Back in June, a number of blogs reported on a federal government survey about the average number of heterosexual sex partners for American men and women. The survey also covered drug use and a lot of other aspects of people’s sex lives, but what got the most headline attention (note the cheesetastic graphic above, which accompanied ABC News’s coverage) was the sex-partner discrepancy between men and women:
The median number of lifetime female sexual partners for men was seven; the median number of male partners for women was four.
The survey, released Friday, is based on data collected from 1999 to 2002 for the National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At this point, some of you are thinking “seven? four? Oh my god, I’m statistically such a slut!” But for the time being, let’s talk about the discrepancy between men and women. This would be considered “unsurprising” to many, right? Well, the New York Times reported yesterday that these numbers are mathematically impossible. It makes sense if you think about it. According to the CDC, the survey is supposed to represent the entire American population, with the exception of the homeless, the incarcerated, and the institutionalized. That’s surely a limitation, but not a massive one. The question was also specifically about heterosexual partnerships, so it’s actually impossible for men to have had more female sex partners on average than women’s male partners.
The Times offers some proofs by a professor of math from Berkeley, for the nerds out there:
“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.
He even provided a proof, writing in an e-mail message:
“By way of dramatization, we change the context slightly and will prove what will be called the High School Prom Theorem. We suppose that on the day after the prom, each girl is asked to give the number of boys she danced with. These numbers are then added up giving a number G. The same information is then obtained from the boys, giving a number B.
Theorem: G=B
Proof: Both G and B are equal to C, the number of couples who danced together at the prom. Q.E.D.”
Sex survey researchers say they know that Dr. Gale is correct. Men and women in a population must have roughly equal numbers of partners. So, when men report many more than women, what is going on and what is to be believed?
There are two possible explanations offered, although the researchers involved in the study refused to speculate and just said they had no idea why the numbers didn’t make sense. After all, the most likely explanation is that their data was falsified by their subjects! Meaning that men are overreporting the number of partners they’ve had, and/or women are underreporting. This is also not that hard to believe, right? I vaguely recall some asinine “rule” that I remember people talking about in college, that to get the real number of partners you had to divide men’s estimates by three, and multilpy women’s by three. College dorm theorems are much more exaggerated than this survey, but then the CDC also was touting this survey’s methodology (answering questions on a computer by yourself, basically) as a new “method designed to provide complete privacy and produce more honest answers.”
OK, so this possibility, about men exaggerating and women underestimating, is not really that surprising. I kind of suspected the samething when I first saw this survey; Amanda at Pandagon pointed it out too and even knew of a supporting study:
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.
What I’m really interested in, however, is the speed with which the media, and probably a lot of other people, are willing to believe these mathematically impossible statistics. After all, the proof offered above isn’t exactly rocket science; if you think about it for more than a few second, it makes sense. There must be something else going on. Part of my theory here is that mainstream media is always very happy to latch onto and popularize any “scientific data” that confirms “common sense” assumptions about men and women. We’ve seen this over and over and over, the tendency to try and find some kind of “hard science” confirmation for the things our society “already knows to be true” about men and women.
But what is the “common sense explanation” for this piece of common sense wisdom, that men have far more female sex partners than women have male sex partners? That men are promiscuous (naturally and biologically, even) and women just aren’t? The answer, I suspect, lies in the other possible answer given by the CDC researchers:
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.
The math professor, on the other hand, suspects that something like a “prostitute effect” would be negligible. But I’d say that what we’re seeing here is actually the conventional explanation for the discrepancy: women don’t have much sex compared to men, but supposedly there are some women who “make up for the difference” by having LOTS and LOTS of sex with then menfolk. Furthermore, these women don’t count*, at least not for the CDC’s purposes — they’re beyond the pale, outside of society. They’re prostitutes, or as Ms. Aral suggests, they’re foreigners. In the past (of segregation and slavery) and still today in so many cases, they’re women of color. They’re women who have to be left out of the math in order to make the “common sense” 7:4 ratio accurate. They’re the original reference of the shame-word “slut.”
They’re every type of woman who’s been made to to serve as the “whore” of the classic “virgin/whore” dichotomy — to balance this mathematically impossible equation by having all the sex that good marriageable white-wedding girls supposedly don’t. (Even though this is also the survey that pointed out that 89% of Americans have premarital sex.) I could go even further and start talking about how this relates to characterization and exploitation of trans women as sex workers, in the US and around the world, as a kind of ultimate “doesn’t count as a woman” but I’ll save that for another post. You get the idea.
* It’s worth noting that the original survey findings and media coverage about them never mentioned that prostitutes were not included. How does the CDC know that they didn’t survey any? They may have asked this as a screening question, or maybe they’re just assuming that they know what sex workers look like, or that they’re all included under “incarcerated,” or that it’s such a small slice of the population (who apparently could be having half of all the heterosex, to balance the equation) that they would have to track them down to actually include them.