Belle Waring hails The New York Times' patient explanation that it's mathematically impossible for men and women to have different numbers of sex partners. Ezra Klein, too, lauds the story for debunking gender stereotypes whereby "Men are relatively promiscuous, women relatively chaste."
Here's the only problem. When I got my Patriarchal Master Narrative card, I was taught that while men are promiscuous, women come in two types -- virgins and whores. This is perfectly consistent with the basic math saying men and women have to have the same mean number of sex partners. The story just as to be that men have a higher median number of sex partners than do women, and it's a handful of sluts who are making up the difference. Is that accurate? Perhaps not. But these stereotypes are a bit more robust than a simple mathematical screw-up.
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Heads in the Sand
As someone who has spent considerable time pointing out the "same number of sex partners" factoid and feeling smug about it, I've noted that there's a few ways it could be wrong:
1. One gender could be more likely to have had sex partners who are now deceased, giving that gender a higher mean.
2. One gender might be more likely to be gay, meaning the means will come out different if we only count straight people in our denominator.
3. The equality certainly does not hold within a given sample population (like, say, the U.S.), since one gender might be more likely to have partners outside that group. For example, my guess is that women have a higher average than men in Thailand, where the sex tourism industry is huge, and men have a higher average in Japan, because many businessmen go on foreign sex tour on the company tab.
Posted by Mr. Noah | August 13, 2007 4:35 PM