JM, in her explanation of Roomate's partners' likely motivation, to find a different kind of "safety" in men they were unlikely to become entangled with.
I think it's fair to say that the guys I've known in the past who have been sexual 'high-achievers' [the ones with girls/women literally throwing themselves at them] have not, generally, been people one would automatically describe as 'safe'.
I think we also have to remember that the numbers all these researchers are dealing with are very very small. 12? 6? 4? Given what the range of the data would be, I'm guessing these differences are not terribly statistically significant.
63: Another way of thinking about this might be (if I could get an analogy ban waiver for a moment) by comparing it to the housing market. In a buyers' market where supply exceeds demand, it average buyer can easily find a house to buy, but the average seller will have a harder time finding a willing seller. Nevertheless, the number of buyers is always equal to the number of sellers.
This analogy breaks down, of course, because you can't sell your house to five different buyers over the course of spring break. Thus demonstrating the wisdom of the analogy ban.
51, 52: I don't think so. Isn't the symmetry we demand only that the total number of sex partners on each side be equal? Couldn't you have 10 guys with four partners each, four women with 10 partners each (those ten guys), and six women with no partners each? So forty on each side, mean of four, median of 4 for the men, zero for the women. And you might explain it by saying that every man asks/says yes to every woman he runs into, and only four women ask/say yes to every man who she runs into.
I'm totally willing and happy to be corrected on this.
82: Yeah. Using your number, whigh seems like a fair guess, I'd say that there are a fair number of women who'd come off as reasonably 'promiscuous' with lifetime numbers under 50, but very few much over 50. For 'promiscuous' men, I'd guess that there might be fewer overall, but more with numbers getting into triple digits.
In 87 "willing seller" s/b "willing buyer". Thus demonstrating the wisdom of hitting "Preview" before hitting "Post".
66: yes, it could theoretically mess with the sample mean. I was thinking of the population mean. The fact that there's so much room for potential divergence between the two is another good indicator that we're not dealing with a normal distributon, right?
"Werdna" wouldn't be a bad name to name a kid. It sounds like a girl's name though.
I get that people could lie to make themselves look good, but I don't see that sort of explanation being trotted out for other survey-based discrepancies.
There are claims that people lie to surveyors about voting for black candidates. It's not clear, I gather, how well supported those claims are.
I've just performed a self-inventory, naming names, and find my number is half what I would have thought, and what I thought I remembered counting. "Forgettables" may swim back into view, but I doubt it. If I'd been answering a multiple-choice survey, without the opportunity or inclination to perform this introspection, I'd have over-reported by a factor of 2.
So, wait - the # of willing buyers is always the same as willing sellers? Or just the number of actual buuyers is the same as actual sellers? The latter makes perfect sense, but I can't wrap my head around the former at all.
95: That's odd. Can you figure out why?
re: 95
Every time I count I get a number that varies by a margin of error above/below a rough central point. However, if being surveyed I'd probably report the higher rather than lower figure. Not as much of a margin of error as a factor of 2, but certainly, the odds are I'd over-report by a bit.
96: Yes, the latter, definitely not the former. My brain is not firing on all cylinders today.
That sounds wrong -- wouldn't the most accurate number be the highest one you remember, assuming you don't have difficulty with the actual counting bit? That is, I can see wrongly remembering a number that's too low, because you forgot someone. The possibility of mistakenly inventing a sex partner seems less likely. (Although, there's IDP, so maybe I'm wrong.)
Enough with the formalities, people: it's time to cough up numbers. The other day LB claimed to be the official harlot of unfogged and it's time to see if she can back that up.
How are we counting partners? Kissing? Groping? Genital contact? Penetration?
(The Catholic schoolgirl exemption.)
Forgettables" may swim back into view, but I doubt it. If I'd been answering a multiple-choice survey, without the opportunity or inclination to perform this introspection...
