I overslept a little and got caught up in playing catch-up, so I don’t have time for a long post before my spot in the schedule comes due. That said, I did want to share this survey I saw at The Sideshow that attacks the racist myth that white people use less hard drugs than people of color. They use more.
Non-Hispanic whites had a higher percentage of ever using cocaine or street drugs (23.5 percent) than blacks (18 percent) or Mexican-Americans (16 percent).
Yet people of color are thrown in jail more for it. Not that I want to up the number of people thrown in jail for using drugs to make parity, but this survey points to an important issue to remember, which is the War on Drugs is used as a tool to reinforce racial disparities. Since enforcement is going to be patchy anyway, it’s easy for the cops to get away with focusing more on non-white people without raising eyebrows. A little racist media that reinforces the notion that black people use more drugs than white people, and next thing you know, the practice of searching black people who you pull over but not white people becomes a national joke, but people don’t stop to question the false premise behind such profiling.
What’s interesting about this survey, conducted by the CDC, is that they’ve used new methods to try to get more honest answers about sex and drug use from people. That said, I’m skeptical that they got good answers anyway; god knows that I wouldn’t trust any government official asking questions about the number of sex partners I’ve had in this political environment. But they did get people to cop to more sex partners than they usually would:
A new nationwide survey, using high-tech methods to solicit candid answers on sexual activity and illegal drug use, finds that 29 percent of American men report having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime, while only 9 percent of women report having sex with 15 or more men.
The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four.
I’m still somewhat skeptical about the huge gaps between men and women that show up on these surveys. On one hand, it’s believable that the social stigma on female sexuality restrains women’s behavior more, but there’s good reason to believe it also restrains their honesty on the matter. I know of one survey that found that when women and men thought they were strapped to a lie detector, the number of admitted partners for men went down and for women it went up, and up more than men’s went down.
Actually, now that I think about it, that issue could explain the gap between white people and others on drug use—white people might be more willing to cop to it, because they’re less afraid of the cops showing up tomorrow to arrest them for the “anonymous” survey answers.
73 Responses to “Interesting survey results on the fly”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
SEVEN? Oh god am I a slut.
I wonder what the mean was. That would give some indication of the accuracy I’d think.
Anyone know what the racial breakdown of drug convictions is? I’m going to be beating some people about the head with these statistics.
Another thing I noticed: the sex survey didn’t say “sexual partners”; it only solicited opposite-sex partners. Since some men sleep with men and women with women, how would that affect those results?
Actually, that’s consistent with school discipline records. White kids are caught at school more frequently with drugs. Both races are caught at the same rate with weapons. The disparity between whites and blacks at school is in subjective discipline, like “defying authority,” fighting, etc. Guess which race is punished/suspsended/expelled for that?
To clarify: it would make sense that the survey is accurate that whites use illegal drugs more often than blacks.
In the interest of full disclosure, I will openly admit to having had thirteen sex partners, that I was a virgin until I was eighteen, that I lived with 2 men on 2 occasions and married one of them. Eventually. After 4 years of living together “in sin”, as my dad put it. Sheesh.
Gee, can ya imagine the FUN if all of the presidential candidates were hooked up to lie detectors during a debate and these kinds of questions were asked? Get a bigger audience and ratings…
Well I’m only 23 and I’ve hit the median number already without even trying all that hard. I look forward to receiving my official sluthood in a few years.
Hard drugs cost considerably more than “soft” drugs. “Non-Hispanic Whites” have the money to afford drugs like cocaine and the other really highly addictive and rewarding “good stuff.â€? Really, it wasn’t until Reagan’s war on drugs that the street price of cocaine jumped astronomically, which coincided with more and more white people buying said cocaine, if only because of the fact that non-whites could no longer afford it. Of course, this also pushed your dealer’s into developing a cheaper drug that the average person could consume; enter crack cocaine, thanks Reagan. I think in general you could assume that those with money will do the drug’s that they assume to be a bit out of the price range of your average person, perhaps it makes them feel like it’s a better drug or they are “special”, an elitist mentality of sorts. As far as the criminal aspects of these drugs, I’ve never been able to figure out what came first: 1) Either it was that non-whites used the drugs first and no-one cared, then when wealthy white people got a hold of them people started paying attention and the drug became criminalized, or 2) White people used them first, then when non-whites started using them people started paying attention, as this would inevitably lead to more crime in poor neighborhoods
. Thoughts? Perhaps I should wikipedia it. Wikipedia: believe it, because “experts� write it.
