GAY PARTNERS….For some reason Eugene Volokh has recently gotten interested in the question of whether gay men have a lot more sexual partners than straight men. This isn’t something that I’ve ever looked into (or cared much about), but I have to admit that Eugene has found a couple of pretty egregious statistical abuses in this area:
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The 1992 edition of Masters & Johnson reports a median number of 250 partners for gay men. But it turns out this is based on a single 1970 study done in San Francisco that recruited subjects via means “such as public advertising, bars, personal contacts, gay baths, organizations, mailing lists, and public places.”
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Another book reported that “homosexual men . . . reported a median of 1,160 lifetime sexual partners.” But the original study referred to “homosexual men with AIDS.” That’s a pretty significant qualifier to eliminate with ellipses.
Eugene was presumably able to look up the original sources for these statistics because he has easy (and free) access to both a research library and online versions of scholarly journals. Most of us don’t.
There’s not much we can do about it either. So just let this be yet another lesson showing that you can’t believe everything you read.
Not that blog readers ever would anyway….
UPDATE: After reading through the comments, I’m feeling guilty for not posting the numbers that Eugene suggested were the most accurate he could find. I can’t vouch for these myself, but here they are:
|
Partners in |
Partners in |
Partners | |
|
Straight Men |
1.7 ? .3 |
4.8 ? .6 |
16.9 ? 3 |
|
Gay and Bisexual Men |
2.9 ? .8 |
16.7 ? 7 |
26.6 ? 11.5 |
|
Straight Women |
1.3 ? .1 |
2.2 ? .2 |
5.2 ? .6 |
|
Lesbian and Bisexual Women |
5.7 ? 7 |
10.1 ? 9 |
19.9 ? 10.5 |
The variances on some of these figures are so high that it’s hard to know how seriously to take them (5.7 ? 7 seems to indicate a negative number as the lower bound for one of them), but at any rate they are almost certainly a lot more realistic than the ones above.
