There's another explanation for modal monagamy seeming weird: For numbers higher than 1 partner, people are lumping them together. If you take all men with (say) 4+ partners, they easily outnumber the men who've only had 1. Yes, the 1-partner group is larger than every other *specific* number of partners, but that's not the question most people are interested in. They are interested in comparing "people with just one partner" to "people will many partners." The difference between a man with 6 partners and a man with 7 partners is not important to them.
It could work out, if the average in the +100 female bin is much higher than the equivalent for men. Prostitution? I would guess that paying for sex is more common for men than women.
What age are the people being surveyed? Since this is lifetime number, it should be higher for people of higher age (unless there are some surprising cohort effects going on as well!) What most people want to know is prospective total lifetime partners, not lifetime partners so far for people of some unknown age distribution.
Yes, “lifetime” suggests *from birth till death*, not *from birth till now*. Of course, the former quantity can be reliably determined only posthumously.
The definitions of sexual partners may be different. It doesn’t specify coitus to be a sexual partner, but maybe women lean towards that definition while men lean towards including that and everything else.
Is a bimodal distribution for both sexes expected?
Rather, in my experience the more 'attractive' of both sexes have many more sexual partners.
In my yoof (freshman Uni) my group of friends included a very shapely and pretty girl who had about 80 different sexual relationships (overnight to lasting maybe 2 weeks) through the year (after a while we started counting) then stayed with the last guy. While one of the guys was both good looking and smart. He got to about 15 that first year and carried on at about that rate through to graduation.
Are they managing to talk to prostitutes? If the men with large "partner counts" are visiting prostitutes, but the survey doesn't cover prostitutes, then that would account for the unequal showing at the 100+ level (and at the other levels). Also, this is a case where there are probably very few 1000+ men and (including prostitutes) more 1000+ or 10,000+ women. A woman who turns 2 tricks a night, on average (sounds low to me) and works 250 nights a year would have about 500 partners (assuming no repeats) a year!
I suspect the numbers reported. When I was in college, I was involved in collating the data from a group of 60 or so students taking ethics who had answered an anonymous ethics survey handed out by the professor. It was a freshman-level class, split 50-50 male-female, and all but 2 students were freshmen (so, 18 or 19). Part of the demographic data was number of different sexual partners, with options for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7+. Also part of the demographic data was gender. So, from that I learned that of the 30 or so of each sex, there were no female virgins, but 2 male virgins. The male curve peaked at 4, with 2 (IIRC) at 7+, the females peaked at 3, with a secondary peak of 8 of the 30 answering 7+. Sexual body count is a matter of opportunity. Women nearly always have opportunity.
I think it's less likely for men to lie about only having one partner, but those with more than one are more likely to estimate up. With women, lying about only having one partner is more likely (especially if only married once), and tend to estimate down on the higher numbers.
This data seems to agree with an extensive survey whose results I saw about 10-15 years ago, in which men reported having an "average" of 8-9 partners in their lifetimes, and women about 4-5. With the distribution shown in the above graphs, it's obvious that "average" is meaningless, and that median (not average) is the only informative value.
The same survey, incidentally, reported that male homosexuals enjoyed (?) an "average" of 550 partners in their lifetimes. That's a pretty jarring number, but it's likely susceptible to the same skew.
There's another explanation for modal monagamy seeming weird: For numbers higher than 1 partner, people are lumping them together. If you take all men with (say) 4+ partners, they easily outnumber the men who've only had 1. Yes, the 1-partner group is larger than every other *specific* number of partners, but that's not the question most people are interested in. They are interested in comparing "people with just one partner" to "people will many partners." The difference between a man with 6 partners and a man with 7 partners is not important to them.
It could work out, if the average in the +100 female bin is much higher than the equivalent for men. Prostitution? I would guess that paying for sex is more common for men than women.
What age are the people being surveyed? Since this is lifetime number, it should be higher for people of higher age (unless there are some surprising cohort effects going on as well!) What most people want to know is prospective total lifetime partners, not lifetime partners so far for people of some unknown age distribution.
Yes, “lifetime” suggests *from birth till death*, not *from birth till now*. Of course, the former quantity can be reliably determined only posthumously.
The definitions of sexual partners may be different. It doesn’t specify coitus to be a sexual partner, but maybe women lean towards that definition while men lean towards including that and everything else.
Is a bimodal distribution for both sexes expected?
Rather, in my experience the more 'attractive' of both sexes have many more sexual partners.
In my yoof (freshman Uni) my group of friends included a very shapely and pretty girl who had about 80 different sexual relationships (overnight to lasting maybe 2 weeks) through the year (after a while we started counting) then stayed with the last guy. While one of the guys was both good looking and smart. He got to about 15 that first year and carried on at about that rate through to graduation.
Are they managing to talk to prostitutes? If the men with large "partner counts" are visiting prostitutes, but the survey doesn't cover prostitutes, then that would account for the unequal showing at the 100+ level (and at the other levels). Also, this is a case where there are probably very few 1000+ men and (including prostitutes) more 1000+ or 10,000+ women. A woman who turns 2 tricks a night, on average (sounds low to me) and works 250 nights a year would have about 500 partners (assuming no repeats) a year!
I suspect the numbers reported. When I was in college, I was involved in collating the data from a group of 60 or so students taking ethics who had answered an anonymous ethics survey handed out by the professor. It was a freshman-level class, split 50-50 male-female, and all but 2 students were freshmen (so, 18 or 19). Part of the demographic data was number of different sexual partners, with options for 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7+. Also part of the demographic data was gender. So, from that I learned that of the 30 or so of each sex, there were no female virgins, but 2 male virgins. The male curve peaked at 4, with 2 (IIRC) at 7+, the females peaked at 3, with a secondary peak of 8 of the 30 answering 7+. Sexual body count is a matter of opportunity. Women nearly always have opportunity.
I think it's less likely for men to lie about only having one partner, but those with more than one are more likely to estimate up. With women, lying about only having one partner is more likely (especially if only married once), and tend to estimate down on the higher numbers.
This data seems to agree with an extensive survey whose results I saw about 10-15 years ago, in which men reported having an "average" of 8-9 partners in their lifetimes, and women about 4-5. With the distribution shown in the above graphs, it's obvious that "average" is meaningless, and that median (not average) is the only informative value.
The same survey, incidentally, reported that male homosexuals enjoyed (?) an "average" of 550 partners in their lifetimes. That's a pretty jarring number, but it's likely susceptible to the same skew.
One comment is that if you assume hetero only, the averages should be the same and they are clearly not.