The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four.
Well, given that the means must be equal (for each woman sleeping with a man, there is a man sleeping with a woman and v.v.) this means that one side, if not both is heavily skewed.
So either there are a substancial number of men (but less than half) having practically no sexual partners at all, or a similar number of women having massively more sexual partners.
Or someone is lying.
Also, I’m 21 and an order of magnitude beyond 4 sexual partners, even if you only count the men….
Man, I hate surveys about the number of sexual partners. It seems that all they do is make people either feel like sluts, or like unfuckable goobs.
I mean I’ve only slept with four women, and the one I’m with now is likely to be the last one. There are times when I wish I would have waited for her (especially since I’m her first), and then there are times like now when some part of me is ashamed that I only slept with four. In a perfect world it wouldn’t freakin matter (and the survey isn’t saying it does, its just society and culture) how many people I’ve been with, and I should feel no shame either way.
But its not a perfect world and somehow I feel ashamed at having slept with too many women, and at the same time too few. How fucked is that?
That’s fifteen per year, right? Oh, wait, it says female partners. I’M A VIRGIN!!!!
Hmmm, does v1rg1n set off the mod bot?
The only journal article I’ve ever seen with incontrovertible data on the drug-use side (of a very small, not really representative sample: pregnant women in florida going for prenatal care) is quite old now, but had essentially equal proportions of drug use among white, black and hispanic patients. (The data came from urine samples gathered for other purposes and anonymized before testing.) But medical personnel were required to report suspected drug use by pregnant women, and they reported blacks and hispanics at 5-10x the rate they reported whites. So duh.
I went to a high school that was small, middle class, half black and half white. The white kids I knew were WAY (WAY, WAY, WAY) more likely to drink alcohol and do drugs. But the only kids I knew who got in trouble for drugs were black.
Question(and I may be the idiot)
Doesn’t it make sense that whites would use more drugs because whites are a larger part of the population? If blacks are something like 12-15% and Hispanics are 8-10%, wouldn’t that simply make sense? (my %’s may be wrong, please correct if you know) Couldn’t I also say something like whites buy more T shirts than…..whoever?
Wouldn’t it have been more revealing and accurate to find use per percentage of a population? If were assigning societal issues to drug use, does this survey by the CDC get us to a conclusion? I’m asking.
And I can joke about my drug use at my blog daily, in between flipping the bird at the RIAA with my blatantly illegal music offerings on Fridays and tales of illegal income, and still no one comes after me. If you’re white, articulate and have no seizable funds, no one cares about you. All these things are about either keeping people in a ditch, or taking their roof away from them so they end up living in a ditch.
I had hope for this country when I was young. Now I just think America is a horrible place where truth goes to die. Meanwhile, ain’t it great to be white in America today?!
I wrote extensively about this very study on my blog the other day (link here). Coming from a statistics background, there are a variety of explanations for the discrepancies between the medians for men and women. Personally, I think it’s mostly misreporting. But there’s also the explanation that it’s a median, not a mean, so that the Samantha Jones’s of the world could be skewing things. Interesting stuff.
Dan, they did use percentages of the races. 23% of whites, 18% of blacks, etc. admit to drug use. Not that whites are 23% of drug users. It would be much higher than that.
Chewbacca,
Not sure where you’re getting your observations from. I’m pretty much out of the game when it comes to recreation of that sort, but cocaine is much, much cheaper — in numeral amount, let alone “real dollars” — than it was in the 80s; the streets are flooded with the stuff, and it’s astonishingly pure. (I said “pretty much.”)
That’s what the War on Drugs got us. It was my observation that the decrease in price and increase in purity began with the War on Drugs.
The reason minorities get busted more is largely economic, rather than strictly racial, although clearly there’s at least some racial component at play. But middle-class people of any race can afford to be more discreet than poor people. And if they do get busted, they can afford better legal representation.
