Ready for a bombshell? Nobody is having as much sex as you think they are.

Other than that really loud couple in the apartment next door, of course.

In order to bust some myths, market research company Ipsos decided to do some snooping around. Their findings will be published in a new book, The Perils of Perception, but let’s just hone in on the sex stuff for now.

A few stats from the study, as reported by the Conversation:

[They] asked people in Britain and the US to guess how often people aged 18-29 in their country had sex in the past four weeks.

The average guess about young men in both countries is that they had sex fourteen times in the last month, when the actual number is just five in Britain and four in the US, according to detailed surveys of sexual behaviour.

Our guess would mean that, on average, young men are having sex every other day – around 180 times a year – compared with the more mundane reality of around 50 times.

To cover a few bases, here’s a handy chart:

Moving to the bit about the country to country difference in sexual partners:

[They] asked people in three countries to guess how many sexual partners people in their country have had by the time they get to 45-54 years of age. On this, people are actually very accurate at guessing the average number of partners reported by men.

The actual figure in Australia and Britain is an average of 17 partners by the time men reach 45–54. In the US, it’s 19. The average guesses are almost spot-on.

So between 17 and 19 partners by the age of roughly 50 – I’m not judging.

Of course, the major difference comes in how men and women talk about it:

…it gets much more interesting when we compare men and women. First, the standout pattern is with the actual data. The number of partners claimed by women in surveys of sexual behaviour is much, much lower than the number claimed by men.

In fact, women claim to have had almost half the number of sexual partners as men. This is one of the great conundrums of sexual behaviour measurement: it’s seen again and again in high quality sex surveys, but it’s a statistical impossibility.

Once again, we go to the graph:

In case you required some kind of reason for the sexual partner discrepancy, off we go:

There are a number of suggested explanations for this – everything from men’s use of prostitutes to how the different genders interpret the question (for example, if women discount some sexual practices that men count).

But it seems most likely to be a mix of men’s tendency to be more rough and ready when they add up, combined with men’s conscious or unconscious bumping up of their figure, and women’s tendency to deflate theirs.

It’s almost like it’s deemed more acceptable for men to talk about how many sexual partners they’ve had.

Anyway, happy bonking.

[source:coversation]