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?
Krista
Clatter? Maybe if you’ve got castanets glued to them…
Joshua
“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”.
Pb
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!
Chubbs
I’m slow today(ok, everyday) but what exactly is this about? BTW, I have had somewhere between 6 and 15. :)
double-plus-ungood
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.
double-plus-ungood
Ace and others are confusing “mean” with “median”.
Shinobi
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.
Punchy
Can I get this translated into English, please?
Zifnab
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.
Mr Furious
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.
Mike
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.
double-plus-ungood
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:
taodon
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.
Zifnab
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.
Zifnab
Smaller penises lead to unsafe sex.
double-plus-ungood
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.
dlw32
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.
rachel
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.)
Don
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.
Don
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…
double-plus-ungood
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
double-plus-ungood
AHA!
oops
The Other Steve
I am reminded of the scene in Clerks, where Dante tries to find out how many guys his girlfriend has slept with.
RSA
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):
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.
Punchy
And cast into my village, I pray.
Mike
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.
double-plus-ungood
No, when I say “most”,…
Ah. Sorry, I misread or misunderstood your original comment, which was discussing “most”. You’re quite right.
Mr Furious
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.
Captain USA
You all seem to be accepting heterosexuality as some kind of axiom.
double-plus-ungood
You all seem to be accepting heterosexuality as some kind of axiom.
The survey under discussion was counting heterosexual encounters.
Andrew J. Lazarus
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.
Jake
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?
myiq2xu
If these geeks think womens breasts feel like bags of sand, wait ’til they discover the sandbox.
Krista
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.
Francis
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.
RSA
Robot sex, obviously. “Rub some more oil on, baby–not that stuff, use the 30-weight.”
Zifnab
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.
capelza
Hahahahaaaa… erm, that’s true. “Honey, you’re the best”.
My husband has had the good sense to never ask.
Krista
Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies. A good philosophy when dealing with each others’ sexual pasts. :)
myiq2xu
Whenever a woman tells me
“I don’t usually do this on a first date.”
I always reply
“Me either.”
Don
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.
Tsulagi
Clatter? Bags of sand? What the hell kind of fun doll does he have in his basement?
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.
Andrew
One word: trannies.
Punchy
Coke….meet monitor…which now must meet Clorox wipes…damn you to hell….
yet another jeff
That’s not a fun doll, that’s one of those cymbal playing wind up monkey dolls…
Perry Como
With bacon and play-doh stapled to its private area.
cmoreNC
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.
cmoreNC
I don’t understand how the second line in my post above came to have an overstrike. Some auto-HTML thingie I guess.
Pb
cmoreNC,
Yep–because of the dashes you had in your post, it was being ‘helpful’.