Are white people — the educated class in general, really — hypocritical, experimenting wildly with drugs but then tsk-tsking over drug use in the ghetto? You bet they are.
Mean != median. They can be very different. And I don’t think the mean was reported in this study.
I wonder how old the interviewees were? And how do they define “sexual partner”? If the survey doesn’t define it, you’ve got a wide range of possible “true” answers for most people. I’ve heard some women don’t count one-night stands, only sex within relationships. I’ve had oral sex and done other sexual activities with way more people, men and women, than I’ve had PIV sex with (Eight, ftr. I think. No, wait, nine, I forgot one. At least.)
Ahh, I obviously wasn’t reading it correctly.
I think I’ve read somewhere that the disparity in the median numer of sex partners goes away if sex workers are counted in the surveys–I think it’s difficult, for many reasons, to get sex workers to talk to governmental types about this stuff. Basically I guess the idea is: a large population of men are occasionally sleeping with sex workers in addition to other partners, while a very small percentage of women (the sex workers) are sleeping with much larger numbers of men. So the median may not be the same but the average could be. While there are male sex workers, I think most of them serve a predominantly male clientele.
sorry in the first sentence i meant to say mean rather than median.
Criminalization of drugs stemmed from a desire to persecute a minority. Drugs were not a big deal until the slaves were freed and the Mexicans started crossing the border in large numbers. William Randolph Hearst had a big bee up his ass over hemp, and his editorial pages started stories on the horrors of marijuana, which went well with the White Man’s desire to do something about the brown horde.
i’d like to see the sex survey results broken down by age range more. I’m interested whether and how much the medians change for various generational cohorts ….
[…] Jun 27th, 2007 by elyzabethe CDC sex survey results released last week, but I just noticed today. As one commenter at Pandagon pointed out, “it seems that all (these surveys) do is make people either feel like sluts, or like unfuckable goobs.” The median number of lifetime (hetero)sexual partners was seven for men and four for women. As is always the case with these sorts of things, there’s a flurry of commentary over whether the discrepency in the male/female numbers is accurate or more based on desirability bias (men more likely to up their reported number, women more likely to decrease it). On a personally anecdotal note, I generally know of little difference in number of sexual partners between my male and female friends. But I don’t find the 3-partner median difference too incredible either. Amanda Marcotte points out a survey that found the number of admitted partners went up for women and down for men when respondents thought they were strapped to a lie detector test. I’d be interested to see results based on age cohorts. The CDC study lumps together everyone 20-59 years old. […]
Especially if the people they target tend to buy and use narcotics in public…
It’s OK if whites do it, or rather if white men do it, or rather, if white, male, Republicans do it.
That’s your government on the drug war.
Any questions?
I wonder if part of the disparity between men’s and women’s medians can be accounted for by the probable fact that some men may count women they have raped (whether they themselves consider it to have been rape or not) as sexual partners while the raped women almost certainly don’t consider their rapists sexual partners.
I also wonder if this is going to quantify the slut vs. prude continuum, as it becomes more generally known. Will four become the new standard number of partners for women–that is, three before marriage–and any more than that makes you a slut, and any less, a prude? Or will it continue as it appears to be currently defined, where “any man but me” makes you a slut and “no man including me” makes you a prude (or a lesbian)?
I really wonder if people limited their answers to vaginal and anal sex, though the survey said:
“Ever had sex—Ever had sex by means of vaginal, oral, or anal sex.”
The construction that only PVI and PAI “count” is, IMO, very commonly and strongly held (except by conservatives when necessary to the conclusion that a former Democratic President perjured himself). So, though they used the broad definition, I wonder if people really answer that way?
For some people the numbers are not different. For some of us, especially those that consciously limit PVI and PAI with casual partners, the difference is huge. For example, limited to PVI and PAI, my answers to “age of initiation” and “number of partners” are 17 and 7; using the broader definition, I answer 11 and I can’t recall.
I suspect that part of the reason for the racial imbalance in the drug statistics is that cops tend to ignore the better off social coke users who have a line every now and then at parties, to target crack users who operate more out in the open, whose habit is more serious and who tend to turn to crime more to feed it. Crack of course being horribly ubiquitous in poor neighbourhoods, many of which are predominantly black. Which is of course a scandal in itself, but I have a feeling that the drug use/drug arrest disparity would be even more marked in an economic comparison.
