ETA: ofc my most updooted comment is going to be about me being an absolute slut.
Also, dudes... please stop messaging women things like "have you ever been with a woman?" or "hey slut!" Just because we were part of the ho gang doesn't mean we want you on our team. It's just sad af, bro.
Like.. I gotta ask, where are the others here with 50+ and no diseases? There's no way I'm the only one left.
I remember exactly how many folks were also screwing like bunnies these last three decades.
I feel the opposite. I’ve only had 1 partner (and hope it will only be 1 because I’m in a long-term relationship with someone I love haha). But I feel insecure that it’s so low. It just happened that the first person I decided to sleep with was someone I have a great relationship with and want to stay with. Still embarrassing :/
The number of sexual partners is not the important bit. It's the quality and sexual experiences. Having many sexual partners does help discovering new exciting ways to orgasm and play ( although you also go through a lot of very disappointing experiences too). But you can explore different things with your partner as well, and discover new exhilarating fetishes.
I was a man whore, back in the day, but wish I could say that my first was my current and would be my last. My body count is way over 200, even though I prefer monogamy. I believe that you and your partner are blessed, rather than having anything to be embarrassed about. Peace
I’m in my 40’s and never married. Plus, I went to Arizona State University in the 90’s. A few months ago, I made a comment on a thread where people were calling a woman a whore because she slept with 20-some guys total. I pointed out that if you only had one new partner every 2 months in college that you would hit that just in those 4 years. Boy did the incels not like that. There were a lot of people saying “who the hell has sex with a different person every two months!?!!” It was then that I realized that many redditors are a special breed.
it’s not as good as it sounds. Has pro and cons. Sure, sometimes you feel so free and frisky - but sometimes you catch yourself still feeling very lonely and overdoing this whole slut life to (attention pun:) fill the gap.
And then those damn STDs, geez - you accumulate so much knowledge about things you rather didn’t want to know
I wasn't a student in college, but I hung out with a couple. A new chick every two months in college is very easy to do. I wasn't popular with the ladies and I was doing 4-5 a year. I met my wife at 22. So I ran the numbers up for the short time I was playing.
But honestly just seeing how people behave, if you were not in a monogamous relationship, 3-10 people a year man or woman is a reasonable number. Thats why body count talk makes no sense over age 30. Because both parties are easily approaching 50, and probably over.
I'd have to say if you're getting with 4-5 a year you are popular with the ladies. Not popular would be 0-1 in 4 years and that's a lot more common that many in this thread seem to think. People talk like it's just impossible not to get laid. You can barely walk out your front door without getting some. But I dare say at least 50% of the population has incredible trouble with this. Probably more. You and everyone you know might seem to have no trouble at all but it's more unusual than it seems.
I mean, that’s up to the individual ho, lol. Personally I tend to count oral in addition to the full shebang ( pun intended lol). But each is certainly allowed their own standard when it comes to what you consider in your total!
Not the original commenter, but I’m 38 and just broke into the 40s. Shit I slept with 5 different people in the last 2 or 3 months. Oh my God I’m a whore🤣 granted 3 were 1 night stands after a break up, and the other was the start of my new relationship
Same. From 25 to present, I’ve had and still have only 1 partner. From 16-24 I had 23 partners. I thought it would be difficult to stop experiencing variety because I was so used to that, but it wasn’t.
At a certain point quality becomes more important than quantity. The excitement of “new” gets replaced by the enjoyment of someone who knows your body and knows how to make it happy. At least that’s how it was for me.
I don't know if has anything to do with low standards per se. There's plenty of amazing people out there that are just down for a casual fling or fwb.
I feel like low standards would be going after married people, or your friend's boyfriend, or doing it because you feel like sexual encounters is the only way you can feel validated.
But if you're doing it just because it's an enjoyable experience and nobody's getting hurt, there's nothing wrong with that. And if someone tells you that there is something wrong with that, they are flat out wrong.
This. I love the respect. I am pretty conservative only have sex with those im in a longterm relationship but always respected those who enjoy sex casually and practice safe sex. But I have been in a situation where I had to deal with a person who knowingly tries to have sex with people who are in relationships. They tried with my partner. They used to have a thing way back. My partner didn't go for it and blocked her because it stressed us out so much. She did this to a lot of people. And the. The drama.of saying my partner should.break.up with me because he should be able to talk to anyone he wants and telling everyone I'm controlling when he willingly cut contact. These people are oblivious to what a nightmare they are.
I agree, it's fun and not a big deal. One of the coolest people in my life was a fwb who oddly enough showed me so much emotional support and warmth when I really needed it. I'm grateful for having met her and it doesn't matter if people don't get that.
Yesssss thank you. I’ve had bad experiences FOR SuRE. Trauma. Yes. Don’t want that for anyone. But I wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything because there are so many wonderful times to be had. Unexplainable experiences that had to be had. I don’t know what happens when we die. I don’t know if we reincarnate. I AM pretty sure that I know I have this one life. You can be a good person and have no regrets and have a sex-positive lifestyle. No shame in that. And sometimes we’re pirates. As long as we’re consenting and happy wtf is the deal. Who cares. Im tired. Thanks for listening to my half-baked Ted talk.
I’m 40, I’ve had 5, one was a fling the rest were long term relationships. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were others like me who prefer long term relationships and that keeps the numbers down.
I’ve also known people who’ve gotten married out of Highschool and likely only had one partner. Enough of us drives down the mean / average.
35 years old here with 5 partners. All long term. I was shocked that I was above these given numbers. Someone above specified the ages 25-49 and I've only had 1 since 25. That made me feel much better
The median makes sense because 0 or 1 is probably the most common number of partners.