I've done many, many qualitative interviews, on personal topics less touchy than public health or sexual history. I have routinely found that the off-the-top-of-your-head answer to questions like "How many jobs have you had?" and "How many addresses have you had in the past five years?" is X, but once I start tracing the actual path of activities, it becomes X+ something. ("So you started that job in the wintertime...was it before or after your baby was born? Did you stop working after that? OK, how old was the baby when you went back to work? etc.)
but very few much over 50
I'll bet the number of women with 50+ sexual partners is quite a bit higher than most people would guess. Particularly if you're not restricting it to actual vaginal intercourse.
not dealing with a normal distributon,
Likely choices are Poisson (distribution of counts of low-frequency events, say clicks per minute of a Geiger counter), power-law (often a consequence of scaling laws in the underlying dynamics; cube of the height divided by the square of the reticence sort of thing), and lognormal (product not sum of randomly distributed variables with finite variance; human wealth and turbulent dissipation are mostly distributed this way, wealth exception likely due to the ability to hire people smarter than you to make decisions). My bet is lognormal, but resolving will be possible only in the surveillance future.
97: Considering the tenor of our past exchanges, you may be gratified to learn that "residual competitiveness"/"self-image" is all I can come up with.
I think I'm holding at a round dozen.
My policy is of long standing, with a very low number plus one "maybe".
85: the ones with girls/women literally throwing themselves at them
Literally, hmm? Do they throw themselves off a building onto him? Or do they get a running start and sort of fling themselves, à la pro wrestling?
(Look, someone's got to be pedantic while Wolfson's in class.)
I have very deft manipulation control of my own memory, if the objectivity of outside parties is to be trusted. I don't know that I coudl trust that my highest # was my most accurate.
re: 100
Well, sort of. But I've never come up with the same figure. And I remember at some point in the past counting n so I go with n [on the grounds you give], but at other times I've remembered that named individual p and 'that girl at B's party' were actually one and the same person, and that I've double counted, etc.
So I'm fairly sure that the largest n is wrong and over-counts by a margin of error.
This implies that the n is gigantic, which it's not. I'm just forgetful.
There's some not-all-that-old thread in which people gave numbers.
54: It's not that I'd expect more lying on a survey than in real life, but I don't find it hard to believe either. Sure, that nice person with the clipboard in the mall says this is confidential, but they'd still turn it over to the police if you confessed to doing something really horrible, wouldn't they? What if this is actually some "Punk'd" thing, or a prank your asshole friend is playing on you? (Are you sure it's not?) And if this is all confidential and won't affect anything, then why not round in your favor and stuff? If you think about it as sex or not-really-sex in your own mental tally -- a woman might not count having been raped, a man might be as excited by having got a blowjob as actually having had intercourse -- then why bother parsing out what "really" happened just for the sake of some study?
113: Then that's not lying, that's a need for a better-designed study.
right, I remember this in a thread recently. I think there was some quiz involved, where one got point for all the "bad" things she had done, including having a high # ....
112: yeah, I remember that.
For official statistics, I think anyone who's slept with me ought to count that one as a double.
109 was me.
That right, thanks. I was totally blanking on 109!
117: For official statistics, I think anyone who's slept with me ought to count that one as a double.
Dude, you've been married for years and you still haven't made it to home plate?
112: Did I give a number, and was it the same as the one I just gave? I don't remember the thread at all.
I don't know what this is evidence for, but it takes great strains of memory to remember a good number of the people I've slept with.
101:Dead average for Kolata's American mean, defined restrictively. Perhaps half again as many if defined expansively.
I add, it's not very many, but they were apparently not memorable.
113: MIGHT not count rape? I can't imagine that a woman (or man) would. (As survivors, I mean; god knows rapists probably would.) For the 4,000th time, let me re-issue the official bulletin: Rape is not sex. It is not about sex. It is about power, domination, violence, etc.
I am not at liberty to look this up, but this is all making me think of the funny Andie MacDowell monologue listing each of her partners by number in Four Weddings and a Funeral, as well as Eddie Izzard's bit on arguing with a girlfriend over whether he had lost his virginity.
great strains of memory
This is interesting; likewise. How old are you? Is the strain the same as 5 years ago? I'm 41, and am not sure about the rate of strain increase.
I think we also have to remember that the numbers all these researchers are dealing with are very very small. 12? 6? 4?
A) Maybe small by your standards!
B) It all depends on how many numbers there are. An average of 4.2 can be significantly different than an average of 4.0 if n=10000.
In the US study, the reported data on number of sexual partners was consistently very different between men and women, in every age group, every race, poverty level, et cetera. With n=6,237. Here's the data, especially charts 7 and 9. These are extremely significant differences.
