It's impossible

blissed · 07-11-09 20:50:47

It's common knowledge isn't it that men are more promiscuous than women.

The article wrote:

Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

Either the men are including their blow up dollies in their total or the women are omitting their affairs. Either way, as the article points out, It's mathematically impossible for hetro men to have more sexual partners than hetro women

The article wrote:

Dr. Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weeki … .html?_r=3

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ngaio · 07-11-09 23:47:18

That's a really interesting article... I'm stealing it to twitter about because I've a friend who might want to blog about that, ha!

blissed · 07-11-09 23:51:00

Hey! come back with my article! *shakes fist*

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hyperballad · 09-11-09 01:03:39

It's funny, but out of all the women and men I personally know, the females are the most telling about their sexual experiences and they seem to have had more partners and a more sexually diverse experience than the the guys I know.

ngaio · 09-11-09 01:39:40

I tend to think that if men are more promiscuous than women, it's in cultures where this is socialised, or where women don't have easy access to birth control. In the circles I am part of, I've also noticed that the women tend to have far more partners than the men. The stereotype of men being afraid of commitment has also tended to apply more to the woman - myself included - than the men. I imagine this is probably just as socialised, rather than being due to any inherent quality though of course that's the eternal question.

pcobb4759 · 09-11-09 23:25:58

Interesting "topological" possibility. Suppose one man has an encounter with three women--the man could claim 3 women but the women could each only claim one man. I'm not saying that this would mess up an entire survey, but it's an interesting variable.

blissed · 10-11-09 02:31:08

Yeah but then 2 men would have a count of 0.

OK here goes On a desert island there are 14 heterosexuals equally split between the sexes. If 7 women have 7 sexual partners then those sexual partners will be the 7 men. Total sexual encounters per sex is 7.

If 6 women only have 1 partner and 6 men also have sex with the 7th woman then 6 men have 2 partners. There would be one lucky lady who'd had 7 partners and 1 guy whose only had 1. Total sexual encounters per sex still would be equal, this time at 13.

No matter how you vary the combination of partners, you always end up with each sex having the same number of encounters. So regarding heterosexual activity it's impossible for one sex as a whole to be more sexually active than the other.

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axion · 15-11-09 18:08:29

I think the mistake your making in your assumptions is that there are an equal number of both sexes. While I don't have access to stats to support this, I'll go out on a limb and say in China, where currently there are far more males than females, females have far more sexual encounters than males. In societies with more females than males, would not males have more sexual encounters? Doubtful the m/f ratio in the west is skewed enough to support the surveys results, but it is something to consider.
Also consider the suburban "Don Juan". He, given his irresistible charm, manages to sleep with all 20 women on his block. The women, all being chaste pictures of virtue otherwise, only sleep with Don and their husbands. Each woman has only 2 sexual encounters; however, Don has 20 from the same encounters. Not really a math person, but it seems to me either of the situations may be going in with the respondents of the survey in question...

...and getting back to the basic question of honesty in responding to the initial survey and our western double standard (one guy three girls - stud; one girl three guys - slut) {sigh}...

dmauro · 17-03-10 21:39:38

ok so bear with me cause this could get a little dense;

statistically at birth there are slightly more men. something like 105 men to every 100 women. however, women are more likely to outlive men. the age in life where women start outnumbering men i believe is around 40 (it varies by country but 40 is a good enough average to work with).

here's my math theory

if people have sex with new partners at an evenly distributed rate throughout their lives, we would still see equal numbers at death, however, people are not usually having sex within the first 15 years of their life.

what that means is that the bell curve for number of partners is skewed towards older age. and with men dying earlier than women, it gives men less time and numbers to complete the total acts of sex on the planet.

as an example at the limit point of death we assume that now there is 100 women for every 90 men and we are also going to assume that all the women want to have sex one last time before they die.

assuming all of those women have sex once, the men now have all had sex once as well except for those ten lucky guys who are throwing your numbers off and creating a higher average for the men.

(dont forget that using this logic, it stands to reason that the people who died earlier also had less sex on average as people who lived longer thus further throwing off the numbers as dead people couldnt be surveyed)

blissed · 17-03-10 21:52:27

mmmmm so what your sayiing is that men could have more sexual partners than women, but only if they're over 90

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dmauro · 17-03-10 22:21:02

not at all, we know its not as evenly distributed as that. my example was a relatively rough oversimplification of the math that could go into it. but my point is that women only have more in the say 20-35 range, then no matter what men start overtaking for two reasons, one they are simply dying off and two after that point men have to do more work to keep up with demand. you get a man and a woman of 45 and statistically the man should have slept with at least one more person. and as time goes on, the numbers spread further apart.

blissed · 18-03-10 00:31:10

The average life expentancy in the UK for women is 79.9 years and for men it's 75 years. Here's a graph of age and gender ratio. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1651

If you look on the graph the effect your talking about is tiny until we all get to 65, just like the prostitute effect mentioned in the article featuring Dr Gale that I linked to, and as Dr Gale mentioned these effects are tiny and don't explain the amount of difference in the answers received from each gender when people are surveyed.

