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You are here: Home / The Two Sexes

The Two Sexes

by John Cole|  August 14, 20079:17 am| 49 Comments

This post is in: General Stupidity

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Men and Men, according to Science Blogger Ace:

It’s worse than that, really. If you read it, they explain this to you s-l-o-w-l-y as if it hasn’t occurred to you that if most men claim (say) 15 sex partners, and most men claim (say) six, then one if not both of these groups must be lying.

In related news, Scientific American reports it’s a true pleasure to touch a woman’s breasts, how they feel like bags of sand, how they so pleasingly as they clatter as they heave backwards and forwards.

Hrmm. Is he talking about male breasts?

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Reader Interactions

49Comments

  1. 1.

    Krista

    August 14, 2007 at 9:20 am

    Clatter? Maybe if you’ve got castanets glued to them…

  2. 2.

    Joshua

    August 14, 2007 at 9:30 am

    “Bags of sand” is a line from 40 Year-Old Virgin. From anybody other than Captain Ace “Vaginas Are Ugly” Meat Curtain, I’d assume that was an ironic reference to the movie. In this case, though, I’m going to go with “actually that clueless”.

  3. 3.

    Pb

    August 14, 2007 at 9:31 am

    Heh; and SCIAM is full of it on this one as well, in so many ways. Read their comments, come up with your own, and then marvel that (if?) they can still count to ten. I’ll put forward yet another scenario that seems to be excluded entirely from their iron-clad reasoning: gay men, oh noes!

  4. 4.

    Chubbs

    August 14, 2007 at 9:31 am

    I’m slow today(ok, everyday) but what exactly is this about? BTW, I have had somewhere between 6 and 15. :)

  5. 5.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 9:32 am

    I think he’s referencing the line from Forty Year Old Virgin when the main character, attempting to conceal the fact that he’s never touched a breast before, says that they feel like a bag of sand.

  6. 6.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 9:34 am

    Ace and others are confusing “mean” with “median”.

  7. 7.

    Shinobi

    August 14, 2007 at 9:46 am

    Well of course only men and men would have multiple sex partners. Women hate sex, DUH, we only allow men to have sex with us so we can fulfill our lifegoal of spawning babies. We are delicate blushing flowers and all, barely managing to hold up our bags of sand.

  8. 8.

    Punchy

    August 14, 2007 at 9:47 am

    how they so pleasingly as they clatter as they heave backwards and forwards.

    Can I get this translated into English, please?

  9. 9.

    Zifnab

    August 14, 2007 at 9:50 am

    Actually, I think Ace may have Freudian-slipped right into an answer to his own question. If most men say they’ve slept with 15 partners, and most women say they’ve slept with 6, clearly 9 of a man’s 15 sexual encounters are with other dudes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  10. 10.

    Mr Furious

    August 14, 2007 at 9:50 am

    I was confused reading John’s blockquote, which, it turns out, is Ace’s entire post… there’s a typo, in the original—“and most WOmen claim (say) six…

    Um, Mr. Ace, Sex is not a zero sum game, and people are capable of having sex with more than one partner, so there is no reason those numbers couldn’t be accurate. Though I am skeptical, especially of the men.

    My suspicion is, societal pressures force women to round down or underestimate, and men to exaggerate. But I’m betting the woman’s number is fairly accurate in an “enclosed” survey setting, where they feel they can be honest and safe. Men will still feel compelled to exagerate, and/or have bought into their own hype.

    What would be the results of a penis-size survey? Similarly skewed, I suspect.

  11. 11.

    Mike

    August 14, 2007 at 9:57 am

    . If you read it, they explain this to you s-l-o-w-l-y as if it hasn’t occurred to you that if most men claim (say) 15 sex partners, and most men claim (say) six, then one if not both of these groups must be lying.

    Not true if a relatively small number of women have many partners. Here’s a simple example: say there are 10 couples. 8 of the women are monagomous, while 2 sleep with all of the men. Most of them men (8 of them) have three partners. Most of the women (again, 8 of them) have only one.

  12. 12.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 9:57 am

    Again, this is simple confusion between “average number of partners” and “median number of partners”.

    It’s covered in the comments of the Scientific American article that Ace links to.

