A recent article asked how men can report more sexual relationships (and sexual partners) than women. Let me ask another question: why don't we all limp because we average just under two legs?
You are probably wondering how people can have less than two legs on average. The answer, of course, is that while the vast majority of people have two legs, a few have only one, and fewer still have neither. But no one has three or more legs, so the average number of legs for humans is just under two. However, the mode, the most frequently encountered number of legs, is in fact two.
You have to make the same distinction to solve what you might call the mean error when it comes to the number of sexual partners. This argues that, “For heterosexual couples, the number of partners just needs to be balanced. The gap stems from men's tendency to exaggerate and women's fear of being labeled disparagingly.
But consider a community of 10 monogamous heterosexual couples. If 1 woman has sex with all other men but all other women do not, we now have a situation where 9 men have 2 partners and 9 women have only one, while the cuckold man also has 1. The fashion for men is 2, the mode for women is 1, while the mean is 1,9 for both sexes.
But no one has sex with 0.9 of a partner, so in itself it should tell you that this is an abstraction, not a real number.
What about the actual behavior? According to the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 1990-91, 18.876, twice as many women (39,3%) had had only one sexual partner in their life compared to men (20,6%); while 24,4% of all men had more than 10 sexual partners compared to 6,8% of women. One percent of men represented 16% of all couples in the past 5 years. Of the 11.000 people between the ages of 16 and 44 surveyed in 2001, the average number of relationships during the previous 5 years was 4 for men and 2,5 for women. Men had an average of 13 lifetime partners, while women had exactly half of them. Fourteen point six percent of men have had more than one sexual relationship at the same time, but only 9% of women have.
Gay men follow the pattern: Gay men tend to have more partners than lesbians, and a study in San Francisco found that nearly 50% of gay men have more than 500 partners. According to Camilla Paglia, “Gay men seek sex without emotion; Lesbians often end up with asexual emotions!
If the fallacy of the mean were true, it would have enormous evolutionary importance because it would mean that there could be no variation in reproductive success between the sexes: in other words, unlike the real case, males and females would have on average the same number. descendants. And if that had been true, Darwin would have been wrong about sexual selection, not dramatically, as he has shown, although he has been assumed wrong for the better part of a century.
In fact, even what Darwin couldn't really explain at the time, heredity, confirms it. Most indigenous societies in Africa are polygynous and institutionalize men with more sexual partners in marriage. The result is that in Ghana, the average father has twice as many children as the average mother. And because the Y chromosome is inherited only from the father and mitochondrial genes only from the mother, at Sinai Y genetic diversity is low while that of mitochondrial genes is high. But how could that be if the actual number of partners for the sexes were in fact equal?
Also, you can see the modal number of partners in the anatomy of ourselves and our close relatives. On the next slide, the average body size of males compared to females (called sexual dimorphism) is represented by circles for each species. The size of the male and female genitalia is also indicated, as well as the relative size of the testes of each species.
Source: C. Badcock de Short, RV, Advances in the Study of Behavior, 9, 152-3, 1979.
In chimpanzees, the modal number of sexual partners is generally high for both sexes, which promotes high female genital exposure, low sexual dimorphism, and very large testes, as many males mate with every female and the only way to compete it is inside the female. reproductive system: hence the need for more high-quality sperm. So for chimpanzees, the claim that the sexes are equal in number of sexual partners may very well hold a lot of truth, especially for bonobos, who are known to be very libertine.
However, in gorillas, sexual dimorphism manifests itself when silverback alpha males monopolize the harems of females, whose genitalia are small, as are those of the male. More importantly, the testes are also small because there is no competition between the sperm in such a situation.
Humans seem to be in the middle: more dimorphic than chimpanzees, but less so than gorillas (with penises that are the largest of all, partly perhaps because they don't have penis bones). But the relatively small size of the human testes and female genitalia is comparable to that found in the highly polygynous gorilla.
Am I missing something? Are there other explanations why the sexes differ in the reported amounts of sex? requested the original message. Oh yes you did, and oh yes there is!
But let me ask you this: Would this mistake be so believed if things were the other way around and involved gender inequality? I know what I am thinking.
Recent comments