“They’ve just done another one of those surveys in which men and women are asked how many sexual partners they’ve had. The women, all twentysomethings, confessed to having succumbed to an average — or more properly, mode — of seven lovers. Men admitted, on average, to achieving somewhere around 30 female conquests… Of course, if random samples of men in Britain reveal that they’ve had an average of 30 lovers and similar samples of women allege they’ve had only seven, we’re left with something of a conundrum, statistically speaking. How can this be, assuming the samples are truly representative?” — Guardian Unlimited (UK)

The author lists four possible reasons to explain the statistical conundrum that men typically claim to have had thirty lovers, whereas women claim only seven. The first is statistical anomaly: if nine men say they’ve had seven lovers and a tenth claims 439, the average (or mode) will be skewed. The second is fudging: men inflate their numbers by including orgasm-less gropes, and women deflate theirs by excluding the same. The third is peer pressure: both men and women give not true answers but rather the answers expected of them. The fourth is a combination of all of the above.

Implicit in all these explanations, however, is the presumption that men and women ought to have an equal number of partners — in other words, that the entire world is happily heterosexual and therefore the number of partners ought to balance. But did the survey ask men how many women they’ve had? No, it asked how many sexual partners. Once you note the difference, it’s very easy to account for the discrepancy in numbers. If men have had more than four times more sexual partners than women, it’s no doubt because they were including other men, dogs, cats, shoes, fruit, water balloons, dirty underwear, sheep, toilet lids…

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.