    As Brad Delong says regarding this kerfuffle:

    …you see, she didn’t tell him that the survey didn’t ask about means–about averages–but about medians. Which means that she doesn’t know the difference between means and medians. Which is a very bad thing for a science reporter

  13. 13.

    taodon

    August 14, 2007 at 9:59 am

    What would be the results of a penis-size survey?

    No where near reality. The average size is 5.5 inches. But somehow extra-large condoms are company’s biggest sellers. You do the math.

  14. 14.

    Zifnab

    August 14, 2007 at 10:01 am

    Not true if a relatively small number of women have many partners. Here’s a simple example: say there are 10 couples. 8 of the women are monagomous, while 2 sleep with all of the men. Most of them men (8 of them) have three partners. Most of the women (again, 8 of them) have only one.

    Unless you’re Mormon, in which case one man has 10 partners, 9 men have had two partners, and 2 women have been cast out of the village for being sluts.

  15. 15.

    Zifnab

    August 14, 2007 at 10:02 am

    No where near reality. The average size is 5.5 inches. But somehow extra-large condoms are company’s biggest sellers. You do the math.

    Smaller penises lead to unsafe sex.

  16. 16.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 10:05 am

    Not true if a relatively small number of women have many partners.

    No. Assuming that all parties involved are sleeping with the opposite sex from the other group, the averages should be the same. For example, assume that the sample size is three men and three women. Man A has slept with three women, B has slept with one woman, and C with none (I’m assuming that’s Ace, BTW). Woman A has slept with two men, Woman B with one, and Woman C with one (Man A is a man whore, it seems).

    The average man has slept with 1.33 women, the average woman with 1.33.

  17. 17.

    dlw32

    August 14, 2007 at 10:05 am

    Not to sound too Clintonian, but it depends on what the definition of “sex partner” is. By, probably the most common definition, I’ve only had one (approaching 21 years of married bliss). By more broad definitions, several.

  18. 18.

    rachel

    August 14, 2007 at 10:10 am

    My suspicion is, societal pressures force women to round down or underestimate, and men to exaggerate.

    True, but there’s also the pressure of being left (literally) holding the baby. Even with condoms and the pill, it’s in a woman’s interest to be more choosy about who she has sex with than it is for men since the wrong choice can be catastrophic for her, her child and her eventual reproductive success.

    (Ladies: consider carefully what you are about before having sex with someone like Ace. I would not breed this blogger.)

  19. 19.

    Don

    August 14, 2007 at 10:12 am

    Um, Mr. Ace, Sex is not a zero sum game, and people are capable of having sex with more than one partner, so there is no reason those numbers couldn’t be accurate.

    Uh, when it comes to counting up partners it is, in fact, exactly a zero-sum game, presuming we’re asking men about women and women about men, not simply presuming hetero pairings.

    If you have 5 men and 5 women in the entire world and each man claims he has had sex with 5 women then by necessity those five women each have to have had sex with 5 men… or someone is lying.

    More practically, the five men could claim to each have had sex with 2 women and three of the women to have had sex with only one partner, but then the combinatorics require that those other women must have had two or more partners with their combined total being 7.

    Make yourself two groups of names and try to come up with a counter-example if you don’t think so. When a member in one group has sex with a member of the other group then – by every definition I have ever worked with – that person has also had sex with them. You can’t put a check mark in group A without adding a check mark to group B unless you’re one of the girls from my high school who thought taking it up the rump didn’t take their virginity.

  20. 20.

    Don

    August 14, 2007 at 10:18 am

    The average man has slept with 1.33 women, the average woman with 1.33.

    AHA! I KNEW more of my female classmates in college were part-time clamdiving than they claimed!

    it’ll come to you, just re-read it…

  21. 21.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 10:18 am

    Here’s a simple example: say there are 10 couples. 8 of the women are monagomous, while 2 sleep with all of the men. Most of them men (8 of them) have three partners. Most of the women (again, 8 of them) have only one.

    Yes, but when you say “most”, you’re using the median, whereas the average number of partners for both men and women would be 2.8

  22. 22.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 10:21 am

    AHA!

    oops

  23. 23.

    The Other Steve

    August 14, 2007 at 10:25 am

    I am reminded of the scene in Clerks, where Dante tries to find out how many guys his girlfriend has slept with.

  24. 24.

