Well, I’ve been in transit all day but am now back in Austin. But I’m not going to let that stop me from noting the story that bemused feminist and liberal bloggers all over are linking—a mathematician pointed out the obvious, which is that the mechanics of straight sex make it unlikely-to-impossible that women average four sex partners and men average seven. Occam’s Razor sez someone’s lying.
Holly, guest-blogging at Feministe, found a link of mine that I was going to link to when I had the chance, where I noted my skepticism of the straight-men-have-more-sex numbers, citing a study where researchers found that if you tell the subjects that they’re strapped to a lie detector, men’s numbers go down a little, but women’s go way up. So, those interpreting this as “big fish” stories that men tell are a bit off—the sadder truth is not that men brag a lot, but women conceal their lives and histories because there’s so much shaming of women for having normal, healthy sexual appetites. I’m a big advocate of the theory that you can beat feeling like a slut by being a slut (which is to say not apologizing for having sex or sexual desire, and isn’t strictly a numbers game—the Slut Philosophy can be utilized by even those who’ve only had one sex partner or even none), and even I would probably choke on the truth if someone from the CDC called and asked me how many. “Hi, I’m from the government. So how big a slut are you?” Yeah. I’m not surprised that men don’t actually beef up their numbers too much; it’s not like you’re overly interested in impressing researchers in these situations. Avoiding shame seems to be the primary motivation.
Full brain power tomorrow most likely.
68 Responses to “Just tell the CDC what a big slut you are”
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I love the questions that you get asked about sex when you go in for an STD or HIV test. They are all about surveillance. Not a one about diagnosis.
I’m glad they only ask quarterly numbers, because there’s no way I could calculate lifetime.
Yup. I was a little suspicious of the Fisher and Alexander “lie detector” study back then, sure, for some reason, that it had to be men who were lying since… ok, I believed the dominant paradigm about women’s sexuality. Now? Makes total sense that women feel more under the gun to suppress their “number.” And based on the near-hysterical, complete-denial reaction from men around the blogsphere (”that reporter dame and *every other person she talked to* can’t tell median from mean… including the professor emeritus!) gives a big clue what that pressure on women looks like.
figleaf
No, you don’t understand. Those guys all have sex with the same four sluts!! That’s how it can work.
there’s so much shaming of women for having normal, healthy sexual appetites.
I could never figure that out. If it wasn’t for women with normal, healthy sexual appetites, I would never have gotten laid.
And that would have been a VERY bad thing.
I could never figure that out. If it wasn’t for women with normal, healthy sexual appetites, I would never have gotten laid.
There are people who care more that other people don’t get laid than that they get laid. We live in a sick, unhappy society.
No, you don’t understand. Those guys all have sex with the same four sluts!! That’s how it can work.
Supersluts are messing up the averages!
WooHoo!
Finally I Am Famous For Something!
On a more serious note:
Isn’t it possible that not all this sex is, er, hetero? Or at least that you can’t simply compare raw numbers of sexual partners between men and women, because some people aren’t as straight as they like to act like they are?
Because if you asked me how many partners I’d had, you’d get a very different response than you would if you’d asked me how many male partners I’d had.
and for the trifecta:
MAJeff, while I guess I’ll never know what it is to be a gay man getting an HIV test, I can tell you there are gynecologists I’ve stopped seeing because they’ve asked personal questions that I knew had nothing to do with discerning things about my sexual/reproductive health.
Ho, I like the health clinics that split me and mr. delagar up, asked us questions about our sexual history, and then ignored every damn thing we said — because, well, you know, even if I was telling the truth, ain’t no way he was telling me the truth: and v.v.
So (my question) why bother to ask us anything?
I think the original numbers are for heteros.
It was funny. The last time I had it done, went through the list of questions, and all my shit put me in a pretty low risk category, so the guy was like, “Why did you come in to get tested again?” I was just like, “I thought it was time. It’s been a while.”
And I go to a gay health clinic.
The surveillance shit is something you get used to. It’s about epidemiology and tracking and shit. Or, maybe I’ve just gotten used to having my sex life colonized by epidemiology and the state.