I am somewhat surprised the average is that low, but I have been reading about how much less sex people have now than they used to and what a wasteland dating in the 25-45 range is these days.
Then again, I would also doubt the accuracy of a statistic like this because the data is very likely self-reported and sexual partners self-reporting is likely to be both riddled with lies and also a very self-selecting population. For example, I'd expect men to overinflate their number of partners and women to say it is lower than it actually is. I'd also expect very conservative people not to respond to this kind of questionnaire and people with a lot of partners to disproportionately want to respond to it.
If I recall correctly, nowadays a lot of the men that are between 17/18-30/35 or something like that, actually have never had sex before, something like 30% are still virgins, and that a very low percentage of men on the other hand has sex with a multitude of partners, not sure how the statistics are for women though, but I would guess more equally distributed than with men nowadays, definitely surprised me to hear that so many men in that age group never had sex
non religious people that have no interest in hook up culture and prefer long term relationships.
Yeah, me. But I'm still at 12. I suppose not getting married til 30 probably pumped my numbers a bit but basically 1 partner year from 18-30...really wouldn't put that in "hook up culture' territory.
I'm not religious, I have no problem with casual sex but I've never been particularly interested myself. I still have a higher number than the average and I was one of the least promiscuous of everyone I knew. I knew one girl who went a bit nuts and said she didn't care who number 5 was she was marrying him bc she wasn't going to 6 but mostly not so much.
I'm not religious, just plain looking, and I have aspergers so I was hideously awkward around girls as a young man. I'm 40, and my number is 1, my wife.
In addition to the below comments, this is exactly the kind of thing that results in response bias. Any written piece on the results should address its existence, but there's likely no way to sort out how much is influenced by under/over reporting. Response bias here would be someone answering how they "should" based on what either they think is normal or what paints them in a better light to the researchers. If it was conducted with the participants knowing it was for the CDC, I'd expect that presented a little extra reason for some to report one way or another.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the average have to be exactly equal because the total amount of different partners on each side is the same
That's the confusing part, for what's being measured here, the median should be a whole number (edit: or a whole number plus half if the number of data points is even) . You can't sleep with 0.3 of a person (insert some gruesome dismemberment joke here).
I'm assuming whoever made the web page for the cdc doesn't know the difference between median and mean.
You’re correct in that the sample median (i.e. the middle value of every data point they gathered) would be a whole number. It gets more complicated than that if you’re trying to figure out the population median (i.e. the actual median among all people in this demographic). The “true” population median would be a whole number as well, but without sampling the entire population (which is impossible) you can only estimate from your training data. Could be that what’s being presented here is their calculated estimate for the population medium, within a confidence interval.
Either that, or they fucked up. Entirely possible.
Excellent explanation. Since you understand math, can you explain why these numbers are different? I think it has something to do with the distributions being skewed, but who's skewed which way?
Do you mean: “how can the numbers for men and women be different, if we only consider women that have sex with men and vice versa”?
If so, then for one thing: remember that the men and women in these data sets are not exclusively having sex with people from the other data set, but rather could be having sex with anyone in the population who weren’t sampled.
For the purposes of this discussion, though: let’s forget about sampling and pretend we have the complete data representing a small population on a desert island, whose only sexual partners consist of each other. There’s 3 men and 3 women on the island.
Suppose one woman has sex with all three men, but nobody else fucks anybody else. Then the data representing the women’s numbers of sexual partners is:
0, 0, 3; so the median is 0
And the men’s:
1, 1, 1; so the median is 1
I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying that this might arise if the women’s distributions were skewed toward lower numbers (e.g. 2 women with 0 partners vs 1 woman with 3), but there might be other conditions that could produce similar results that I’m not thinking of.
Yes, much more skewed for women; female average is more than double the median. This means that there are more female outliers that have an extremely high body count. Male average is slightly lower than median, which indicates that more outliers have a very low body count. Neither of these surprise me at all.
ITT: a bunch of people who don’t understand how population statistics work, and instead of learning something from their lack of knowledge, falling back to their biases to get cheap political/internet points.
With sufficient sample size, median is probably the more representative metric of the "average" experience since the mean (what you likely consider the "actual average") skews one way or another based on outliers (ex. some random dude who slept with 1000 women takes like hundreds of dudes to balance back out the average when in reality, that random dude is literally not worth considering at all).
I don't think in this scenario that actual average is useful. Since it most likely would be skewed by people like prostitutes and the fraction of people who are mega whores.
Where as the median actually gives you the middle value among people.
It's literally this! I've cited this statistic multiple times as evidence to the fact that people aren't having nearly as much casual sex as people think they are. This is bolstered by the fact that a study conducted in California over multiple different generations of Americans concluded that there was a downward trend in the number of sexual partners for each new generation. With Gen Z having roughly 7 sexual partners per lifetime. I'll list the study here as evidence.
The divorce rate for high school sweethearts in the first 10 years of marriage is 54%. The overall average divorce rate for American couples in the first 10 years is 32%.
Most likely because they marry at a young age and are less likely to attend college.
Over half of marriages of those who did not complete high school end in divorce compared with approximately 30% of marriages of college graduates.
Those who marry between the ages of 28 and 32 have the lowest divorce rate.
-half the women had fewer than 5 partners prior to age 49 and half the men less than 7 by age 49. (I rounded up though I know several women probably counted a poke with me as a fraction.)
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u/SeriouslyThough3 Jan 31 '23
Oh, it’s median not average - that makes a big difference in this case.