    RSA

    August 14, 2007 at 10:26 am

    I think that the mean versus median issue is a red herring. For example, it’s easy to find papers describing comparable differences between means, for example (broken HTML link, sorry):

    Rather than a small but statistically significant gender difference, the typical discrepancy in men’s and women’s lifetime number of sex partners is large by any definition. For example, in national samples, the mean number of sex partners for men and women, respectively, was 12.3 versus 3.3 in the United States (Smith, 1991), 9.9 versus 3.4 in Britain (Wellings et al., 1994), 11.0 versus 3.3 in France (ACSF, 1992), 10.2 versus 4.2 in New Zealand (Davis et al., 1993), and 12.5 versus 5.2 in Norway (Sundet et al., 1989). In populations that are more or less closed systems with an approximately equal ratio of men and women, such as the United States (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1993), this apparent gender discrepancy does not make logical sense (Einon, 1994; Gurman, 1989).

    And assuming competence on the part of the people conducting the surveys and analyzing results, they’d have ensured that equal numbers of men and women were included, they’d have mentioned outliers that could correspond to prostitutes, and so forth. There’s always the issue of unrepresentative sampling (which would raise other issues aside from prostitutes and priests, such as same-sex partners), but I’d think this would be discussed in the literature as well.

  25. 25.

    Punchy

    August 14, 2007 at 10:28 am

    2 women have been cast out of the village for being sluts.

    And cast into my village, I pray.

  26. 26.

    Mike

    August 14, 2007 at 10:29 am

    Yes, but when you say “most”, you’re using the median, whereas the average number of partners for both men and women would be 2.8

    No, when I say “most”, I mean the mode, though in this case it’s the same as the median.. When you say “average”, you mean the arithmetic mean. If you keep clicking through to the actual article being quoted, it talks about medians.

  27. 27.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 10:38 am

    No, when I say “most”,…

    Ah. Sorry, I misread or misunderstood your original comment, which was discussing “most”. You’re quite right.

  28. 28.

    Mr Furious

    August 14, 2007 at 10:45 am

    Seriously, Don? You think your example with two captive groups of partners is analogous to an open survey, where the groups of men and women are distinct?

    I’m no statistician, but, I don’t see how your example makes sense in any case other than that specific one.

  29. 29.

    Captain USA

    August 14, 2007 at 10:45 am

    You all seem to be accepting heterosexuality as some kind of axiom.

  30. 30.

    double-plus-ungood

    August 14, 2007 at 10:48 am

    You all seem to be accepting heterosexuality as some kind of axiom.

    The survey under discussion was counting heterosexual encounters.

  31. 31.

    Andrew J. Lazarus

    August 14, 2007 at 11:13 am

    My bet for this discrepancy is not lying, but that women have a much higher “sample error of the mean”. The example where all but one woman is monogamous but the other woman is a sex worker who mates with everyone works well for this. The probability that this one woman is missed in the survey sample is relatively high. The distribution of the male responses is much more uniform and the male result is not that sensitive to who is selected for the sample.

    Remember the conjugation: I make love, you have sex, she sleeps around.

  32. 32.

    Jake

    August 14, 2007 at 11:34 am

    The survey under discussion was counting heterosexual encounters.

    I don’t thinks so. At least not the whole survey.

    From following various links I’m guessing the articles are all based on this survey by the CDC.

    Does anyone know for certain?

  33. 33.

    myiq2xu

    August 14, 2007 at 11:39 am

    If these geeks think womens breasts feel like bags of sand, wait ’til they discover the sandbox.

  34. 34.

    Krista

    August 14, 2007 at 11:42 am

    I am reminded of the scene in Clerks, where Dante tries to find out how many guys his girlfriend has slept with.

    Odd how many men really seem to be hung up on how many guys their woman has slept with, and a shame how it tends to immediately colour their perceptions of that woman. We women know that we’ll be thought of VERY differently (if not dumped at the curb) for having numbers in the double-digits, so we lie like rugs. We have to, unfortunately.

  35. 35.

    Francis

    August 14, 2007 at 11:54 am

    clatter? heave? wtf?

    shimmy, certainly. wobble, ok if you want to sleep on the couch. but unless his only s3x partner has been an overly enhanced stripper who wouldn’t take off the coconut bra top, he really needs a thesaurus.

  36. 36.

    RSA

    August 14, 2007 at 11:56 am

    clatter? heave? wtf?