Oh, I’m sure they’re “for heteros”, but I guess my question is about how they phrased things.
Because there are a lot of “heteros” who have “experiemented”.
Of course, maybe such folks aren’t inclined to include those in their official number.
Well, there’s the fact that men and women often have different definitions for sex, esp. here in the Bible Belt. I wish I had a dollar for every woman who said “Well, sure, I’ll do handjobs, and blowjobs, and anal, but that’s not REAL sex, because my folks would kill me if I couldn’t wear white to my wedding.”
Good point. Also, what’s the definition of having sex? Are they only counting PIV intercourse? Does oral count? Anal? I count it.
Thanks! I’d count it, and so would most people (if we didn’t live in such a slut shaming-stud admiring society, that is.)
Plus, a lot of women in BB country don’t count anything, not even PIV intercourse, if they don’t get pleasure from it. (if you just do it “for him”, then you’re not a slut, just a good woman who’s good at pleasing your man.)
Of course, by that definition, a granny with ten kids can die a virgin.
I pointed out over at Balloon Juice that depending on who they asked, they might have run into the “good girls don’t do sex unless they’re reelly, reelly in LUV with the guy so whatever I was doing last night after I got drunk in a bar and went off with that sinfully handsome dude doesn’t count” phenomenon.
(Unfortunately this attitude also seems to carry over to birth control. At the state school I did my graduate work at, there were a sizable number of sorority girls who would show up at the medical clinic for missed periods, discover themselves pregnant, and then (blink blink) swear up and down they hadn’t the FOGGIEST idea of how they jes’ happened to get a bun in the oven, no sirree….I’m a Good Girl, I am. It drove the medical clinic nuts.)
I love the questions that you get asked about sex when you go in for an STD or HIV test. They are all about surveillance. Not a one about diagnosis.
I’ve had a couple of good GPs and NPs that actually do ask about sexual partners and practices despite my marital status. I’m not offended by this because I know that there are valid health reasons to inquire.
I have to wonder about the clinicians who simply assume that married=monogamous and shelve the STD discussions. I’m holding up my end of my monogamous marriage agreement, but there are plenty of people who aren’t and they are the ones who do need to talk to their doctors about the risks.
I think Amanda is essentially correct. We went over similar studies a decade ago when I took intro stats and the conclusion you draw from careful analysis is that a few very promiscuous women are lying about their numbers.
That is to say, yes, men exaggerate the truth a bit, but not a whole lot; the ones who have a lot of sex partners are basically having that sex with the same women (or, the pool of really slutty women is larger than the pool of prudish men).
So, a lot of women are fibbing. I don’t think it follows that all women are fibbing. This is more a bone of contention between me and any amateur statisticians out there than with anything Amanda said.
I would be really interested in a study of what sets the “slutty” women apart from the prudes…upbringing, education, what?
Or, maybe I’ve just gotten used to having my sex life colonized by epidemiology and the state.
SO you’d rather be subjected to faith-based HIV health policy? I don’t think the Bushco Fundies would disagree with that! They’ve been trying to get rid of good data in policymaking since day 0.
If we don’t got some data, we don’t got shit to make evidence-based decisions about treatment and testing and all of that good stuff. Better to ask a few nosy questions that will provide some information to care givers and otherwise be fully stripped of individual identifiers than to ask no questions and tell lots of lies.
If you have a problem with what is being asked, ask to see the clinic’s HIPAA stuff. You do have a right to know where that information is going and how it is being used. Lots of people might think, for interest, that asking about occupation has nothing to do with their healthcare - and they could be dead wrong.
Petey, the point is that even if it was a few Ms. Goodbars not owning up to their behavior, it still wouldn’t add up. The t-test for difference in means of the two distributions is highly significant.
The more likely situation is that men have had one fewer partner and women have had one more.
I also wonder about the bicurious situation, too, but I’d wager that would affect the female as well as the male numbers.
Did you hear me complaining? I do research, ya know. It’s possible to have both going on, after all, the state and public health professionals are trying to figure out ways to regulate behavior. Hear me complaining? (well, sometimes.) I agree, but let’s not pretend what’s going on isn’t going on.
