The Sexual Equation

At this point in the evolution of American society, it’s pretty much common knowledge that a gross double standard exists between men and women with regards to their respective number of sexual partners.

By CC Staff

You know… a guy who sleeps around is a super cool badass, whereas a girl that opens her legs up to all passersby is a dirty slut.

So it should never come as a surprise when surveys get released, such as a recent one released by our own federal government, which claim that men, on average, have at least three more sexual partners over the course of their lifetime than do women.

But according to a recent New York Times article, there’s just one not so minor problem with such surveys. Their results suggest logical impossibilities! According to Cal-Berkley professor David Gale (no, not the same David Gale who was portrayed by Kevin Spacey in 2003, although that’d be pretty ironic), mathematical logic dictates that men and women have to have around the same number of partners, and oddly enough, most sex survey researchers agree with him.

So what gives?

The article gives two possible explanations. One theory has an extraordinary amount of men soliciting prostitutes and regularly schtupping girls in foreign countries, but based solely on conversations that I’ve had on the subject, I’m not sure I buy into this one.

For one, as much as most guys want to give off the impression that they have a nice sized number, I don’t know too many guys that want to own up to the fact that they have to solicit prostitutes in order to procure said number.

Furthermore, at least among people I know, girls are FAR more likely to come home from European vacation with a steamy story about some beautiful Spanish stallion giving her a night to remember than are guys able to seduce some hot Italian 20-something.

The other, far more believable explanation is that both men and women regularly lie about their number of partners, with men embellishing their number while women act like some of their sexcapades simply never occurred. Now this one makes sense.

Because of the double standard, many women carry this undying belief that they need to maintain the perception that they’ve only been with a few guys, lest they be branded with a big Scarlet “S(lut).” Guys, on the other hand, worry that they’ll be branded with a big Scarlet “D(ork)” if they aren’t banging girls left and right.

So is that it?

Have we reached the point in our society that when it comes to sex, everyone’s simply a liar?

It certainly seems like this is the case. What’s that say about us? For my part, as I’ve said before, perhaps this is a sign that we really need to release ourselves from worrying so much about our own past and the pasts of people we come into contact with. If having any sort of sex at all causes us to lie about it, it seems the choices we’re left with are either to stop having sex, which obviously isn’t going to happen, or to just get over it this stupid obsession we have with the Number.

The question is, are we really up to the task?