    Robot sex, obviously. “Rub some more oil on, baby–not that stuff, use the 30-weight.”

  37. 37.

    Zifnab

    August 14, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    Odd how many men really seem to be hung up on how many guys their woman has slept with, and a shame how it tends to immediately colour their perceptions of that woman. We women know that we’ll be thought of VERY differently (if not dumped at the curb) for having numbers in the double-digits, so we lie like rugs. We have to, unfortunately.

    It’s not what you think. Guys just perfer that new car smell.

    That said, I know very few men who would look at a hot girl and say, “Yeah, I would rather have sex with the uglier virgin in the corner.” Get fucking real. At least give us credit for being superficial. Saying “I’ve slept with a couple dozen women” isn’t the sort of thing an intelligent guy says to his prospective mate either. It’s the sort of thing he back-slaps with his friends, but you’d have to be crazy to look a girl in the eye and say, “Unlike the 20 girls I’ve previously nailed, you are something really special.”

    Either way, the entire premise is flawed and hinges on the assumption we’re living in Elizabethan England, not post-Sexual Revolution suburban America. I don’t know any of my 20-something friends who give two craps about how many guys a girl has seen before him, so long as she assures him that he’s got the biggest penis she’s ever had.

  38. 38.

    capelza

    August 14, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    . I don’t know any of my 20-something friends who give two craps about how many guys a girl has seen before him, so long as she assures him that he’s got the biggest penis she’s ever had.

    Hahahahaaaa… erm, that’s true. “Honey, you’re the best”.

    My husband has had the good sense to never ask.

  39. 39.

    Krista

    August 14, 2007 at 1:09 pm

    Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. A good philosophy when dealing with each others’ sexual pasts. :)

  40. 40.

    myiq2xu

    August 14, 2007 at 1:16 pm

    Whenever a woman tells me

    “I don’t usually do this on a first date.”

    I always reply

    “Me either.”

  41. 41.

    Don

    August 14, 2007 at 1:26 pm

    Seriously, Don? You think your example with two captive groups of partners is analogous to an open survey, where the groups of men and women are distinct?

    I think that for a sufficiently large and well-implemented survey – which presumably queries identical quantities of men and women – the results will trend towards accurate, yes.

  42. 42.

    Tsulagi

    August 14, 2007 at 1:29 pm

    Clatter? Bags of sand? What the hell kind of fun doll does he have in his basement?

    We women know that we’ll be thought of VERY differently (if not dumped at the curb) for having numbers in the double-digits, so we lie like rugs.

    Nah, maybe by the dumb and/or insecure, but no way in hell would I ever have married a virgin. I want someone with at least as much sex drive as I have.

  43. 43.

    Andrew

    August 14, 2007 at 1:38 pm

    The survey under discussion was counting heterosexual encounters.

    One word: trannies.

  44. 44.

    Punchy

    August 14, 2007 at 1:42 pm

    It’s the sort of thing he back-slaps with his friends, but you’d have to be crazy to look a girl in the eye and say, “Unlike the 20 girls I’ve previously nailed, you are something really special.”

    Coke….meet monitor…which now must meet Clorox wipes…damn you to hell….

  45. 45.

    yet another jeff

    August 14, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Clatter? Bags of sand? What the hell kind of fun doll does he have in his basement?

    That’s not a fun doll, that’s one of those cymbal playing wind up monkey dolls…

  46. 46.

    Perry Como

    August 14, 2007 at 3:25 pm

    That’s not a fun doll, that’s one of those cymbal playing wind up monkey dolls…

    With bacon and play-doh stapled to its private area.

  47. 47.

    cmoreNC

    August 14, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    When someone’s put in a context where they feel compelled to answer the “how many” question:
    -Don’t many men tend to OVERESTIMATE how many women they’ve slept with? To avoid seeming inexperienced and un-studly.
    -Don’t many men tend to UNDERESTIMATE how many men they’ve slept with? To avoid seeming too casual and slutty.

  48. 48.

    cmoreNC

    August 14, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    I don’t understand how the second line in my post above came to have an overstrike. Some auto-HTML thingie I guess.

  49. 49.

    Pb

    August 14, 2007 at 6:52 pm

    cmoreNC,

    Yep–because of the dashes you had in your post, it was being ‘helpful’.

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