Wow…according to the numbers Ms. Tart put up, only 4% of people over the age of 20 are virgins. I don’t know whether to be proud or sad.
Incidentally, i agree with Robert. I’m in essentially the same situation now, except the roles are reversed; she was my first, i was her fourthish, and probably last for both of us.
I was going to take aim at some possible underlying mathematical explanations for the imbalance between men and women when it comes to number of partners, but Ms. Tart, as promised, did it better at her own blog.
One thing to add, though: nobody seems to have considered whether group sex might skew the results. Under the terms of the CDC study, if a man has sex with two women at the same time, the man’s number of opposite-sex partners would increase by two, while the women’s number of opposite-sex partners would increase by only one each.
(I’m pretty sure this is only a theoretical consideration, but any contribution I make to any discussion of sexual issues is theoretical by definition. Bear with me.)
And yet, all the guys I’ve heard complain about this ignore sex workers and explain away their lack of sexual fulfillment, and their perception that “women can get laid whenever they want”, by positing that a very small percentage of men are sleeping with (hoarding?) much larger numbers of women.
Personally, I’d be really curious to see two things: (1) how close the mean values are to each other (if everyone were 100% honest, they should be the same); and (2) how the values are distributed - does it approximate a normal distribution, or is the perception that we’re divided into sexual haves and have-nots (”sluts and goobs”) more accurate?
The perception that blacks and Latinos use more drugs than whites comes from crime reporting, and crime reporting is about who the police arrest, not who uses drugs. The police target blacks and Latinos more than they do whites, so there will be more operations aimed at blacks and Latinos, more arrests of blacks and Latinos, and more reports of blacks and Latinos using drugs.
White people use plenty of drugs, but the cops aren’t watching, so neither are crime beat reporters.
cminus: but there would be two women who had +1 to partners, so it evens out.
D, it evens out for purposes of the mean, not the median. Take a population of three men and three women, none of whom have had any sex. Two women and one man have a threesome that satisfies the definitional criteria for sex between each woman and the man. The male population now has a mean of .66 partners — two total partners, three guys. The women similarly have two partners for three women for a mean of .66. But the guys’ median is closer to 0 than one — two of these guys have no partners, one has more. The women’s is closet to 1 than 0 — most of these women have had a sexual partner.
Yes, but it doesn’t make a difference whether that man slept with two women in one go or on seperate occations. Which is what I took cminus to be considering.
Well, that is of course true: group sex has no different effect on the count from the same pairings seriatim. I misunderstood your comment.
It has been 101 days since my 23d birthday, and I’m still a virgin.
BTW, watch out, MA Jeff God of Biscuits- you (ie virgins) are the ones that get sacrificed and thrown in volcanos!! Or is that just in movies??
Oops… by that definition Thomas, I can add 2 more. Hey, I hit 15- wasn’t that the “skank” level? Where’s my bumper sticker?
louise, that’s their def. The one I support is this:
“a reasonable attempt by one participant, through physical contact, to produce orgasm in another”
By that def, I still don’t remember the number, and I didn’t start any earlier, but I can add a man to the list.
Lord.
By that list, I’m just a massive sex-fiend.
And here I feel as though I’ve just been sort of normal.
Lessee….
24 years of sexual activitiy.
An average of about 2 partners per annum (including non-penetrative sex), and we have a number in the low forties.
So I guess I’ve had more than my share.
It’s that averege per annum which strikes me as more interesting. That seems to be a reasonable number, not terribly promiscous (though there were some periods of wild abandon).
And looking at that aspect, I find those numbers to be really low, for both sexes.
It’s actually fairly easy to anonymize surveys. One technique–the name of this escapes me–involves asking a candidate to simply flip a coin or roll a die before they answer, and if the result is heads or a six or whatever then just answer “yes.” It encourages honesty because, if I recall correctly, for individual responses you cannot tell if someone is lying or not. But you “know” about how much randomness there is in the entire sample.
IANA statistician, so don’t quote me.
