Why the difference?

[GhostDad]

What, and men have a biological urge to have sex because it doesn't require as much equipment as baseball?

Like already stated, men make a very small investment in reproduction. Sperm is very expendable, you're not required to raise the child, you're not required to keep it for 9 months, and so on. Females have a finite amount of good eggs (all with expiration dates), they have to carry, birth, nurse, and raise the child. The way the sexes are set up, men desire as many partners as possible, and women desire only the best males.

So how do you explain the millions of hook-ups and one night stands that occur between men and women nightly?

Are you asking why people have sex?

Riiiiiiiiiight. So all gay men are a four letter word that starts with s and rhymes with 'gut', and all straight men would be if it weren't for women . . .

Without the barrier to sex that choosy females present, then it is expected that sex will be more plentiful and more easily acquired.

 

[DivineRAiN]

Karate: Why is it that the average heterosexual male is found to have five to nine partners in his life, but almost two-thirds of male homosexuals (60%) have had more than 250?

The numbers might be low for the average heterosexual male because they are dealing with women... and this was in 1970?
Now-a-days it's different.. an average heterosexual male can have 9 different partners + more, before he turns 18. He would be considered a playa.. or a pimp..(or a dog). And there's plenty of females out there willing to give it up... even before they get into high school. Some girls are starting to be sexually active before they turn 13. The young ppl don't have as many hoops to jump thru.

 

[seebs]

I don't understand what your point is. Both the statistics in the OP deal only with men.

Yes.

But men who want women to have sex with them have to comply with the demands of women, whereas men who are just looking for men don't have to.

There's a secondary issue: Look at statistics for promiscuity between people who are permitted to "marry" and people who are not. There's a substantial influence there; if people can't get societal recognition of a marriage, they lose the social support network and may not be as able to commit emotionally. Humans are, in the end, social creatures.

FWIW, I don't know a single lesbian who has had more than two partners ever. I know several straight women who are past twenty, and at least one solidly past a hundred.

The gay guys I know seem evenly split between sexual patterns indistinguishable from those of typical straight males, and rampant sleeping around.

Keep in mind that averages are a very poor way to develop a picture of a group that has multiple distinct subgroups within it.

 

[Patzak]

So I guess my question to the apologists is: why the difference? Why is it that the average heterosexual male is found to have five to nine partners in his life, but almost two-thirds of male homosexuals (60%) have had more than 250? If the argument that homosexuality is just like heterosexuality with only superficial differences is toilet paper then this seems like a lot of water. So I'm just wondering what the apologist rebuttal to this is? Is this 'hard-wired'; what is the cause of this huge difference in practice?

As has already been mentioned, the study you cite was concerned only with a group of homosexuals that would be expected to have a higher-than-average number of partners.

On the other hand, Laumann, Gagnon, Michael & Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States uses a random sample of the population and comes up with the following:


_________________________Partners in Last Year_______________Partners in Last 5 Years_______________Partners since Age 18
Straight men________________1.7 +/- 0.3_______________________4.8 +/- 0.6__________________________16.9 +/- 3
Gay and bisexual men__________2.9 +/- 0.8_______________________16.7 +/- 7__________________________26.6 +/- 11.5
Straight women______________1.3 +/- 0.1________________________2.2 +/- 0.2_________________________5.2 +/- 0.6
Lesbian and bisexual women_____5.7 +/- 7_________________________10.1 +/- 9_________________________19.9 +/- 10.5

(Table cited from http://volokh.com/2003_05_11_volokh_archive.html since the study itself doesn't seem to be available online)


Note the large margin of error (for a 95% confidence) with the homosexual data that's due to them representing only a small part of the population.

Nevertheless, even if we only look at the upper bounds of the interval (38.1 partners for gays, 30.4 partners for lesbians), the values are much lower than found by the San Francisco study you cite. Still higher than for their straight counterparts of course, due to the factors mentioned by the other posters.

Of course, this is a single study, but if we're trying to establish a universal average, its methodology seems much better than the self-reporting one of a single area that you cite - and the average it finds is, in my opinion, much more believable than the 250-1000 value that you give.

 

[seebs]

I would say that including bisexual and gay people in the same categories is probably a pretty serious sampling error too.

It also has the same problem as others; it doesn't do any kind of cluster analysis.

 

[DietCherryCola]

As people have said, men are different than women when it comes to sex. Women seek emotional satisfaction with sex; men just want the sex. (generalisation here, by the way).

There are good evolutionary reasons why this is the case. The sex drive comes out of the desire for children. Women have to put in a vast amount of effort to bring a child to term. All a man has to do is have sex. Thus, a woman seeks a man who will support her in this endeavour, and will require him to prove his loyality in various ways prior to permitting him to have sex with her.

Men will just seek sex. If the women control access to sex, then men will be forced to jump through hoops to get it.

However, if men control access to sex - as in homosexual relationships - then those hoops will dissapear.

It is pretty obvious, really.

Oh, please, we live in a society where third date = sex. It's not that hard for a man to get their evolutionary grove on.

Even if it's easier for gay men to find willing partners, it does not explain the enormous gap between 250 and 9. Or why men get married at all if they just have to spread their seed across the land.

 

[bammertheblue]

A discussion of the methodological flaws of this study:

(From http://www.jeramyt.org/gay/gayscience.html#myths )

"One study which appears to support the idea that homosexuals are highly promiscuous was published by Bell and Weinberg, and is often cited by the Christian Right, and even some secular sources. However, their data is highly suspicious, and cannot be generalized to the entire homosexual population.

Because of their methodology, their data is valuable only as a case study for the sample they studied, but it is not by any means representative of the general gay population. for my specific critique of this study, and why their statistics on gay promiscuity are so bizarrely high...

