Three sex partners on average for a heterosexual woman? This can’t be right. And a mathematician says this is logically impossible.
UPDATE: More from Janet Hardy, one of the authors of The Ethical Slut. (via MeFi)
Three sex partners on average for a heterosexual woman? This can’t be right. And a mathematician says this is logically impossible.
UPDATE: More from Janet Hardy, one of the authors of The Ethical Slut. (via MeFi)
As regards the statistics involved in the article linked, there is nothing more than the simple concept of median. The explanation of why the numbers cited should match, if obtained from the same close population, is just basic maths and is provided in the same article. The expression “statistical distribution”, instead, has to do with random variables which pertain to a different context.
Thank you for that. May I mention the book The Ethical Slut in realtion to this distribution? There I’ve gone and done it.
Hah! It all updated together. What a tiny little world.
The mathematical argument may be a little misleading because it supposes a closed set that encompasses the entire sample of possibilities.
Imagine a flat of apartments containing ten women and one man. Say by the end of the year each of the women has slept with the man during at least one night of drunken debauchery. Then from this set the man would have ten partners and each of the women would have one, even though the totals for the sexes would be equal (10=10).
Okay, maybe the population of men and women is more equal than that. Well I guess the other nine guys would be on the next floor up, having sex with each other — or maybe they’re sneaking off and having sex with women who were not part of the statistical sample.
Then again, maybe the women had sex with guys who were so unmemorable that the ladies completely forget the incident had occurred. Whereas the guys remembered every single woman — and included a few whom they only knew from magazines for good measure …
I said that in my previous comment: “…if obtained from the same close population…”. Nevertheless, if the study has been conducted at a national level in the US or UK (large Country), the chances to find someone outside the population are very low. Also, I don’t think that the fact that it is a sample matters as long as the sample is randomly chosen.
I wonder, instead, if the problem has to do with choosing a point measure as the median. Suppose that there are three men (X, Y and Z) and three women (A, B, C). A sleeps with X, B sleeps with Y while C sleeps with X, Y and Z. The median for the women would be 1 while for the men would be 2 (and 5 = 5 encounters).