Some of the numbers are interesting. The # of sex partners is similar in all three of the income categories.
Also, note that they do have a category for how many men/women report themselves as being promiscuous. "15 or more sexual partners in lifetime".
28.9% of all men put themselves in this category! And only 9.4% of women. Whoa, those few sluts must be working doubletime.
The white population reflects the overall numbers for "15 or more sexual partners in lifetime". For the black population, 46.2% of all men put themselves in this category, and only 12.5% of all women.
I really do think that this discrepancy is almost entirely the result of lies.
127: I'm 27. I am positive my number is not higher than my age. I think it's around 20. I know it's more than 15.
>15 partners = promiscuous???
My benchmarks in the realm of sexual propriety must be seriously skewed.
I'm 24. I've had 2. 1 was a mistake. I'm now engaged to be married.
Expand it to any sort of interpersonal genital contact and the number becomes 6.
When I was in Taiwan everyone was watching "Three's Company" and making wild assumptions about American sexual behavior. One female teacher was asked by a student whether she knew who the father(s) of her children was (were). He wasn't trying to be rude, as far as I can tell, but just cheeky; he thought that that was a normal question to ask an American woman. (In Chinese that would have been unspeakably rude, much worse than in English, and he did enormously enjoy breaking the Chinese rule).
Oh, fine, after I post that, I go back to read two years ago when everyone was a prude. I'm just not good in relationships, y'all!
I am 35, my number, and margin of error, is roughly in line with AWB's plus a bit.
However, I had had well over half my lifetime partners before I was 21. So when I first went to college I was probably at one end of the bell curve, and as I've gotten older and had longer relationships lasting over years it's slid towards the median.
I don't know what this is evidence for, but it takes great strains of memory for a good number of the people I've slept with to recall having done so.
Yeah, being single for long periods of time as an adult is going to affect numbers a lot without any particular change in sexual ethics. I've been in the same relationship since I was 24.
re: 136
Yeah, I've had 3 relationships lasting over 3 years each. So, I've been single for less than one year in the past 14 years. That drastically changes the lifetime number of partners.
It would take an enormous effort to get my number of partners up to my age. 3 or 4 women's soccer teams would have to take me up as a charity case.
The most interesting thing in the stats is that for any of the "how many partners have you had" categories -- either "0-1", "2-6", "7-14", or "15 or more" -- the number of people putting themselves in that category hardly changes at all whether you are looking at 20-, 30-, 40-, or 50-somethings.
So, virtually everyone racks up all their conquests in their early 20s? Is this because a huge number of the people in the study were married? They don't say what percentage of the sample was from each demographic category.
I would have liked to see the age-based numbers broken down by marital status.
Finally, in the question about "ever had sex" and "age of first sex", sex includes oral sex. It doesn't say whether that applies to the questions about "number of sexual partners". The actual study design is probably somewhere on the CDC website along with the actual database of data.
Since my number is 1, I play other memory games, like thinking of all the states/countries where it's happened.
I don't know what my number is, but seven is clearly the best answer. Few enough that you can remember each one, and perhaps even warmly; not so few that your confidence or desirability is in question.
I was just waiting for a president to chime in to boast/lament.
I don't know what my number is
Bullshit.
139, see 136, 137. I'd bet that ttaM's and my pattern is pretty common, and among people who remain not coupled up past their twenties, lots of them aren't having much sex at all. The Sex and the City demographic -- grownups engaged in a steady stream of short term relationships, isn't a big one. (Again, data pulled out of my ass.)
Thomas Jefferson's number was at least 2.
I suspect that divorced people from 35-45 rack up big numbers as well.
143: Likewise. "I'm not saying" is fine, but "I don't remember," is nonsense.
Really? You called that sex?
I am utterly and completely terrified.
Bullshit
I could count, given the relevant parameters, I just haven't this morning, Bobala.
re: 146
Yes, I have an older male relative [exact identity redacted] who says that getting divorced in his late 30s presented him with near unlimited opportunities for shagging around. Certainly more than he'd had when he was in his teens.
No, Ogged, I will not put you on my mailing list of recently separated women.