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dmauro · 18-03-10 03:32:27

yes but if you look at the graph its at 30 that the separation starts, and i'm not saying that its going to end up explaining the huge discrepancy, but given 30+ years of declining numbers, some of which are prime for racking up stats, it does make sense that men would have a few over women. i was reading a US study (i dont know how creditable it was...it was on the internet after all) and they said that the average us female sleeps with only 4 men and the average male sleeps with only 7 women. while i think these numbers seem low, i think that maybe the statistical separation between the two is reasonable.

blissed · 18-03-10 11:53:58

For that to be reasonable there would need to be in the US 7000 women for every 4000 men. There are 3% less men of all ages in the USA and from 15 to 64 the gender ratio is identical. http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/sex_ratio.html

So when you take a survey you need 4000 people of each heterosexual gender. All you have to do now is explain why the US men surveyed had 3000 imaginary girlfriends or the women didn't mention nearly half of their real boyfriends.

When you do that your still physically left with a reprsentative group of 4000 women and 4000 men who can only fuck each other, so a higher ratio of lovers for one sex is going to be impossible.

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dmauro · 18-03-10 19:33:03

you know, we also dont have any real facts on how large a sample size these surveys were taking. or what kind of people they surveyed.

if you only surveyed NY city, it stands to reason that the people there have slept with people who dont live in the city. so we may be questioning and analyzing surveys which were horribly flawed to begin with.

blissed · 18-03-10 19:53:12

I'm kind of putting my trust in Dr Gale to assess the credibility of how representational the samples are of the whole population and regardless of what survey's produce I agree with him that the popular assumption that men in general are more sexually active than women is based in a physical and mathematical impossibility

from the article wrote:

Dr. Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females.”

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dmauro · 19-03-10 08:00:28

hmmm i get the point but i still want to see more info on what group of people were polled. for example the hotel i used to work in, a lot of us slept with the customers. if you polled the population of the hotel, you'd end up with numbers that didnt remotely add up. and if you polled the entire city block we were on, we'd still be throwing off the numbers because the majority of our clients were from out of state (obviously).

my point being, if a heavy tourism area was used for data, or say a college campus, or anywhere where many people from all over congregate but only on a temporary basis, you will end up with numbers that will never match up.

also, i am friends with a girl (read 50 year old woman) named becki. she was a roadie in the 80's for all sorts of big hair bands. she says she's slept with over 100 guys, and she is still sexually active. i'm relatively certain that she wasnt included in the survey, and god knows she's throwing off the average a bit herself. how about prostitutes? they could be in the thousands.

all these surveys show, is probably the "average normal" person. so the numbers could be true, depending on who was surveyed.

blissed · 19-03-10 11:41:27

If you google some methods for finding a representative sample from a population you'll be able to judge if you think there are any that are credible. Advertising agencies use focus groups," focus group selection methods" might be a good search.

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dmauro · 20-03-10 06:03:54

i understand how they are picked. i want specifics on the individual surveys themselves. just because you or i would try to use an overall image of the population, and just because thats the right way to go about doing it, doesnt mean thats what was done. anyways all of that aside i agree with you for the most part. i just feel that there's too many factors that could make a survey like this give faulty information but not necessarily be from people lying.

blissed · 20-03-10 12:15:16

Yeah I know, how muich the person being ask actually cares about the survey question is one big factor. Political opinion polls have on occasions been completely wrong, yet they're treated almost as if someone has been to the future and brought back the actual election result

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dmauro · 20-03-10 17:54:23

exactly

jefferys1962 · 20-03-10 19:00:16

*dips his toe into the water . . . not too cold . . . get's bold*

Wow . . . all this talk about math but not much discussion on the more probable explanation for the discrepancy. That being the Stud/Slut angle brought up by Axion. I'm thinking that's the more interesting point.

Here's an interesting angle: Men tend to exaggerate their sexual experiences when talking to other men. How might the survey have turned out if the survey takers had been women?

blissed · 20-03-10 19:28:32

That's a good point. I know a manager in a supermarket and whenever she has a seriously hard physical task to give out to the staff like breaking up loads of old wooden pallets to fit them into a skip, she puts a team of guys on it and adds 2 girls to the team as well. While showing off to the girls the guys do a fantastic amount of work really quickly

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dmauro · 21-03-10 04:00:45

so basically we're all agreed upon the fact that these surveys will never be accurate...you'd have to figure that the people doing the survey could figure it out too...right?

#1 07-11-09 20:50:47

It's impossible

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