OKTrends has another great post, gay sex v. straight sex, analyzing data on millions of customers who use the dating site OKCupid. Here is one piece of the long post that I found surprising.
Another common myth about gay people is that they sleep around, but the statistical reality is that gay people as a group aren't any more slutty than straights.
Median Reported Sex Partners
- straight men: 6
- gay men: 6
- straight women: 6
- gay women: 6
Here's how the distribution curves compare:
- 45% of gay people have had 5 or fewer partners (vs. 44% for straights)
- 98% of gay people have had 20 or fewer partners (vs. 99% for straights)
It turns out that a tiny fraction of gays have single-handedly two-handedly created the public image of gay sexual recklessness–in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.
Interesting, but users of OkCupid are already a heavily selected group.
moreover, it's odd all groups agree on "6". Conforming to social norms > reporting the truth
Actually, contrary to my previous comment, I'm somewhat surprised that straight men and straight women reported the same median number of partners. That's some evidence in defense of this data, but I still don't trust it entirely.
Compare the "men seeking men" vs. "men (or women)seeking women†on craigslist in any city.
I don’t think this study is consistent with the differences we see there. Not that there is anything wrong with that!
moreover, it's odd all groups agree on "6". Conforming to social norms > reporting the truth
The *median* answer for all groups is six. Almost everyone gave a different answer.
Look at the chart. If the results here are based on a lying then it is impressively coordinated lying.
Yup. There are 2 big reasons why this data is bogus and they've already been mentioned.
What I would add: when someone uses clearly bogus data in an attempt to refute a common perception of a group, all it does is reinforce the perception of that group, in my opinion.
Lots of (fair) complaints here about why the data might be skewed, but then only anecdotes instead of data to make counter-claims.
If promiscuous people don't use Ok Cupid, then the fact that 2% of gay men have 23% of the sex is a lower bound.
Which would mean in the actual world, the distribution is probably even more skewed. Assuming that a small percentage of people have a large amount of the sex, within-group.
"Straight male and straight female averages are necessarily the same. This is reporting truth."
Perhaps you need to review the difference between a median and a mean.
"Look at the chart. If the results here are based on a lying then it is impressively coordinated lying."
Not really. If OKCupid has choices for how many partners (0,1-3,4-6,7+) then it would be easy for everyone who is really in the category 7+ to choose 4-6 for example. As others have pointed out, there is an incentive to misrepresent this data point on dating sites – and large misrepresentations would be encouraged if there are choices that cap-out at a relatively low number or jump considerably (if the choices are 0, 1-5, 6-10, 10-100, 100+ there are many people that might not want to choose either of the last two choices, even if true).
The worst part about this data for me is that there is no separation into age groups. Except those who marry young and stay married forever, it seems like sexual partners tend to rise with age. And unless those singles using OKCupid in their 30s and 40s are divorcees (who married young) who then abstain from sex with all their OKCupid dates & girl/boy-friends until they re-marry, I would be surprised if so many remained in the 0-6 range. Think of Sex & The City – were Carrie Bradshaw and her friends and boyfriends in the 0-6 range? How different would the median OKCupid person really be?
Color me skeptical of the data.
This level of inequality is completely intolerable. Congress needs to do something!
Think of Sex & The City – were Carrie Bradshaw and her friends and boyfriends in the 0-6 range?
Sex & The City was a TV show, i.e. fiction.
I think we're all missing the most important finding of these results:
The graph showing number of partners, gay and straight, satisfies the single-crossing property.
There is an obvious call for conditional probability here.
Do people who easily find an abundance of sex partners need an online dating site?
If not, then equal numbers are exactly what we should expect after culling out everyone else. In other words, these statistics are utterly meaningless, and to put stock in them would be misleading.
I'm not going to defend an okcupid poll as being the most statistically rigorous method of measuring promiscuity, but the primary reason commenters seem skeptical of the graph is that "everyone already know gay people are more promiscuous." Not a particularly convincing argument.
True, the sample is almost certainly skewed towards the young, urban, and technologically savvy. But it is still pretty solid evidence that among the subset of people that use okcupid, straight people and gay people are equally promiscuous: (1) It's got a sample size of millions; (2) Answers to the poll seem to be relatively honest, as shown by the equivalent results for straight men and straight women; and (3) No one has offered a remotely convincing explanation for why gay men alone would be motivated to under-report their actual number of partners, while lesbians and heterosexuals would all give truthful responses.
On a more different note — I am very skeptical of the claim that "promiscuous people don't use okcupid." It ain't eHarmony, or even match.com — the site is a facilitator of hook ups as much as anything. Okcupid users are probably more promiscuous, on average, than the general population.
Also, this statement:
"Read: Promiscuous gay people do not bother with OkCupid; there is no such thing as a promiscuous straight person, so therefore we are undercounting the group of people who are promiscuous (gay people)."
shows you are just paranoid. Someone makes a general claim, and YOU specialize it to gay people? There's nothing in the original comment that makes me conclude he intended what you are asserting. I imagine people on dating services are aware that they might suffer from adverse selection, and maintain a high level of screening, driving out people of all types, gay or straight, that might just be looking to hook up. If we don't have any information on what kind of data censoring is occurring, it makes sense to remain agnostic and not revise our beliefs based on a selected sample.
