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Lies, Damned Lies, and Sexual Statistics

 
 
 
 
 
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This article proves the fallacy of one of the more frequently referenced statistics in human sexuality, namely the wide disparity between the reported number of average lifetime sexual partners for men and women.

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09/22/2008
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Polymath1976 5 months ago

I agree with your main premise. Namely, it is far more likely that women will contain small groups with very high partner counts than it is that men will. It is far easier, after all, for a woman to get laid if she is not bashful about it. I also agree that the distribution for women could be bimodal, although I suspect that the mode to the right will have a far lower peak than the one to the left. I assume that we can agree that if the entire population were surveyed, the averages would be essentially equal (differing only slightly due to unequal denominators). Your claim is that the small group of women with astronomical partner counts are easy to miss due to their scarcity, thereby deflating the average for all women. The behavior of most women is represented by the lower average, since the ones who were missed are not representative of the population. Men, on the other hand, more closely resemble one another in their behavior, so their higher average is accurate. I do see your point, and I do think that some variation in the data can be explained that way.

Even so, I still believe that there is significant over- and under-reporting taking place in these surveys. A sample of N women would require skipping over enough promiscuous women in the population to account for 14N uncounted sexual partners in order to explain the results in the survey I discuss. If we are talking about a sample size of 1,000, then there are 14,000 sexual relationships that were missed due to our choice of the particular women sampled. It could be as easy as missing 14 women who each slept with 1,000 men. That is certainly possible. (It would all depend on their concentration in the population. If it is anywhere near even one percent, it is highly unlikely that 14 would be missed in a sample of 1,000.) But as the sample size goes up, that sort of scenario becomes much less likely. (This is of course why sampling error goes down with increasing sample size.)

Polymath1976 5 months ago

Perhaps the main point I would make to challenge this claim is this: There is evidence of the improbability of missing these women in a well-designed survey to be found in the reports of the men. In other words, the men—and lots of them—had no problem finding them, suggesting that the local social network containing these men was sufficiently well connected to permit their meeting these women. The men have been sampled from that network, and so have the women, creating similar odds of forming a good sample. Promiscuous women may be more rare—and more promiscuous—than promiscuous men, but I do not believe the rarity is sufficient to explain a whopping 14-point differential between the sexes. After all, if the concentration of these women in the population was low enough to make missing them in a survey likely, it becomes unlikely that their social connectivity would be sufficient to have their "attention" fairly evenly distributed among the men, which is a crucial part of your argument.

What would be great, and what I bet we'd both like to see, is some deeper statistical results—range, variance, sample size, etc.—that would put these results in context.

Thanks again for your comments. I really enjoyed the exchange.

johneosborne 5 months ago

To clarify: there is certainly a survey design problem here, but I'm suggesting that the surveys are accurate for nearly all men and women. They might be inaccurate for only a very small number of women. These women might not get sampled, or they might be particularly prone to lying. If their promiscuity comes from a dysfunction, it's easy to imagine that they are ashamed of their behavior and want to cover it up, or are suppressing their awareness of an underlying depression.

johneosborne 5 months ago

Here's the problem I have with the idea that the survey is poorly designed - these results come up again and again, in different countries by different researchers and in different generations. There's something real behind these numbers. It may be a biological difference in how men and women report (lie) about their behavior, or it may be a biological difference in their sexual behavior.

I think you're assuming in your reasoning about the statistics that the distributions are similar between the male and female populations. I'm suggesting that they might have very different distributions. I wouldn't be surprised if both men and women had a bimodal distribution, with a second peak at the high end comprised of people who are unusually promiscuous. But I'm suggesting that the high-end peak for women is exceptionally high and exceptionally sharp, much moreso than for men. Sampling error would then have a greater impact on statistics for the women. I'm suggesting that a higher, sharper peak for women could be explained by the ease with which attractive, dysfunctional women can find male partners. There are probably few opportunities to be a Wilt Chamberlain (a world-class celebrity), but potentially many opportunities to be an A.W., my girlfriend in college who'd had over 200 partners in one year. She's now a middle class mom with a Ph.D.

Of course it's true that for every male yes there has to be a female yes. But, if you sample yes answers in the male population more accurately than yes answers in the female population, you end up with a misrepresentation of the network.

Polymath1976 5 months ago

That is an interesting and fair point, John. Indeed, one might get strange results estimating a population average if one missed outliers (prostitutes, Wilt Chamberlain, etc.) when collecting data. (I allude to the possibility in my third footnote.) But keep in mind that these are not ordinary discrete data we are working with, since they refer to relationships between two elements (or edges between nodes, if you like). The key point is that a yes answer in the female group requires a yes answer somewhere in the male group and vice versa. Promiscuous people (women or men) would act as hubs in a network, but no matter how high their numbers, they could add at most one to anyone else's count. Missing such people in a random sampling is possible, but missing enough of them to create the type of disparity seen in this survey and others like it is tremendously unlikely. What I think is the case with the survey I looked at is that two phenomena occurred: 1) The polled subjects were less than completely honest. 2) The survey itself was poorly designed. It is possible that the second phenomenon was the most weighty in this case, but I am convinced that the first also played a significant role. Thank you for your thought-provoking comments!

johneosborne 5 months ago

To sum up, it's possible that nearly all men and women are honest about their partner numbers and the surveys of them are accurate. Only the outliers in the female population are inaccurate, whether by bad sampling or lies.

Speaking from the gut, if an attractive woman wants a new partner every night, how hard is that in a big population center? It's intuitively obvious that such a woman could easily reach numbers in the hundreds. And if she does it out of dysfunction, how likely is she to report it? The two promiscuous women in my personal experience had both been through extensive counseling that helped them break out of the self-destructive behavior and made them able to talk about it. It's possibly that many hyper-promiscuous women never get that perspective and are stuck keeping their sex habits a secret.

johneosborne 5 months ago

There's another possible explanation for the discrepancy between men's and women's reported numbers. Sometimes called the prostitute effect, it says that a very small number of women have an extremely large number of partners. If these women aren't sampled, the statistics are thrown off. I would add that the promiscuous women wouldn't necessarily have to be prostitutes. There are probably a fair number of ordinary women who have large numbers of partners. My guess is that these women are usually dysfunctional in some way (sexually abused, alcoholic, etc.) I would imagine that these dysfunctional women, hoping to pass for normal, would be inclined to lie on surveys. I speak from personal experience: I'm a male with a dozen sexual partners. These women have averaged about 20 partners apiece. Nearly all of those partners were concentrated in a single women with over 200 partners, with most of the remainder in a second woman with 40 partners. Six of the women had two or fewer partners. The two promiscuous women were attractive, intelligent, and outgoing, but both had been abandoned by a parent.