Big Answers To Little Questions

Via Ezra, a fantastic article in the New York Times explaining that, actually, there can't be any difference between the sexual behavior of men and women because, well, the math says so. In short, the article says that all the surveys which claim that men have, on average, 3x the number of sex partners that women do cannot be right, because, assuming you are restricted to heterosexual discussion, every man who has sex requires a woman be involved. Hence, there is an average of exactly one man and woman per sexual coupling, and thus the average number of couplings for each gender must be the same.

The answer I would like to believe as to why this article makes no sense is that most men are so bad at sex that the women in the studies have either forgotten or blocked out their past experiences.

Unfortunately, the more likely answer is that the survey confuses the concepts of median and mean when it comes to the term 'average'. The mean number of sex partners must be the same, for basic math reasons. But the article only ever talks about the median, and median value can be skewed by outliers. The old saw is that if you, a few buddies, and Warren Buffet are in a room together, the average income in the room would be either $50,000 or $1.3 billion, depending on whether you are talking about the median or the mean income.

So median is useful when discussing some concepts - I think we can all agree that the 'average' person in the hypothetical room makes the much lower figure. But it can also be misleading, since when talking about averages in this sense, you have to take the outliers into account. Speaking broadly and entirely in stereotypes, once could imagine that most women have a lower number of sex partners than most men, because women are less apt to jump into bed at the first opportunity.

There may be some small number of women, though, who for concious or unconcious reasons lack the restraints on sexual behavior than most other women have. Those women, being women, have no shortage of sexual opportunities, and find themselves with many times more partners than the more restrained women do. This would not change the median value, but might greatly affect the mode.

Whereas, if men all follow the more usual strategy of 'have sex with anyone who will have sex with you', and the variables are things like attractiveness, intellect, money, etc. then you would expect a more Gaussian distribution of sex partners, and the median and the mode would be very close to one another.

Okay, that's the bell. No homework this week for Statistics and Probabilities 101....