They Were Lying All Along?

From the Sunday New York Times:

Turns out that men aren't more promiscuous than women after all. We had this wrong! Mathematicians have finally proclaimed it statistically impossible that men in the US can claim a median of seven sex partners over a lifetime, while women claim a median of four. In any society, heterosexual men and women must have roughly the same number sex partners, or the math just doesn't work out.

Actually, I have to say I've wondered about this myself. If men are going wild, but women are nun-like in their chastity, who are men having sex with? I assumed it was just the same band of loose girls, roaming from town to town, like the circus. But no - the "prostitute effect," as one researcher calls it, is negligible. Somebody's lying, and he thinks it could be the men. If women say four, and men say seven, three partners are unaccounted for. Two, he said, may be "imaginary."

Men as sexual conquistadors - it's such a nicer stereotype than men as insecure fabulists. I'm going to miss all that strutting and bragging.

*For more on this curious story, check out the Angry Bear blog.