Do men really have more sexual partners?

Men supposedly have 2 to 4 times as many sexual partners in their lifetime as women. Is this realistic? (Source: IntimateMedicine.com)

The number of sexual partners is often overblown by both parties.

A larger number of sexual partners may be a consequence of sexism, which works in men’s favour because regularly exchanging sexual partners is an achievement to them. But what guarantees do we have that men give honest answers to this question? Despite the increase in sexual liberties, women can also intentionally hold things back.

Psychologist Norman Brown, who’s interested in the background of these fabrications about the number of sexual partners, says that the hypothesis about mighty stallions and eternal virgins has no firm basis. The catch isn’t really that either men or women intentionally come up with a larger or smaller number of sexual partners, but the focus is on the method by which men and women even determine who they should consider as someone they shared their nudity with.

How do women determine the number of sexual partners?

 ”Women are more likely to rely on enumeration,” said Brown, a scientist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. They tend to say, I just know,' and if you ask them to explain how they know, they’ll start naming the men from their past. If the enumeration logic continues in this fashion, namely from the unclear to the concrete, this could mean that this woman is belittling all her past physical contacts which she called important at a given moment when the man was present.

 

Who’s hiding and revealing something that doesn’t exist? Both...(jlp)

Male strategy?

They will more or less tell the number of sexual partners according to the strategy of “approximation”. This strategy is about overstating the actual number of women they were sexually intimate with.

With the united powers of research, the phenomenon was, besides Brown, also researched by Robert Sinclair and Sean Moore, the first from the University of “Laurentian”, the second from “Augustana” College. They conducted several researches on this endless subject of the truthfulness of both sexes. The most expansive and closest (time-wise) research was an internet research from 2005. It included 2065 heterosexual people with sexual experiences. They were all approximately 40 years old. The average amount of sexual partners was 8.6 with women and 31.9 with men. You may find nothing unusual with this, but both the author of the article and the researchers were astounded by this overblown figure from the men.

To assess more accurately how much the results were a matter of discrepancy of the people who answered the questions because of different methods of counting the number of sexual partners, and to what degree the number was merely a lie, they first asked them only for the number and then about the amount of respect their partner felt for them. Later, they also asked them about the truthfulness of the answers they gave in the research.

Men are sometimes not up to the role of the macho men they portrayed themselves to be before the action. (jlp)

Many fabricate the number of sexual partners

It turned out exactly as the research team expected: 5% of men and 4% of women hinted that they weren’t truthful with their answers, a further 16% of men and 11% of women said they gave an answer they knew didn’t paint a realistic picture. In the last question concerning truthfulness in general, 21% of men and 15% of women admitted that they simply made up the number of sexual partners. Conclusion: “They gave an answer and then two minutes later  admitted they had lied about the answer”, Brown stresses.

He named them “self-incriminators”

Among other things, a big characteristic for them was to particularly enjoy the principle of “approximation”, approximating the number of sexual partners. When they removed these people from the research pattern, the contradictions in the whole research were greatly reduced. The results really excited them and they’re eager to continue researching. The next thing to do is a telephone poll, which could help strengthen their results or it might reject them. In any case, let me mention a cute label Brown uses to describe the people who exaggerate with a passion at the end. They get so caught in their own discrepancies because they’re “liars who lie about lying”. I would say this is a cute, fiery and naughty label.