5 ms·

> men cheat a little more than women, according to studies Women admit to cheating less than men, and this is reflected in a bias of studies whose methodology

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  > mathematically, hetero-sexual partnerships always draw from both sets equally Uh, no, not from the sets under study. You've ignored time and space. The sets under study are the set of men and set of women currently living in a particular countries. The sets from whom their past partners are drawn (even assuming purely heterosexual relationships) may include people no longer living at the time of the survey, as well as people who are alive, but not living in the country under study (either at the time of the survey, or even ever.) If you managed to get responses from representative sample of all men and women who had ever lived (which, you know, is logistically tricky), then you could validly argue that all heterosexual partnerships must draw evenly from both groups. But you don't, so you can't. The imbalance could just be that UK men are more likely to have had past relationships with women not currently living in the UK than UK women are to have had with men not currently living in the UK. (It could also be the kind of reporting bias you suggest, and there are certainly other sociological reasons to suspect that such reporting bias is at least partially to blame -- its just not, even without bringing into it questions of same-sex pairings, the kind of mathematical necessity you make it out to be.)
  • rdancer 11y ago
    Time and space are good retorts, let's talk about them. The UK is a relatively cosmopolitan kingdom, and those trips to Magaluf & Basra must lead to some monkey business, right? Time. Women live longer on average, and there is also on average an age gap between heterosex partners (males older); therefore it is more probable that the male sex partner will be deceased, not the female. The numbers for females, if anything, should therefore be higher. Space. If the UK is a net exporter of male sexual partners, that would mean that some other country or countries would be net importers. Regardless, the worldwide number of heterosex connections must be the same for women and men. But that's not the case. In every country, with the notable exception of New Zealand, women report less sex partners than men, and the worldwide aggregate for men is still unexplainedly higher than the aggregate for women. Some studies suggest the gap to be due to women underreporting, some studies suggest prostitutes are underrepresented in the samples, but in the end, whenever somebody wants to argue that men tend to have more sex partners than women, let them know that (a) one number is pretty useless in telling the whole story, and (b) if conclusions of a study present a mathematical paradox, they should be taken with a grain of salt.
• peterwwillis 11y ago
  The design of the study has more to do with this than anything else. Still, there's been several decades (at least) of independent study on the subject, and all of them i've seen conclude that more men cheat than women, even if more recent studies show the frequency of women cheating is increasing. Regardless of your math, the fact that every study leads to the same conclusion is what I would call strong evidence that this is more likely than not to be true. The simplest answer to your question ("who are all those extra men partnering with?") is incredibly simple: there's a smaller group of women who sleep with a greater number of men than vice-versa. And this makes total sense if you consider that women have more choice of partners, and men have less, and that there's a larger pool of men looking for purely physical/sexual relationships. Basically the availability of men is greater, the availability of women is smaller, and so the reported number of women cheating is smaller, and the reported number of men cheating is larger.
  • rdancer 11y ago
    > there's a smaller group of women who sleep with a greater number of men That's a falacy. If a small number of women raise the number of their sexual partners, the rest of the women must lower their number of sexual partners, to keep the average the same. That's not the way to explain the deficit.
    • peterwwillis 11y ago
      The average number of women who cheat? Or of men? Either one doesn't change if a small group of women has a larger number of partners, though the average of men who cheat may increase.
  • rdancer 11y ago
    > there's a smaller group of women who sleep with a greater number of men That's a falacy. If a small number of women raise the number of their sexual partners, the rest of the women must lower their number of sexual partners, to keep the average the same. That's not the way to explain the deficit.
• FireBeyond 11y ago
  "Women admit to cheating less than men, and this is reflected in a bias of studies whose methodology includes self-reporting." I remember reading something that said something along the lines of "A married man in a bar, cheating, is more likely to do so without thought to the wedding ring - either oblivious to taking it off or apathetic". Women doing the same thing were much more likely to make a conscious point of removing the wedding ring in the same situation.