Everyone Sucks at Math (Not Just Girls!)

Here is something that has bothered me as long as I can remember: statistics show that the average number of sexual partners for straight men is higher than the average number of sexual partners for straight women. Uh...how is this possible? Each straight man is having sex with a straight woman, so the average MUST be equal. This is so annoying, and this August the New York Times agreed with me. To quote:

Dr. Aral said she cannot determine what the true number of sex partners is for men and women, but, she added, “I would say that men have more partners on average but the difference is not as big as it seems in the numbers we are looking at.”

Dr. Gale is still troubled. He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, “would be negligible.” The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted...The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females.”

So, there*.

And today's stupidity: in this week's Savage Love, a guest expert gives us this gem:

"Most people have either had a three-way or thought about it. Yes, even women. "

Even women??? The context of this is guy/girl/girl threesomes, so wouldn't more women than men HAVE to be into it??? Jeez. That is incredibly dumb.

*Neighbor Steve is arguing with me over whether or not the statistics are actually impossible, and my response: it is impossible if the male and female sample sizes are even roughly equal, which in these surveys (and in the world at large) they usually are. For the math to work, the number of women would have to be several times the number of men.