See e.g. some U.K. data here, or the U.S. data here (which conveniently control for race, so that the trends are strikingly obvious as a class phenomenon).
Thanks! I think I misinterpreted your earlier post; when I wrote the grandparent comment, I had read ‘monogamy’ as you referring to faithful long-term one-on-one relationships, not just the subset of those relationships that are marriages. But it sounds like you mean marriage proper, in which case I think you’re right (albeit depending on what scale of ‘environment’ we’re talking about).
However, even regardless of any research data, things should be obvious from common knowledge and everyday observations. There are clearly lots of men around for whom getting into any relationship with a woman would be a Herculean accomplishment, even more of those who struggle with positive but still meager results, and a minority for whom getting laid with attractive women is almost trivial, who easily rack up many dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of notches.
If I’m honest, my own everyday observations and knowledge don’t seem to be strong evidence of all three of: (1) breakdown of monogamous norms, (2) a concurrent increase in female hypergamy ‘where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place’, and (3) a causal relationship between #1 and #2. It doesn’t help that I didn’t even hit adolescence until last decade—I expect I have much less experience of relationship trends over time than you.
It seems plausible to me that men have a much wider variance in heterosexual sex partners than women, but I’m not sure it’s definitively confirmed—or that the variance ratio has increased over the last few decades because of a decline in monogamous norms. The PNAS article suggests that a failure to account for prostitutes in sex surveys can explain the male-female difference in mean number of sexual partners, which hints that it might also explain the male-female difference in variance, too. (After all, excluding female prostitutes from a survey is a little like chopping the right tail off the female sex partner distribution, which would decrease its variance.) The other review article doesn’t seem to suggest a clear trend in the male-female variance ratio over time, either, although it looks like there is (surprisingly—at least to me) little high-quality data for judging that.
For anyone else curious about the published paper, it’s freely available. Annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to say the standard deviation of number of sex partners for women under each condition, only averages, so it’s hard to do an independent statistical check. The authors did do their own test:
Number of sexual partners. The two-way ANOVA on self-reports of the number of sexual partners yielded no significant effects, F < 1, but the data did strongly favor the predicted pattern (see Figure 2). That is, men reported more sexual partners than did women in the exposure threat condition (3.7 vs. 2.6, η² = .03), where gender expectations are most salient. The magnitude of the sex difference decreased in the anonymity condition (4.2 vs. 3.4, η² = .01), and the direction of the difference actually reversed in the bogus pipeline condition, with men reporting fewer partners than women (4.0 vs. 4.4, η² = .001).
The ‘bogus pipeline condition’ is one where the women were hooked up to a (not working) lie detector.
A much smaller one, which may well be within statistical bounds. Good point about people knowing that lie detectors don’t work. That may account for any remaining difference.
Apparently, there was no experiment with the men hooked up to a (bogus) lie detector, and I think there should have been.
Sure there was:
Men who thought they were attached to a polygraph reported an average of 4.0 sexual partners, compared to 3.7 partners for those who thought their answers might be seen.
Thanks—goes to show I should have read the linked material.
I’m surprised. I’d have expected that men would lie about having more partners rather than fewer, but that might be mere stereotyping on my part.
The other possibility I can think of is that people who think they’re hooked to a lie detector don’t just say what they immediately think is true, they check their memories more carefully.
Thanks! I think I misinterpreted your earlier post; when I wrote the grandparent comment, I had read ‘monogamy’ as you referring to faithful long-term one-on-one relationships, not just the subset of those relationships that are marriages. But it sounds like you mean marriage proper, in which case I think you’re right (albeit depending on what scale of ‘environment’ we’re talking about).
If I’m honest, my own everyday observations and knowledge don’t seem to be strong evidence of all three of: (1) breakdown of monogamous norms, (2) a concurrent increase in female hypergamy ‘where a minority of exceptionally attractive men account for the overwhelming part of non-monogamous sexual pairings that take place’, and (3) a causal relationship between #1 and #2. It doesn’t help that I didn’t even hit adolescence until last decade—I expect I have much less experience of relationship trends over time than you.
It seems plausible to me that men have a much wider variance in heterosexual sex partners than women, but I’m not sure it’s definitively confirmed—or that the variance ratio has increased over the last few decades because of a decline in monogamous norms. The PNAS article suggests that a failure to account for prostitutes in sex surveys can explain the male-female difference in mean number of sexual partners, which hints that it might also explain the male-female difference in variance, too. (After all, excluding female prostitutes from a survey is a little like chopping the right tail off the female sex partner distribution, which would decrease its variance.) The other review article doesn’t seem to suggest a clear trend in the male-female variance ratio over time, either, although it looks like there is (surprisingly—at least to me) little high-quality data for judging that.
It’s interesting to note that the difference goes away when the women are told they’re hooked up to a lie detector.
That’s a cute result!
For anyone else curious about the published paper, it’s freely available. Annoyingly, it doesn’t seem to say the standard deviation of number of sex partners for women under each condition, only averages, so it’s hard to do an independent statistical check. The authors did do their own test:
The ‘bogus pipeline condition’ is one where the women were hooked up to a (not working) lie detector.
However, there’s still a difference.
Apparently, there was no experiment with the men hooked up to a (bogus) lie detector, and I think there should have been.
I also have no idea what proportion of the population is cynical about lie detectors. I don’t even have a strong prior on that one.
A much smaller one, which may well be within statistical bounds. Good point about people knowing that lie detectors don’t work. That may account for any remaining difference.
Sure there was:
Thanks—goes to show I should have read the linked material.
I’m surprised. I’d have expected that men would lie about having more partners rather than fewer, but that might be mere stereotyping on my part.
The other possibility I can think of is that people who think they’re hooked to a lie detector don’t just say what they immediately think is true, they check their memories more carefully.
Or maybe the sample’s not representative of most men—the sample was of Midwestern psychology undergraduate students.