Except it’s not. From the article, anyway, the difference is that the statistically significant results cannot “logically” occur.
From tfa:
Consider that G and B are the sums of the dances had by girls and boys. Obviously if you total up the number of dances “had,” then the total had by ALL girls equals the total had by ALL boys. But it does not follow that girl/boy populations will have the same distribution; if one very popular boy dances with all the girls while the rest hold down the punch table, then (assuming equal numbers of boys and girls) the two groups will be significantly different.
Remember that the t-test is based on central tendency, dispersion, and sample size, not just the arithmetic mean,
Were I to attempt to interpret the results, I would guess that most women are “prudes” but that a small minority are “slutty,” which is I think basically what Amanda said.
Or, in other words, Amanda is right, but NYT got their critique of the studies wrong.
Don’t know if my comments are working here, but if they are, there’s a reason one should always pay at least a cursory visit to Crooked Timber on a daily basis. There is a difference between median and mean.
So, the hacks in Atlanta wanna know how much of a slut or ho women are? It is ridiculous at how obsessed Bush and Company are with our sex lives.
If they ask me how many sex partners I had, I will be one of few men that are honest. Ain’t no point in lying.
figleaf (or someone),
Is there something wrong with pointing out that they used median a few times in the article? I don’t think it invalidates the point of the article, but it seems a pretty egregious mistake considering that the person is talking about the statistical probabilities here.
Sujal
About the whole median/mean thing, the math professor quoted in the article wrote in to Salon to clear up the confusion. He is pointing out that no matter how you slice it — median, mean, etc. — the original data appears to be flawed and people are not giving accurate numbers. Men are too high or women are too low or both.
What about 25th and 75th percentiles?
Those have become a favorite for SAT scores in college admissions, since a small D1 college can make exceptions for athletes, legacies, etc. without bringing those numbers down much at all, whereas they would bring down the mean at least a few points in many cases.
Objection, your Honor, she’s assuming facts not in evidence.
I mean, really. One can complain about something while still acknowledging it’s necessity. If someone intimates that having your legs amputated is perhaps not an optimal situation to be in, do you accuse them of being objectively pro-gangrene?
In this case they may also go a ways towards explaining the “crowded at the high numbers” theories that have been discussed here re: sexuality.
In other cases with colleges, they report SAT averages according to point splits; i.e. % students having 400-500 on a given section, 500-600, 600-700, >700. I suppose a statistical arrangement like that would work here.
Along with not counting instances where they just had a random hookup they’d rather not admit to, isn’t it quite possible that some women don’t count instances of rape but men do?
The woman didn’t choose to do it, so it doesn’t count for her.
If they are taking the question in a “how slutty/studly are you” way it does make some kind of sense.
Um…not so much. Since you’re counting instances of dancing and not numbers of partners, the groups will always have the same average because every dance (in this model) includes one boy and one girl. Each dance adds on point to each side, no matter who was involved.
Since when is the fact that men lie about how much sex they’ve had news?
If such statisticians really want to set cats in amongst pigeons then they should stop messing about with studies like “how many partners” and ask, rather, either side of married (het) couples how often they have sex.
Sophist (on average partner count): “Each dance adds on point to each side, no matter who was involved.”
Exactly.
Think of the count this way:
Take a picture of everyone at the dance. Draw a line from each woman to each of her partners. Count the lines. Divide by the number of women. This will give the average number of partners per woman.
Take another copy of the same picture. Do the same for the men, drawing lines and then dividing by the number of men.
Now realize that the lines are the same in both drawings. So if there are the same number of men as women, the averages must be the same.
I had the same thought as JoAnne in comment 31 re: rape being considered sex by men but not women.
Maybe the women in these studies are actually referring to quality, not quantity.
Joanne,
Yes, the mean must be the same if there are no liars, but the data being crowded towards one end can affect the median and spread.
