Sex Survey Discrepancy Tied to Prostitutes
Oct. 9 -- Everyone pretty much takes for granted the idea that men are more promiscuous than women.
Major studies of sexual behavior reveal heterosexual men usually report more sexual partners than heterosexual women.
The 1991 General Social Survey, for example, put the value at 47 percent higher for men. The National Health and Social LifeSurvey of 1992 said the rate for men was 74 percent greater.
But when researchers published these surveys, social scientists challenged the findings, saying the numbers did not add up. The total number of partners each sex reports should be equal, even if men had more sexual relations on average with fewer women. Yet in the surveys, the numbers were not equal.
To explain the discrepancy, researchers said men tended to inflate their conquests, while women underestimated their liaisons.
A new study published in the upcoming issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says adding the visits of men to prostitutes helps even up the sexual partner accounting.
These earlier studies did not include enough “ladies of the evening,” the researchers say. When prostitutes are included, men and women have a similar number of partners: Men are still having more sex, but with a few chosen women.
Tracking Numbers of Prostitutes
The populations surveyed in the earlier studies included only households and failed to involve marginal living arrangements where prostitutes might live, explains Devon D. Brewer, a social scientist with the University of Washington in Seattle, and lead author on the study.
Rooming houses, military barracks, college campuses, motels, jails, prisons and homeless shelters were not included in these two national surveys, Brewer says.
To try to understand the differences detected in men and women in the two surveys, Brewer analyzed whether the number of prostitutes in the original studies was accurate. He found the original studies contained fewer prostitutes than were predicted for the overall population at that time.
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