Terry, my husband is also in the 40+ range- gee, maybe THAT’S why we’ve been together monogamously for 17 years!! haha! Something to be said for practice…
And since I also think ‘trying to produce orgasm is completely reasonable’, I agree that those numbers seem remarkably low…oh, did I misread that?
Oops.
And, since everyone else is doing it…I’m 30 and have had sex with ten women. Three of these did not involve “intercourse.” Five were essentially one-night stands. I also apparently have a preference for long redheads who drink gin.
Surprised nobody has brought up the disparity between crack and cocaine sentencing, something which IIRC is being reviewed currently.
Yeah, I failed to work the math all the way through. Once I saw that it generated an apparently imbalanced result, I neglected to check whether it duplicated another possibility already considered. Dumb mistake.
(This may go some distance toward explaining why my number of sexual partners has already reached a whopping zero, a mere 5,122 days since my 23rd birthday. What can I say? Stupid, boring and ugly. I’ve got it all.)
48 years old, 6 women I’ve been involved with, happily married for 13 years.
When I was 24 I had a girlfriend 9 years older than me, which was a bit unusual back then but is more acceptable these days.
Jovan, I could’ve said the same thing at that point in my life, and I still turned out all right :>).
I initially didn’t give a lot of credence to the prostitution theory, but it would explain the mean/median disparity very easily if true. Does anyone have any statistics on how many sex workers the average man patronizes in his lifetime?
I really do wish they had published a mean in addition to the median. If there was a big difference in the mean, we would know that misreporting was the culprit. Either that, or my last (and least plausible) theory, that American men are having sex with a lot of foreigners.
P.S. Thanks to cminus and randomliberal et. al. for meandering over to my post.
To all, please feel free to leave comments or critique my analysis. I know there are other feminist statistics geeks out there.
I’m reading all the comments. Wow, I really am a slut. My inititial 15/yr joke was closer to the mark for this year than I thought it would be–yet according to the survey I am still a virgin.
Ms. Tart. I’ll be along presently.
More on the reasons I find these numbers funny; though it’s anecdote, and not data.
I was pretty clueless about who was/wasn’t interested in me. So I wasn’t very good at “seducing” women. Being sort of shy, I wasn’t good at letting the ones I was interested in know I was interested.
So most of my partners were older than I was, by 4-10 years. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that this changed.
So my experience is that women are just as interested/active as I am/was (in those 24 years I’ve been “off the market” by virtue of relationships for about half… well sort of, there were relationships where options were open, but I didn’t exercise them much, lets call it 1/3rd).
Thats the other reason I usually distrust such surveys. It’s wrong to do it, but it just doesn’t match the people I know (not taking into account my, occaisionally non-normative relational structures).
Oh dear, Ms Tart just reminded me of another fun night- make it SIXTEEN. (and BTW, sometimes COUPLES visit sex workers!)
I am SO gonna burn in Hell.
Louise: When I got back from Iraq, we were watching an HBO program, and pondered it. We weren’t sure the “soldiers get comped” offer would cover two.
Because all of these so-called sins involved pleasuring and being pleasured, they are not sins but sanctified acts. Sing Hallelujah!
Louise: When I got back from Iraq, we were watching an HBO program, and pondered it. We weren’t sure the “soldiers get comped” offer would cover two.
But, for purposes of the survey, you wouldn’t be adding another partner, since it was hetero-normed.
About 96 percent of U.S. adults have had sex.
I wonder what the other 4 percent consist of, besides self-proclaimed Christian virgins.
Re: 4%- Amnesiacs on soaps, maybe?
PHOOEY. Back to fifteen… but I’m keeping the sticker! (and does screaming “Oh GOD!” during count close enough to “Hallejulah”?)
I saw the same HBO show, I think- it was fun and friendly for us. And to misquote Heinlein, if it’s not, stick to mechanical toys- it’s more sanitary.
Amanda: re the survey about the way the numbers change when you think lying can be detected by a lie detector…
If men are reporting “conquests” and women “submissions” or perhaps , in their minds, “episodes of weakness”, then the numbers would change in the reported way..men would be less inclined to brag and women less inclined to cover up their perceived misdeeds.
[I don’t particularly buy any of that but if I had to explain those numbers…]
Fuck, yeah!