To go back to the example I was using earlier about college admissions, say School A and B both admit 500 students in a freshman class. But School A has a division I football team which makes academic exceptions for 100 scholarship athletes, who all have SAT scores of 1000, while school B has no major academic exceptions for anything.
School A’s remaining 400 students all have SAT scores of 1350, while School B’s entire 500-student body has an SAT score of 1300.
Which school can submit the higher mean SAT score in Princeton Review?
Which school can submit the higher median SAT score to Princeton Review? Careful…
We can have exactly the same situation here whenever there may be any outliers.
Sophist, JoAnn, bzzt. You are both wrong.
Please take a look at the Student’s T-Test. The two sample distributions are not judged solely on whether or not the means or the same, but on how much variation there is within each sample. This is true of the majority of inferential stats you are ever likely to encounter.
Any way you look at it, the sum and mean for “Girls” and “Boys” will be the same, but the sample variance will differ. So it is unlikely that they are drawn from the same population.
In layman’s terms, it would mean “Boys and girls behave differently.” In statistician-speak, it means “The observed difference is probably not due to random chance and can be generalized to the population at large.”
Clear as mud? This stuff is not intuitive, I’m not knocking you for not knowing it, but your assessment is in error.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve always lived on the coasts, but both numbers seem incredibly low. Is it just me? I mean, I had a summer vacation where I slept with more than seven women (and it’s not like I’m some big stud. I’m just a normal guy) and I would probably think that any woman who had only four sex partners is kind of odd. I don’t think I know any women who’ve slept with so few people.
so the studies both say that the MEDIAN was 4 and 7. median != mean.
in the above popular boy scenario, the median would be 0 dances, but the average would be above that.
Petey, I think you’re the one missing the point. I don’t think anyone is arguing that men and women may not behave differently, just that studies that focus on the average number of partners to draw conclusions are flawed.
More to the point, if you read the Salon update that Holly (#27) linked to, you’d see that the mathematician found other issues with the raw CDC data rendering further analysis like you’re proposing rather pointless.
Sujal
I was going to answer some of the questions but got way too confused, and this isn’t the first time. So I’d like to propose a new definition of “have sex” just to clear all the trouble up — and it’s nice and gender- and person-independent too, so it shouldn’t foul shit up too much. Just this:
having sex = engaging in activities involving at least two people, where at least one person comes to orgasm with the knowing and willing help of another.
What do you-all think?
“…the conclusion you draw from careful analysis is that a few very promiscuous women are lying about their numbers.”
It has to be this way because what? Most women are “good girls” and good girls don’t put out? Or what?
I know the plural of personal anecdote isn’t data and all that, and so I can only speak of my experiences in rural and urban east Tennessee, the urban Brookline/Cambridge/Somerville/Arlington and light urban Connecticut Valley areas in New England, the mid-to-south Jersey suburban and seaside areas, the south Puget Sound and Seattle areas of Washington State… and urban homeless, hippie wastrel, fast food industry, dot-com-boom high tech industry, minor-touring-musicians, and art-roach arts communities… as experienced in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and now with the 20 ought-naughts… but through all that it’s seemed like nearly all men and nearly all women (heterosexual or otherwise) spend a significant part of their middle teens through late twenties falling into and out of relationships that last between half and two-and-a-half years in which sex (however you choose to define it) is part of the relationship. (Note: some of those mid-term relationships being “failed” marriages.)
And so, again agreeing that the plural of anecdote is not data, I just don’t see how hard, or even controversial, it would be for most Americans male or female to wind up with statistically similar numbers of partners. *Without* the help of promiscuous-but-invisible outlying women. (Who I think would have to somehow avoid being offset by equal numbers of equally promiscuous men to be statistically significant anyway?)
I dunno. Maybe we really can blame a “very small” hand full of very, *very* busy women out there for throwing off the numbers (why not, we try to blame women for everything else) but, again, i think the perfectly obvious answer is probably the answer here.
figleaf
Oops. I seem to have visually elided the word “distribution” when reading your post, which was kind of an important part of understanding your point, and which lead me to think you were putting forth an idea you were actually arguing against. My bad.
