E.g this article, written by a sexuality counselor, claims that some experts believe that there could be as many 15 million Americans swinging on a regular basis, and basically says that swinging works for some couples and doesn’t work for others.
I don’t believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles—“experts say”, “some experts think”, etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open.
Slightly better are ‘estimates’ (or was it ‘a study’?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that’s also quoted as ‘2-4m’ (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being ‘the BDSM and swing communities’, which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can’t even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.
Fair point—the exact number wasn’t very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the “couples” to include “non-married couples”, and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn’t sound too unreasonable.)
I don’t believe that for a second and you should apply a little more critical thought to these numbers. What experts? What are they basing this on? Searching for this, I find nothing but echo chambers of media articles—“experts say”, “some experts think”, etc. Is 15 million remotely plausible? There are ~232m adults in the US, half are married, so 15m swingers would imply that 13% of marriages are open.
Slightly better are ‘estimates’ (or was it ‘a study’?) attributed to the Kinsey Institute of 2-4% of married couples being swingers, but that’s also quoted as ‘2-4m’ (a bit different) and one commenter even quotes it as 2-4% being ‘the BDSM and swing communities’, which reduces the size even more. All irrelevant, since I am unable to track down any study or official statement from Kinsey so I can’t even look at the methodology or assumptions they made to get those supposed numbers.
Fair point—the exact number wasn’t very important for my argument (I believe it would still carry even with the 2-4% or 2-4m figure), so I just grabbed the first figure I found. It passed my initial sanity check because I interpreted the “couples” to include “non-married couples”, and misremembered the US population to be 500 million rather than 300 million. (~4% of the adult population being swingers didn’t sound too unreasonable.)