Evolution, Sex, and Gender, Not to Mention Research

NancyLebovitz

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

So how sketchy is the research on human sexual behavior, anyway?

From The New York Times:

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

So how sketchy is the research on human sexual behavior, anyway?

Not nearly as sketchy as the reporting on it. I've seen too many newspaper articles treating claims that strictly heterosexual men have more sexual partners on average than strictly heterosexual women on average seriously, to take -any- reporting on the matter seriously. (Hint for those puzzling about what's wrong with this: The two numbers have to match. ETA: As Luke_A_Somers points out, the numbers don't have to be identical, and within particular subsets of the population it's possible for large disparities.)

One other case where the numbers may not match: differences in age.

For example imagine a population where everybody lives for 60 years, men always marry at 40 where they have sex once, and women marry at 20 where they also have sex once (assume they always have twins). Women over 20 will have had on average one partner, and men over 20 will have had 0.5.

So, the numbers don't need to match if you have more pairings where the man is older than the woman than the other way around (which seems to be the case); I expect that to account for some of the differenc... (read more)

0TheOtherDave14y

Well, assuming equal populations, anyway.

11Luke_A_Somers14y

The numbers don't need to match, even if everyone was counted and reported accurately. To take some extreme examples: The population is Alex, Betty, Carrie, Daphne. Alex hooks up with each of the others. Mens' average: 3. Womens' average: 1. Now take Alice, Bob, and Cindy. Alice hooks up with Bob and then leaves the population (emigrates or dies) Womens' average: 0. Mens' average: 1

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