Also:
This is, in fact, exactly what she is not saying.
Nup. If I only counted the number of of people with whom I had enjoyed orgasm, it would add up to a grand total of one.
And no matter how many times my partner arranged the syntax of that statement, the number would still be zero.
I think most people would agree that sex does not necessarily have to include the big O. There are so many damn quirks out there, so many difficulties and disabilities, and even types of orgasm, that some group is always going to be an exception to such a subjective statement.
If you have to generalise at all, how about replacing the orgasm bit with just enjoyment including genitals?
Then again, there’s cybersex. Yeah, I give up.
Petey Wheatstraw:
Sophist, JoAnn, bzzt. You are both wrong.
Please take a look at the Student’s T-Test. The two sample distributions are not judged solely on whether or not the means or the same, but on how much variation there is within each sample. This is true of the majority of inferential stats you are ever likely to encounter.
Any way you look at it, the sum and mean for “Girls” and “Boys” will be the same, but the sample variance will differ. So it is unlikely that they are drawn from the same population.
In layman’s terms, it would mean “Boys and girls behave differently.” In statistician-speak, it means “The observed difference is probably not due to random chance and can be generalized to the population at large.”
Clear as mud? This stuff is not intuitive, I’m not knocking you for not knowing it, but your assessment is in error.
I took statistics, as well as probability, in a real graduate-level course. Tutored some of the young men in that class. Used it in Genetics and P-Chem as well.
So no, I’m not depending on feminine intuition or some layman’s idea of “average.”
The MEAN should be the same if the respondents are truthful and the sample is representative.
Read all the data carefully. Other studies compare the MEAN, not just the median or the mode.
You say, “Any way you look at it, the sum and mean for “Girls” and “Boys” will be the same, but the sample variance will differ.”
Unfortunately the studies show different means for the same or nearly same-sized populations of men and women.
Hence the respondents are not truthful, or the sample is not representative.
End of story.
But thanks for playing.
Plus, a lot of women in BB country don’t count anything, not even PIV intercourse, if they don’t get pleasure from it. (if you just do it “for him”, then you’re not a slut, just a good woman who’s good at pleasing your man.)
How odd of them to act as though their own sexual experience has anything to do with anything. Everybody knows that if the man gets hard, it’s sexual, and if he comes, it’s sex. That’s all the definition we need. What kind of prudish hypocrite thinks her arousal changes anything?
Or maybe what I should be asking is, since when are the only feminists, or the only women with self-respect, the ones who live in the Bible Belt?
The dance comparison amuses me. Because surely, my school wasn’t the only one where girls got sick of boys refusing to dance and formed their own all-girl dance circles?
Think of the count this way:
Take a picture of everyone at the dance. Draw a line from each woman to each of her partners. Count the lines. Divide by the number of women. This will give the average number of partners per woman.
Take another copy of the same picture. Do the same for the men, drawing lines and then dividing by the number of men.
Now realize that the lines are the same in both drawings. So if there are the same number of men as women, the averages must be the same.>>
You’re wrong because the averages aren’t calculated among everyone who could have danced, they are calculated among everyone who did actually dance (technically, it’s called a mean excluding 0).
Look at it this way.
There are 4 men and 4 women at the dance.
The 4 men each dance with 1 particular woman; the other 3 women do not dance.
There were 4 dances that took place.
The average man who danced danced with 1 woman.
The average woman who danced danced with 4 men.
It’s funny how defensive so many guys are on this—afraid that your anxious masculinity caused girlfriends to lie about number of partners? If you’re the sort that tends to say that men are born bigger sluts than women, guess what? Your girlfriends probably have lied to preserve your ego and keep you from getting angry at them for not living up to your double standard.
So, a lot of women are fibbing. I don’t think it follows that all women are fibbing.
Strawman. Never said all women are fibbing. Some of us would suck it up and tell the truth. Just not enough of us to pull up the numbers.