Don't numbers go way up in retirement communities (fasted growing HIV+ population)?
149- No, I was only counting Sally as the 1.
I don't know what my number is
Bullshit.
Not at all. I tried to figure this out recently and I couldn't, at least not with any confidence.
Also, I think Cala's 4 has been unduly overlooked. I know there are public-health people here -- can anyone confirm that the self-report problems that Tim cited (with regard to social attitudes like voting for a black candidate) are magnified 100x for men who are having sex with men but do not identify as gay?
I really can't honestly count fumbling around in a college dorm bed as sex, especially if there was no penetration. Far too unsatisfying to count.
157- You had trouble figuring out Ogged's number? That is surprising.
great strains of memory
This is interesting; likewise. How old are you? Is the strain the same as 5 years ago? I'm 41, and am not sure about the rate of strain increase.
Do people not keep a list? I'm well aware of memory fade, or the forgettables, what have you, and not unlike the keeping of photographs, I want someday, when reminiscence becomes important, to be able to remember these people.
I vacillated on whether to post this presidentially, but...
My number is 19. Interestingly for the present debate, I am near certain that two of them would not count me in their number, for although the encounter involved vaginal penetration and ejaculation, the act was...er...exceedingly brief.
One of those two subsequently insisted to her roommates that she was a virgin, and the roommates found that hard to square with the fact that she had used emergency contraception.
158: What about women underreporting teh gay sex?
Seriously?! Er, yeah man. It was great.
I suspect that divorced people from 35-45 rack up big numbers as well.
So heartening.
I really can't honestly count fumbling around in a college dorm bed as sex, especially if there was no penetration. Far too unsatisfying to count.
Well sure, if there was no penetration.
139: Ex recto, but I suspect that the general pattern is like LB and Matt. Series of partners (one-night stands or short relationships) that turn into longer monogamous relationships, that turn into a marriage. Even if there's a lot of infidelity, it could still correlate pretty well with everyone's number being pretty much fixed by the time they marry.
159: Is it wrong that my mental definition of 'sex' turns heavily on nudity? Genital-genital or oral-genital contact culminating in orgasm is sex (penetration is sex even if no one comes), and anything else culminating in orgasm is sex if you're mostly naked, not if you're not. I don't think this is logically consistent or anything, but on inspection of my beliefs, I'm pretty committed to this definition.
But there is a post-Clintonian pattern of insisting that oral sex is sex. In some cases, I can see it, but in others, it just doesn't count.
Do people not keep a list?
I'm finding this hilarious. I've never heard of people keeping a list, and the image of someone getting out The List when it's time for an addition is making me laugh. Do you ever subtract someone from the the list?
158: Remember that infamous Oprah episode where that guy was like "yeah, I have sex with men, but I'm not gay. I'm on the DL" and Oprah couldn't wrap her mind around it?
A dating pattern I've found out about recently is sober, needy women joining AA to pick up needy, recovering guys.
157: It's hard to know exactly how many people are on the other side of the knothole.
163: I confess to complete ignorance of the literature (informal or otherwise) on how likely women are to lie and/or not interpret gay sex as "real" sex. So I dunno. I brought up the other because there is such a wealth of primary and secondary data showing that, well, men lie about this topic. To themselves and others.
168: Yeah, see, this definition stuff could really affect my number. Maybe I've been doing better than I thought...
Not at all. I tried to figure this out recently and I couldn't, at least not with any confidence.
I could kind of see that. People are weird about sex, even to themselves, and I think that probably effects the extent of your memory of sexual partners.
168:
Elaine: Hey, when do you consider sex is taking place?
Jerry: I would say, when the nipple makes its first appearance.
161: I have to admit that I've got one partner who I probably remember only because of earlier attempts to come up with a number -- I was trying to count years ago, and forgot this guy, and felt terribly bad about it when I remembered.
168: remember when LB tried to justify all those bathroom trysts as not really cheating because she had her clothes on?
Dammit, I knew catching up with unfogged would make me want to post on a thread. So I'm just ducking in here, because something bugs me about this subject.
re AWB's 129. I think my number has been higher than my age since I was 15 or 16. 17 at the latest. Sometimes not very much, and it might have briefly dipped below once or twice.
I honestly can't remember the total. I lost track s