Bell and Weinberg. Homosexualities : A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women. New York, 1978 a.

The sampling of the homosexuals in the study was not random, and they admit as much. The heterosexual sample was random, using census data and land tracts to ensure a random sample, and going to exhaustive lengths to make sure those samples were truly random.

While they did go to great lengths to get a large sample group of homosexuals, and I don't doubt that their data is representative of the sample they were testing, their data is absolutely not generalizable due to the clear fact that their sample was not a random sample. b. Another reason why their data is not generalizable is that they while they did a survey of heterosexuals as well as homosexuals, for some reason they didn't include the heterosexual data.

For example, while they claim that one homosexual respondent claims to have had sex with over 10,000 people, and a large percentage of their sample claim to have had sex with over 500 people, they do not give correlative data on the heterosexual sample.

For all we know the heterosexual sample may have had a greater number of sexual partners than the homosexual sample. Without this control group, we cannot generalize their sample to the population at large, because we do not know that their population represents national norms since we have no heterosexual control group. It is possible that the heterosexual statistics were equally high, and could have shown that the data does not represent promiscuity specifically among gays, but of the sexually active single person in San Francisco in the 1970's."

[Paragraph breaks mine, to make it easier on the eyes].

Sorry for the length. This paper is very interesting.
So is this link: http://tps.stdorg.wisc.edu/TPS/facultysenate/chapter2.htm

 

[CSmrw]

If I, a married, heterosexual man in my late 30's, were a: unable to marry, b: forced for most of the last century to hide my feelings in all ways and c: were a part of a group that shared similar situations, I expect I would have easily passed the 1000 mark in just the twenty five years I have been sexually active. The stats are inherantly flawed as a comparison of general sexual behavior. It may be decades before anyone can possibly do any kind of comparisson between straight and gay people. It's nothing more than a study of a particular social set.

 

[NothingButTheBlood]

What I think he's saying is taht men are horny. And if women were as horny and willing to have sex as straight men, then we may see comparable figures for heterosexuals.

What about prostitutes? Men can have access to women when they want really.

 

[selfinflikted]

What about prostitutes? Men can have access to women when they want really.

no, not really. One doesn't find prostitutes everywhere, so that's not a valid argument.

 

[CSmrw]

no, not really. One doesn't find prostitutes everywhere, so that's not a valid argument.

Moreover, society frowns on prostitution, socially, ususally outlawing it completely, so that you not only run the risk of being found out and ridiculed or persecuted by your social group, you also run the ristk of actual penalties and a record. Again, if prostitutes were regulated and freely available, and I weren't married I would probably do two or three a week.

 

[DietCherryCola]

no, not really. One doesn't find prostitutes everywhere, so that's not a valid argument.

But it isn't too hard to find a one-night stand should you look for one. Women have casual sex, too, and more so now than ever.

The idea that straight men would have upwards of 250 partners if they only could is the invalid arguement, imo.

 

[DietCherryCola]

Moreover, society frowns on prostitution, socially, ususally outlawing it completely, so that you not only run the risk of being found out and ridiculed or persecuted by your social group, you also run the ristk of actual penalties and a record. Again, if prostitutes were regulated and freely available, and I weren't married I would probably do two or three a week.

So is having sex 1000 times with 1000 women more appealing to you than 1000 times with 1 woman?

 

[CSmrw]

So is having sex 1000 times with 1000 women more appealing to you than 1000 times with 1 woman?

I can't answer that. As a heterosexual male in a theistic and conservative society I have never had the opportunity to have sex with 1000 people. In my early twenties I was definitely unsatisfied with my sexual situation, but there wasn't much I could do about it. Since then I have mellowed quite a bit. This also skews my perceptions. On the whole I feel that I would be with the woman I married regrdless, and I would pay the price for her companionship by being faithful to her, regardless, because after this many years I can't imagine any other way of functioning. I don't think I would have minded an open marriage, but it was never offered.

 

[vitodabona]

So is having sex 1000 times with 1000 women more appealing to you than 1000 times with 1 woman?

The chase is better than the catch. It depends on what phase of life (the individual, etc ) your in, when your young it is all about conquest. (speaking in general)

 

[NothingButTheBlood]

I know Gene Simmons has bragged he has been with over 1000 women and has polariods of each one. Maybe it's a heterosexual thing only if your famous and women throw themselves at you. I know our little town has a house of ill repute and the police overlook it. Prostitues on the street too in certain areas.

 

[wblastyn]

Well yeah. That's my point.

People say that homosexual behavior is normal, but they're all doing this stuff, so how can it be normal?

ALL? How the frack do you know what ALL gay people are doing?

 

[keltic63]

but they're all doing this stuff, so how can it be normal?

Someone owes me some men!!!!!!!! I've got 1. I talked to my cousin (also gay) today and he was telling me that he's got no one. So where are all these "gays" who are "doing it" with 250-1000 men? Just doing the math for 1000 partners over the course of 20 years would mean that a guy would have to find a different partner once a week all year (with 2 weeks vacation from it) for those 20 years. That's a lot of work! I'm suddenly tired. I need a nap.

 

[wblastyn]

Someone owes me some men!!!!!!!! I've got 1. I talked to my cousin (also gay) today and he was telling me that he's got no one. So where are all these "gays" who are "doing it" with 250-1000 men? Just doing the math for 1000 partners over the course of 20 years would mean that a guy would have to find a different partner once a week all year (with 2 weeks vacation from it) for those 20 years. That's a lot of work! I'm suddenly tired. I need a nap.

Well the fact certain people actually believe ALL gay men have had 1000 partners suggests we shouldn't take certain people seriously. I mean if they believe that, what else do they believe lol.

 

[flicka]

ALL of them? Oh geeze..someone needs a dose of reality.