Your use of the word “promiscuous” offends me, Petey. I prefer the phrase “doesn’t buy into the double standard”. Sluts are good people. Women who view sex as a means to pleasure and themselves as sexual subjects are smart and to be looked up to, not shamed. Women who buy into the idea that their bodies belong to men and therefore their sexual choices need to be made strictly with the desires of some prudish, misogynist they want to marry later (for reasons that make no sense) need help, not being held up as the role model.
Along with not counting instances where they just had a random hookup they’d rather not admit to, isn’t it quite possible that some women don’t count instances of rape but men do?
For about 12% of women, that will only add one guy to The Number if they do add it, and for 88% it will make no difference. It’s not even close to enough to jack up the numbers.
I think talking to medical professionals who work with women is generally pretty instructive. The mind-blowing numbers of women who have medical problems because they are in denial about sexual experiences will knock you over with a feather. I had a doctor who worked in infertility and he said the most common cause he saw was untreated STDs, by far. Sometimes women would come in having had the STDs for years and ignoring the symptoms, in no small part because they’re trying to create the illusion to their husbands that there were no men before them.
First, the actual study. As has been pointed out, they report the median, not the mean, or average. The salon article is unfortunately not helpful because the math prof doesn’t have access to the actual raw data and instead simply pulls numbers out of his ass to draw his conclusion that the means are different as well. As the data is presented in the study, it is not possible to know the means at all. Also, it should be noted that the study defines sex as including vaginal, oral and anal.
From the actual data, there are three non-mutually exclusive explanations for the differences in median. First, people are being dishonest. Second, the sample of men and/or women are non-representative. Third, relatively, there are a small number of women with a large number of male sexual partners.
I don’t think much any conclusions can really be drawn from the study itself. In fact, that they do not report the means is somewhat a red flag to me and makes me think that the data is not very reliable.
The Kinsey institute is doing a survey on definitions of “having sex.” If you’re interested, it’s here. If the survey discussed above didn’t specifically define what they meant by that, there could be some radically different numbers. I mentioned the Kinsey survey to my SO and we found we disagreed on our definitions of “having sex.” That, in itself, could cause some of the statistical problems in the survey that’s the subject of this post.
So a woman gets saddled with “Slut” by having three extra partners in a lifetime? Staying at or under four makes her a Good Girl, but seven puts her solidly into Slut?
Thank God I am gay!
I can see some — uh — benefit, I guess — in not admitting to having huge hoardes of anonymous lovers at a series of grand orgies a la Messalina, but yoikes, three?
THREE?!?
If that is all it takes to kick you into the slut category, no wonder women lie about it, and it sure as hell says something about straight male insecurity about their own performance if they are that afraid that the woman they are with has something to judge them against.
Not that I think being a slut is a bad thing, though in my experience, gay men tend to be “pigs” rather than “sluts”, and in my circle at least, it’s a good thing.
Peter, the whole hetero dance that we’re all supposed to perform keeps the “score” down for both genders. I mean, seriously, the idea that less than half the population will hit double digits in their entire life is, outside of mating-ritual-madonna/whore-
no-sex-before-marriage-which-should-happen
-at-18-virginity-worship idiocy, simply astonishing. We live into, on average, the 70s, with 50 or so years of sexual activity, so that’s only two new partners each decade. Even assuming that the average respondent is in, say, mid-thirties to early forties, that seems ridiculously low if you consider it from a detached perspective.
Nick, I don’t see a problem with it. Serial monogamy is why the numbers are so low. The idea that people would have 2 partners a year over their lifetime doesn’t make sense in a society where most straight people marry at some point. So it’s not two partners each decade. If you have 10 over a lifetime, odds are that was 9 in one and then one for the rest of your life.
I’m not even remotely judgmental about this and think people should sleep around if they want to. But I also see that at this point in my life, I’d be happier being monogamous with a guy I’m in love with than having a lot of casual sex with guys that haven’t been, um, trained to please me. Been there, done that, moved on.
Well, that’s fair, Amanda, but even in a context of serial monogamy the numbers seem ridiculously small. Also, “one for the rest of your life” is not really the way that marriage generally works.
I’m not suggesting that I see a “problem” with the numbers being low, just that it’s a byproduct of things that are, in fact, problems. Without those factors, many people would be having much more fun, safe sex than they are currently.
