Sex at Dawn

More than likely what that study means is that these days French women aren't lying about their sexual habits. ... Or, at least, lying less.

If French women claim to have had 5 sexual partners each, and French men claim 13, either a lot of people are lying, or 60% of French men's partners are not French. (Or there's a lot of gay sex in France.)

Can't the male/female number be skewed if a smallish portion of French women are having sex with a lot of different French guys?

Maybe it's the same 13 French women who have had sex with all the men in the country. They'd definitely have to be somewhat predatory to achieve that.

The term should be "Mon dieu," not "mon Deu."

Matt Elmore hits it on the head when he notes that the changes in the numbers may reflect nothing more than the fact that women may feel less pressure to lie about their sexual lives. If a smallish portion of French women were having sex with lots of men, then theoretically that wouldn't affect the average numbers at all, though I don't know the details of the methodology used in the study in question. Thanks for the correction on Mon dieu.

Regarding the sex discrepancy in the number of reported sex partners...

"One of the most reliable and perplexing findings from surveys of sexual behavior is that men report substantially more sexual partners than women do. We use data from national sex surveys and studies of prostitutes and their clients in the United States to examine sampling bias as an explanation for this disparity. We find that prostitute women are underrepresented in the national surveys. Once their undersampling and very high numbers of sexual partners are factored in, the discrepancy disappears. Prostitution's role in the discrepancy is not readily apparent because men are reluctant to acknowledge that their reported partners include prostitutes."

Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners

Fixed link:

Prostitution and the sex discrepancy in reported number of sexual partners