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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily -- it could just as well imply that 19-29 year old women are having entirely-monogamous sex with men outside (hopefully above) the 18-29 range.

Also, that 18-29 chart is about people looking for a relationship. The data about actually-having-sex [1] used different age ranges, breaking up 18-24 and 25-34. It shows a spike of no-sex in 18-24 men, which evens out with women once they're into the 25-35 range. The article didn't use the handy graph in figure 1 from the study which was quite informative: [2]

[1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[2]: https://cdn.jamanetwork.com/ama/content_public/journal/jaman...

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This is accurate. When I was 18-24 life sucked, because all the younger women were still in high school, and almost all of the women my own age were hooking up with older guys. The sweet spot for men starts around the late 20s.

My hypothesis is that this is because of a pretty significant gap in EQ and maturity between young men and women. Also women’s prime reproductive years (physically) are from late teens to early 30s. Men’s prime years to be able to support their partners is usually starting around 30s. Makes sense when you think of it like that.

Your idea doesn't make sense since women report higher sexual partners than men in ALL age groups in the figure you linked,

No they don't. In every age group there's more men than women in the 2 and >3 partners categories, while women are visibly ahead in the 1 partner category.

Based purely on that figure, we can reasonably say that after age 18-24 men and women are about as likely to have had sex with at least one person in the last year (within the error bars of each other), with men being more likely to have had sex with more than one person in the last year.

Right, but if the 18-24 women are having sex with older men and the numbers in the older group are equal, there are more men who will be having sex with more than one woman than the inverse, or the numbers wouldn’t balance.

cannot be upvoted enough.

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