Good dive. I think one point you missed is that people with lots of partners and especially low investment men don't care to memorize all the names of the women they slept with and can't keep count exactly. I know a few PUA types and their lay counts are often approximated so say 50. These results aren't wrong just imprecise due to the lack of record keeping.
It's Staggering the author overlooked this very basic element.
I've known a number of "lothario" types since high school some 40 years ago... And their counts are 50-100 by their 30's (I can validate from having heard many names from them over the years).
Seems like the author is trying to support their own prepared conclusion rather than find truth. It only takes a few such men to really throw off the stats (and from what I've seen of the young adults in my family and their friends, there's more than a few these days.
I'm not a PUA or "lothario" type at all (decades of faithful marriage and otherwise serial monogamy), but back in the late 80s, I had a hazy drug and alcohol three years (touring with a band, no girlfriend, etc).
I could go through and get a pretty accurate count for most of my life but for that period, depending on definitions, I would probably estimate 50. That's probably a combination of unreliable memory and rounding up, so I would be excluded from the results as the author describes, right?
What the author doesn't take into account is that a very small percentage of men, at the top of the attraction scale, maybe 1-2%, has almost unlimited access to women.
Data from dating sites like okcupid consistently show, that 80% of women are only interested in the top 20% of men.
And for the top 10% or 5% it gets even more extreme, until the top 1% of attractive men, that have basically unlimited access to women.
Those men sleep with a new woman every week or even more often, accounting for 50+ new partners per year and a lifetime body count in the hundreds of even thousands.
And they sleep with a large variety of women not only at the top, but over the whole attraction spectrum.
Meanwhile the women on the other hand only sleep with a handful of these men and have a much lower body count.
And the encounters with those men are mostly very short, either a one night stand or a short affair.
Only very seldomly does the affair last longer than a couple of weeks.
Additionally, a large percentage of these women is in committed relationships/marriages being unfaithful to their partners, which keeps the encounters additionally short and secretive.
Now, when asked about the number of their lifetime sexual partners, given social desirability and the female wish to report lower numbers, what type of sexual encounters would the women be most inclined to conveniently "forget" to report, or decide that "it didn't count"?
Most probably the short term, maybe even immoral, encounters with those highly attractive men.
If a woman decides to underreport her body count, this is what she would exclude first from her list.
So it wouldn't be surprising, if women excluded especially the men with extremely high body counts from their own counting.
That could explain why the gender gap disappears if the extremely promiscuous men are excluded from the dataset.
Maybe they are exactly what the women refused to report.
I think that there's an unexamined assumption that men and women, especially the young, should have an equal desire for sex. It may be that most women have a greater desire for attention from the opposite sex, and most men have a greater desire for sex. It might be the case that many women try to trade a minimum of sex for a maximum of attention, while many men do the opposite. Certainly, to use personal experience, I have often wondered why I had to waste time dancing, watching chick flicks, and holding her purse while she shopped for a new pair of shoes to match her new handbag; it's not like any girlfriend I ever had shared a reciprocal involvement in my preferred activities.
Good dive. I think one point you missed is that people with lots of partners and especially low investment men don't care to memorize all the names of the women they slept with and can't keep count exactly. I know a few PUA types and their lay counts are often approximated so say 50. These results aren't wrong just imprecise due to the lack of record keeping.
Right?
It's Staggering the author overlooked this very basic element.
I've known a number of "lothario" types since high school some 40 years ago... And their counts are 50-100 by their 30's (I can validate from having heard many names from them over the years).
Seems like the author is trying to support their own prepared conclusion rather than find truth. It only takes a few such men to really throw off the stats (and from what I've seen of the young adults in my family and their friends, there's more than a few these days.
I'm not a PUA or "lothario" type at all (decades of faithful marriage and otherwise serial monogamy), but back in the late 80s, I had a hazy drug and alcohol three years (touring with a band, no girlfriend, etc).
I could go through and get a pretty accurate count for most of my life but for that period, depending on definitions, I would probably estimate 50. That's probably a combination of unreliable memory and rounding up, so I would be excluded from the results as the author describes, right?
You are totally right!
What the author doesn't take into account is that a very small percentage of men, at the top of the attraction scale, maybe 1-2%, has almost unlimited access to women.
Data from dating sites like okcupid consistently show, that 80% of women are only interested in the top 20% of men.
And for the top 10% or 5% it gets even more extreme, until the top 1% of attractive men, that have basically unlimited access to women.
Those men sleep with a new woman every week or even more often, accounting for 50+ new partners per year and a lifetime body count in the hundreds of even thousands.
And they sleep with a large variety of women not only at the top, but over the whole attraction spectrum.
Meanwhile the women on the other hand only sleep with a handful of these men and have a much lower body count.
And the encounters with those men are mostly very short, either a one night stand or a short affair.
Only very seldomly does the affair last longer than a couple of weeks.
Additionally, a large percentage of these women is in committed relationships/marriages being unfaithful to their partners, which keeps the encounters additionally short and secretive.
Now, when asked about the number of their lifetime sexual partners, given social desirability and the female wish to report lower numbers, what type of sexual encounters would the women be most inclined to conveniently "forget" to report, or decide that "it didn't count"?
Most probably the short term, maybe even immoral, encounters with those highly attractive men.
If a woman decides to underreport her body count, this is what she would exclude first from her list.
So it wouldn't be surprising, if women excluded especially the men with extremely high body counts from their own counting.
That could explain why the gender gap disappears if the extremely promiscuous men are excluded from the dataset.
Maybe they are exactly what the women refused to report.
I think that there's an unexamined assumption that men and women, especially the young, should have an equal desire for sex. It may be that most women have a greater desire for attention from the opposite sex, and most men have a greater desire for sex. It might be the case that many women try to trade a minimum of sex for a maximum of attention, while many men do the opposite. Certainly, to use personal experience, I have often wondered why I had to waste time dancing, watching chick flicks, and holding her purse while she shopped for a new pair of shoes to match her new handbag; it's not like any girlfriend I ever had shared a reciprocal involvement in my preferred activities.