Actually, part of the other 4% could be people who are asexual. They’re not having sex not because they can’t get any or because they are afraid of being sent straight to hell, but because they honestly have no interest in it. I’m sure that there aren’t many of them, and I haven’t heard it being discussed, but I would imagine that they feel just as much pressure to conform as anyone else. So although they might say they would, they probably wouldn’t hit that.
[…] No, this post is really in response to a post at Pandagon by, you guessed it, Amanda Marcotte. […]
I don’t think the people being snide about the 4% virgins noticed that some of the commenters here mentioned being virgins? (aside from MAJeff, who is being snarky about the heteronormativity of the test).
Shy != boring and unattractive, for those of you in the %4.
Hell, I am so painfully shy that the thought of introducing myself to someone at a bar can bring me close to a panic attack. Yet, I’m cleary on one (probably relatively) extreme end of the 96%.
This is one of those areas where polling data on sexuality hasn’t kept up with theoretical knowledge, or even human practice. I love being a sexuality scholar. So much fun.
The survey is of people between the ages of 20 and 60. So my guess for the 4% of that group that has not had sex is some combination of:
1) Extremely devout unmarrieds (probably all in the 20-30 age range).
2) Young people (also in the 20-30 range) who just haven’t had sex yet, for whatever reason.
3) Older people (30+) who just haven’t had sex yet, for whatever reason. Not many in this group, but some. Nothing wrong with it.
4) Asexuals
But seriously, since the survey includes people in their early 20s, it includes those who are just late bloomers. I know folks who lost their virginity at 21, 24, 25, etc. The survey itself shows that people who attend college lose their virginity at a later age than people who don’t. Some portion of the Bell Curve O’ Deflowering lies beyond that 20-year age mark.
Mean != median. They can be very different. And I don’t think the mean was reported in this study.
No shit! Which is why I said the means must be equal (pigeonhole principal) , while the medians are different (reported data) -> skewed distributions.
MAJeff, speaking of Hallelujah, did you know the leather community history trivia that a Hallelujah remix was popular during marathon fisting sessions at the Catacombs?
(My source is one of the chapters in Thompson’s Leatherfolk)
“ard drugs cost considerably more than “softâ€? drugs. “Non-Hispanic Whitesâ€? have the money to afford drugs like cocaine and the other really highly addictive and rewarding “good stuff.â€?”
Well in the Upper Midwest here, meth is an overwhelmingly white, rural and cheap drug.
That I didn’t know. I just remember getting all sweaty to Dr. Alban on the dance floors in Des Moines.
Can’t say anything for convictions, but after some digging about, I see that the FBI site has some info on arrests.— Arrests by Race, 2004 (total): http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/persons_arrested/table_38-43.html#table43a
—- Arrests by Race, 2004 (under 18): http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/persons_arrested/table_38-43.html#table43b
—- Arrests by Race, 2004 (18 and over): http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/persons_arrested/table_38-43.html#table43c
To compare to the population, you can check the 2000 census’s General Demographic Characteristics. It’s the first hyperlink on the page there–I’d try to direct link, but it’s one of those funny URLs and I’m not sure it’d work. D:
The FBI site has a page or two on how it got its numbers, it’d seem, over at http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/appendices/appendix_01.html .
Speaking of meth, am I the only one who is amused by law enforcement’s response?
In some ways, meth is like crack. Cheap, quick high, intense craving/withdraw often resulting in addicts taking extreme (often illegal) measures to secure their next hit. And yet, crack is demonized while meth addicts get invited to Oprah, and laws are passed forcing me to jump through hoops just to get my cold med.
Non-whites are handled much differently in the criminal justice process than are whites. The prosecutors are far more likely to charge non-whites with felony forms of drug possession than they are whites. This accounts for the differences in incarceration rates.
Kepler, crack vs. meth is also a issue of racial perception. Crack is black (at least in the eyes of the cops and prosecutors), and meth is what ruarl whites use. If you’re black and caught with crack, you’re viewed as a menace to society and prosecuted. If you’re caught with meth, you’re often seen as a poor guy who shouldn’t have his life ruined and the prosecutors lower the nature of the crime they charge you with or ask for leniency.
Sorry for the somewhat rambling tone of the post, I’m writing in a hurry.