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.

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.

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.