I don’t know. What I have experienced in my limited view of the world, the numbers pretty much match what I have seen.
I mean in my OWN family, my Mom, has had 1 person. I have talked to my Grandmother, and grandfather and both said she only dated 1 guy. And well, she Married HIM.
1 guy. EVER. **boggle**
Same with the rest of my hardcore Mormon family. Now, I am not Mormon, I left the religion and it’s fanaticism. But seriously these guys are nuts when it comes to sex before marriage.
Could the number of Mormons (who are long family tied Mormons, meaning those who were born into the religion since Joseph Smith) be skewing any results? What about other religious sects where the woman is pretty much tied up and chaperoned before being transfered to her husband?
What was that stat for the low end of Bushco’s support? 30% that’s an awful lot of born ignorants who follow some religious cult. I myself, well let’s say I am in the double digits and leave it there. I enjoy sex way too much to give it up now.
lol
loosely twisted, are you seriously that naive?
They might also ask about rapes — been raped, committed a rape, does the person count that as “having sex”. Men will likely count not committing rape, and having stuck it in via rape as “having sex”. Women will do the opposite — say they were raped and that they do not count it as sex.
Bet that this would be a much larger factor than anyone supposes.
Also, “one for the rest of your life” is not really the way that marriage generally works.
True, but it still cuts down on your numbers a lot. Say you have 5 partners from age 20-25 and then you marry. Then you divorce 15 years later and date some more, racking up another 5 partners in 5 years. Then you get married again, tack on another 15 years and voila!—10 partners in 40 years. Serial monogamy is why the numbers are so low, even if you’re not much of a prude.
i’d be *really* curious to see how often married people are monogamous. from almost every couple i’ve known, at most one person is monogamous. rarely are both.
I wish I could find this, but I remember reading in some reputable journal that in a specifically double-blind anonymous survey where the participants were guaranteed secrecy and tracked their partners for several years, and specifically asking only about straight sex, the numbers *still* didn’t match: the men had had more partners than the women, total. (Though not 40-75% more; it was something like 5-10% more.)
Then someone thought to survey prostitutes, who were completely excluded from the previous surveys. At that point the numbers immediately added up. :-/
i’d be *really* curious to see how often married people are monogamous. from almost every couple i’ve known, at most one person is monogamous. rarely are both.
During any given year, or for a whole lifetime? I’d be surprised if most marriages include consistent adultery, even on the part of just one partner. The average married person is still going to have a lot fewer sexual partners than the average person who is dating over the same period of time, even if married people sometimes cheat.
for the rest of your married life.
using current day statistics, people get married at 25 and die around 75. in fifty years of marriage, i don’t believe for a moment that you only cheat once. you might have a series of one night stands with no corresponding “mistress” type of affair, but if a person were to cheat, i don’t think a person they would only do it one time. you get away with it once and the next time is easier, time after that is even more easy, etc.
i also think you’re flat wrong that there’s a difference between the expectation of monogamy in dating and the expectation in marriage. i’d wager that the number are similar, if not higher in marriage. if you cheat while you date someone, you’re going to cheat after you get married. and if you don’t cheat while dating then you’ll be married the first time you cheat.
My point isn’t that people “cheat” more often when dating than when married (maybe they do, but that’s beside the point); it’s that “dating,” by its very nature, includes a bunch of short term relationships (some of which haven’t yet reached the point where you’ve agreed to be exclusive), while marriage lasts longer (even if not always as long as you’d initially thought). So if you spend any significant period of your marriage at all trying to be monogamous, you have fewer sex partners. If you’re introverted and don’t like forcing yourself to go out and find new partners (which covers at least a significant fraction of married people), then you definitely have fewer partners, now that you don’t have to look for new ones just to have any sex life at all.
The same could also be true of people in long term live in relationships, but a lot of unmarried people are unmarried and no currently in a long term relationship, so the average number of sex partners for married people is still going to be lower than the average number for single people (some of whom aren’t in a position where “cheating” is even meaningful).