(Can anyone see the flaw I think I see in these statistics?)
John Watson
August 17, 2007
MEN are more promiscuous than women. Almost every survey, in every country, finds men have more sexual partners than women. A recent US Federal Government study concluded the average heterosexual man had had seven female sex partners; his female counterpart had had four male partners. The disparity was greater, 12.7 partners to 6.5, in a British study. Intuitively, this seems right. It even makes sense that men should act in a way that spreads their genes widely, whereas women want the stability of a single partner to maximise their success in raising children. Except it’s all a myth.
An article in The New York Times not only shows why the study findings are wrong, but also how powerful such myths can be, even when they can be logically disproved. In this case, it’s a matter of mathematical logic. The population contains roughly equal numbers of men and women. As neither gender can have a heterosexual encounter without the other’s involvement, every sexual partnership for a man, regardless of individual tallies, also counts as one on the side of women.
Emeritus professor of mathematics David Gale, of the University of California, Berkeley, offers the “High School Prom Theorem” as illustration: “We suppose that on the day after the prom, each girl is asked to give the number of boys she danced with. These numbers are then added up, giving a number G. The same information is then obtained from the boys, giving a number B. Theorem: G=B. Proof: Both G and B are equal to C, the number of couples who danced together at the prom. Q.E.D.”
I found this simple mathematical proof compelling, but not so some of my colleagues, who were reluctant to let go of long-held social beliefs. The answer just seemed wrong.
The Times quotes Gale on a crucial consequence of this: even a baseless myth has a real-world impact. He suggests stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females are so ingrained in this understanding that they influence survey respondents’ answers: men, believing they should have more partners, inflate the number; women, not wanting to be thought a slut, minimise it. Gale concludes the myth creates “a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy”.
Few areas of understanding/misunderstanding exemplify this better than politics, which abounds with apparently vote-changing arguments and beliefs that should not survive were they subject to logical examination, or just checked against the empirical evidence. The debates on economics, for instance, reek of inconsistencies. For all the talk of the changing demography of Australia, the mathematical reasons for record low unemployment and other changes in employment patterns are widely discounted.
Those who pay attention to such things might recall reading this in The Age of April 4, 2001: “Before this decade is out, the greatest problem to bedevil our economy for the past quarter of a century — chronic unemployment — is likely to be solved. Indeed, it will have been replaced by the opposite problem: widespread shortages of labour … between 2005 and 2010 we should see officially recorded unemployment falling — and falling simply because of demographic change.”
For all columnist Ross Gittins’ powers of insight, this was not a miraculous prophecy. The development was inevitable: it was made so by the mathematical logic of the numbers of retiring baby boomers and widening shortfalls in the numbers replacing them in the workforce — falling 170,000 short of the pre-2001 recruitment average by 2020. Similarly, decades of high unemployment coincided with the prime working years of the baby-boomer population bulge.
One political truism does not even require number-crunching for its logical limitations to be exposed. We hear after 11 years of Coalition government that Labor lacks the experience to run the economy. After 13 years in office, Labor asked: what experience did Peter Costello have in running the economy? (Answer: none. And John Howard’s experience as treasurer in the Fraser government, including the 1982-83 recession, was not to be recommended.)
The problem with this argument is that logically it means that once a government has been in office long enough, no opposition can ever be qualified to replace it. That is an unsustainable proposition for a democracy. But if men can be labelled promiscuous all these years, it shouldn’t surprise that political myths and stereotypes often escape proper scrutiny.
John Watson is a senior writer.
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