As I understand it, the stereotype is that men are more promiscuous than women in terms of desire, but that since it's easier to convince a man to have sex with you than to convince a woman to have sex with you, in practice gay men will tend to be more promiscuous than straight men.
Of course, an implication of this idea is that gay women should be less promiscuous than straight women (or gay or straight men). And since any promiscuous lesbians out there apparently aren't using OKCupid (because promiscuous people don't use dating sites) the difference ought to be particularly large in the OKCupid data. But it's not. The median number of sexual partners for gay women is the same as for straights and as for gay men.
I wonder how people skeptical of the survey results would account for this?
Steve,
To clarify, no, I don't believe that gay people are more promiscuous. It seems pretty obvious that in my original comment, I said your comment exhibited bigotry, which is adhering to pre-conceived ideas about a group despite contradictory evidence. I have no sense of whether gay or straight people should be more promiscuous; if you pressed me further, I'd have to say that they exhibit equal levels of promiscuity, simply because my prior is diffuse. Also, I don't think OK Cupid sheds light on this.
Now, before you go somewhere else with this, let me make my actual opinion clear. I agree, population percentages on OK Cupid agree with national population, according to the statistics you provide. But that doesn't mean that the slice of the population that engages in online dating is representative of the original population. If you wanted to prove that to me, we'd need either (i) some reasonable way of showing OK Cupid users could be considered a random sample or (ii) some way of showing that they are selected, but we can correct for the selection or that it isn't a big deal because despite my concerns, OK Cupid users actually are a pretty "average" bunch.
Now, I don't personally think you could do either of those things. Online dating connotes… I don't know what? Maybe you are too busy to meet people the old-fashioned ways, maybe you are more comfortable meeting people in low anxiety ways, maybe you express yourself better on the Internet, maybe you just have really bad social skills, or maybe you want to maximize the number of targets to maximize the number of hits and go for quantity of propositions rather than quality. I imagine there are many ways to construct arguments that the selection problems will lead to any result you want, so try this one: since gay people face social stigma, they find it safer to look for partners online where they can observe sexual preference, while straight people don't face the same problem, and only go to OK Cupid to hook up (leads to, "gays are more promiscuous than straights, since this IS their population, and it matches the promiscuous straight population"). Maybe everyone on OK Cupid is socially crippled, so the populations on there look like the true populations, but with the social butterflies sorted out (leads to, "the qualitative conclusions are fine as long as promiscuity scales up with socialness, whatever that means"). Maybe straight men are unsuccessful predators, straight women are straight-laced, so few "real" interactions occur, and the sample only describes hard-up straight guys and careful straight girls(leads to, "heterosexuals are more promiscuous than gays in the original population, since we only see failed heterosexual encounters and the original population is more successful at hooking up, but a representative slice of successful gay encounters"). I can go on all day, and maybe you can rule some of these stories out from the data and stats, but the point remains that you saying "it looks like you straight people have the market on promiscuity pretty much locked up" is offensive. Really. I promise.
On average, sure, but what's the distribution?
Yeah, but what is the life expectancy of the gays?
How many get hepatitis vs the total population?
Men generally inflate their sexual escapades, so I doubt this statistic for gay men is the result of guys suppressing their history.
And I don't find it hard to believe that promiscuity is limited to a small fraction of the demographic. For reasons I shouldn't have to spell out in detail, opportunity for promiscuous sex limited to those who are young and good-looking, or those who are rich. Most gays (as with most people) are neither.
As for AIDS stats, to contract the virus you don't have to have a lot of sex with different people; just a lot of (unprotected) sex with someone who is HIV+ (and may not know it).
It's worth noting that in gay men, as among southern Africans, the factor that allows for the rapid spread of HIV isn't so much promiscuity as it is simultaneous sexual relationships characterized by unsafe sex. The first three or so months after infection is both the time when one's most infectious (viremia) and the time when standard HIV tests don't pick up the virus. The result? Rapid spread.
As for the reduced numbers of partners, two factors which might be responsible for the decline in partners for gay men overall include the development of a dating culture in major gay metropoli and the inclusion of gays outside of these metropoli. Whether in reaction to the HIV/AIDS epidemic or the ability of young gay men to share in the culture of straights or decreased homophobia in cities directed towards out gay men or just for convenience's sake, interest in developing stable relationships surged. As for the highly visible gay culture in First World metropoli in the 1970s, it was an anomaly; most gays at the time were in the closet, or not living in the urban fast lane. As coming out become more possible and migration to major cities less necessary, the numbers also shifted here.
Please note that it only takes ONE sexual partner to contract HIV. Promiscuity may heighten your chances but the number of people with whom a person has intercourse is not the reason why a person contracts HIV.
Also, if you notice, it seems like regardless of orientation, we can all agree that MEN tend to have more partners than women. Due in part to men's tendency to overreport and women's tendency to underreport. Take it at face value – a certain sample group reported similar numbers, which evidences that within that sample group, gay folks and straight folks aren't that different – and maybe that's why these particular individuals are on this dating site.
So quit using ignorance to state that "it's still different out in the real world" and "the gays are still worse," you just look dumb.
"the number of people with whom a person has intercourse is not the reason why a person contracts HIV"
This is pretty dumb.
"we can all agree that MEN tend to have more partners than women"
Actually, evidence is a large portion of men have very few partners, while the girls are always willing and able to romp with a sexier man.
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Thanks for this kind article the Gay Sex Statistics that you have given in this article are very good.
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