Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

Isn’t it interesting how nobody ever really questions statistics that bear out some version of reality that “everybody knows!”

EVERYONE knows men are promiscuous by nature. It’s part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. The strategy is different for a woman, who has to go through so much just to have a baby and then nurture it. She is genetically programmed to want just one man who will stick with her and help raise their children.

Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

And of course, that statistic gibes with reality — or at least, what we tell ourselves is reality — the Way Things Are, Naturally. And because it does that, newspapers and other media outlets just keep repeating that statistic as if it’s God’s Honest Objective Truth. After all, someone else had it in their story, and they must have fact-checked it, and it was in a book somewhere, so that’s good enough for me!

Well, except for the part where it’s mathematically impossible.

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

It is about time for mathematicians to set the record straight, said David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Surveys and studies to the contrary notwithstanding, the conclusion that men have substantially more sex partners than women is not and cannot be true for purely logical reasons,” Dr. Gale said.

See, if heterosexual men have seven female sex partners and heterosexual women have four male partners on average, that means that men are somehow having more female sexual partners than those same women are having male partners.

Now, I went to law school because I can’t do math (you should have *seen* me in Evidence when the prof wanted us to work out probability problems), but even I know that the average number of female partners and the average number of male partners for heterosexuals has to be equal. Because if it’s not, who are all these surplus women showing up to sleep with men and yet not being counted among the women who have sex with men? Even if the higher number of female partners among men could be explained somehow by sluts or prostitution, wouldn’t those sluts and prostitutes drive up the average number of partners for all women?

Conversely, where do all those men disappear to between having seven female partners themselves and showing up as the male partners of women?

Maybe, just maybe, people are not honestly reporting the number of sexual partners they have:

Sevgi O. Aral, who is associate director for science in the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there are several possible explanations and all are probably operating.

One is that men are going outside the population to find partners, to prostitutes, for example, who are not part of the survey, or are having sex when they travel to other countries.

Another, of course, is that men exaggerate the number of partners they have and women underestimate.

Dr. Aral said she cannot determine what the true number of sex partners is for men and women, but, she added, “I would say that men have more partners on average but the difference is not as big as it seems in the numbers we are looking at.”

Dr. Gale is still troubled. He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, “would be negligible.” The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted.

Ronald Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego, agreed with Dr. Gale. After all, on average, men would have to have three more partners than women, raising the question of where all those extra partners might be.

“Some might be imaginary,” Dr. Graham said. “Maybe two are in the man’s mind and one really exists.”

I can’t imagine why women would underreport the number of partners they have over a lifetime and men would exaggerate.

Maybe, perhaps, it’s that “everybody knows” that men are promiscuous by nature and women want to find just one special man?  That women are used up by sex with new partners (even if they marry them!), like gum or tape or warm buckets of spit or congealed buffet dishes?

The more people accept that notion as Truth, the more pressure there is to lie about the number of partners one have over a lifetime — for men, to appear more experienced, and for women, to not be deemed a slut (though one also has to be sure not to be seen as a prude)

Kinda like when you started hearing all over the place that women used on average 20,000 words, while men used 7,000. But that turned out not to be true, either, once someone bothered to fact-check it. Turns out men and women talk about the same — but because the “women won’t shut up and men are strong, silent types” thing sounds true because it feeds into our lazy sexist cultural assumptions, that little factoid got repeated and repeated and took on the authority of Fact — because “everybody knows” it’s true.