Reminds me of the surveys that found that men have more partners on average than women. Mathematicians then jump in and show that's not mathematically possible.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html
Think the key takeaway really is to frame your question precisely and draw the right conclusions. That you always perceive your friends to be more popular than you, or that surveys of number of sexual partners seem to always suggest men have more partners than women are still interesting - only the actual conclusion may be more nuanced than the superficial takeaway.
In the case of sexual promiscuity, my questions are: what social trends are causing the skew in survey results and/or what flaws are pervasive in modern survey taking methodology. We're able to logically prove the fallacy of this particular question, but how many other inferences are we drawing from survey data which are incorrect?
Imagine a scenario where there was 1 man on earth, and 100 woman. Say that the man slept with half the woman. Now he has slept with 50 women, the male average is 50 partners / 1 male or 50. Half the woman had 1 partner, so 50 woman / 100 total woman slept with 1 man, average 0.5 partners.
Easy to show that the average could be swayed one way or another with this average.
Cue the mathematicians to show me pedantically why I'm wrong, but it's not about that. It's about the imprecision of English in Buzzfeed articles when using math terms.
Take your 1:50 50:1 ratio, and now only sample 5 people out of the entire group. If those 5 questioned were women which only had one partner you would miss the 'black swan' that had 50. I would think the question comes if your sample size is large enough to encompass all the outliers that can significantly influence the results.
For example in Parent comment a few female sex workers could have sex with hundreds of men, but if not questioned they would be missed. The article 'hand waving' the prostitute effect away without further details is disingenuous.
But the ratio of heterosexual men to heterosexual women is close to 1:1 and not 7:4. Therefore the disparity in reported numbers is impossible.
Even if homosexuals were included in that survey, and asked about "how many heterosexual partners you had", them answering "0" wouldn't matter at all (provided that there were roughly the same number of gays and lesbians surveyed)
Source? Or is this just guesswork? Because the stats I've seen in the past, while varying in numbers, have pretty consistently been that, in the population, from most to least common is:
Opposite sex partners only > Both same and opposite sex partners > Same sex partners only. (Don't have any sources handy, but I'll try to find and post some later.)