Comments on: Lies About Sex

By: Buster Hymen

Buster Hymen — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:36:57 +0000

But no one is counting what you do by yourself!

By: savagehenry

savagehenry — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 07:56:26 +0000

Bob Knaus, I don’t think those numbers reflected academics, it is my understanding they are taken from the population of the country as a whole (correct me if I’m wrong). Those numbers don’t seem low at all to me and I know some pretty promiscuous people. I would say if you’ve reached triple digits you are probably a very very very very very very very very far outlier.

By: Pablo Stafforini

Pablo Stafforini — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:44:31 +0000

misrepresentation => underrepresentation

By: Pablo Stafforini

Pablo Stafforini — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 05:43:13 +0000

Doug S wrote:

Another potential loophole – men and women could be using different definitions of what counts as a sexual partner.

David Buss considers these and other potential explanations for the sex difference in reported numbers in the revised edition of The Evolution of Desire but concludes that “the real reason” of the discrepancies is the misrepresentation of prostitutes in sex surveys (p. 259).

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:00:11 +0000

Doug S, yes, a study I ignored while I was finding the one that looked so good claimed that the women in their sample figured that it only counted when they could remember the man’s name.

By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 01:39:31 +0000

Another potential loophole – men and women could be using different definitions of what counts as a sexual partner. If, for example, men considered act X sufficient for counting someone as a sexual partner and women did not, then that could also cause differences in results. If two people can disagree on whether they were partners, then the High School Prom Theorem doesn’t hold even if everyone answers honestly and the sampling rate is 100%.

By: Bob Knaus

Bob Knaus — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:28:09 +0000

My conclusion: academics are not getting enough sex.

The number of lifetime partners (for both genders) reported in Robin’s original post seems low to me based on personal experience and what close friends have told me. If those numbers are accepted as reasonable by the commenters on this board… then I can only conclude that they need to get out a bit more.

In my experience, there are a few women who are in fact statistical outliers, and the ones I know are not prostitutes. You should call them escorts, by the way. The one friend who finally did progress from trophy wife to stripper to escort (in her 40s!) had passed the triple-digit number of sex partners a decade earlier. She’s a welfare mom now, which provides some kind of moral, though I can’t think exactly what.

By: J Thomas

J Thomas — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:28:57 +0000

“I’ll accept that lying prostitutes may explain the difference.”

It isn’t just prostitutes that lie. This particular study suggested that prostitutes in Colorado Springs tended to have about a 5 year career, and during that time they would tend to be underrepresented in polls for various reasons. For example, if you poll by residence, the prostitutes tended to live in places that wouldn’t get polled.

With an incidence of less than 3 in ten thousand, an average 5 year career would increase that to only about 3 in a thousand. Not that many studies include ten thousand women.

And the prostitutes on crack brought up the average considerably, and they were much rarer, and also have a much shorter life expectancy. So they would be severely underrepresented in polls.

By: savagehenry

savagehenry — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:05:20 +0000

This reminds me of an episode of I believe it was Coupling (a British sit-com similar to, but better than Friends in my opinion) where one of the characters brings this up and says that when you ask a man how many people he’s slept with you always have to subtract 2 or 3 from their number and when you ask a woman how many people she’s slept with you always have to add 2 or 3 from their number. I would suspect that in surveys and studies that ask that sort of question you’ll find much of the difference can be explained by the fact that men like to appear like they’re studs and women like to appear as if they’re not sluts because there exists an odd double standard in many cultures (America especially). I would be more interested to see the result of surveys like this in non-western cultures, like some remote native tribe in South America. Perhaps there are some places where that cultural double standard isn’t as strong, is non-existent, or even the reverse. That might lead to less of a reason to lie when asked how much you get around.

Funny thing though, I myself (a man) often lower the number if asked by most people, however I have met girls who are probably lying when they say they’ve slept with absurdly large numbers of men (25+ !!). Guess not everyone follows the typical pattern.

By: Jadagul

Jadagul — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 20:06:24 +0000

The other thing to note is that you might not be able to leave out the self-identified liars, because they might be a skewed sample. As in, assume the Lady X hypothesis (or prostitution) and then suppose that Lady X is more likely to lie than anyone else in the survey. This will skew the numbers. If she self-identifies as lying and you throw her out, this will probably skew the numbers even more.

Now suppose, as is plausible, that guys with few partners are more likely to lie than guys with many, and women with many are more likely to lie than women with few; then throwing out the self-identified liars could actually make the discrepancy worse, not better (depending on by how much they lie).