Other People's Sex Life Isn't What You Think

Other People's Sex Life Isn't What You Think

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Research shows that we think teens are having more sex than they really are. Men, in particular, have a distorted understanding of the sex life of young women.

The results of the research and consultancy company Ipsos on misperceptions were collected in the book The Perils of Perception.

As part of the research, people living in the UK and the USA were asked to estimate how much sex their 18-29 age group in their home country had had in the last month.

The average estimate in both countries focused on young men having sex 14 times a month. However, detailed studies of sexual behavior showed that the real number was five in the UK and four in the USA.

So while people think that young men have sex every other day or 180 times a year, the real figure is around 50 per year.

However, this is not the only error in our estimates. In both countries, men have a greater misconception about the sex life of young women.

Because men in the UK estimated that these women had sex 22 times a month, and those in the USA 23 times. Yet studies show that young women have sex, on average, about five times a month.

One of the reasons behind this mistake is our way of thinking, and the other is the information conveyed to us about this issue.

Benchmarking problem

Everyone knows that the continuation of our lineage depends on sex. But our perceptions on this subject contain many mistakes. Because while other people can get a better idea of ​​social norms about their behavior through observation, the same is not true for sex that takes place behind closed doors. The kind of sex acts that everyone can watch, on the other hand, do not represent the real norms correctly.

Because we can't find the right information with which we can make real-life comparisons, we turn to other sources, male conversations, questionable surveys, obscene media and porn. These, on the other hand, distort our perception of reality, as they contain extreme examples and controversial anecdotes.

Number of sexual partners

In the same study, people from three countries were asked to estimate the number of sexual partners aged 45-54 years had ever had. For men, these estimates were quite close to the truth.

According to the self-report of men in Australia and England, they had an average of 17 sexual partners by the time they reached the age of 45-54, and 19 in the United States, and the estimates on this subject were correct.

But when we compare men and women, we see that the situation is completely different, that the average number of sexual partners expressed by women is much less than men estimated.

According to women's self-reports, the average number of sexual partners is half the number of men's sexual partners. But here a statistical impasse arises. These numbers have to match.

Among the reasons for this can be counted as the fact that men resort to paid sex, and that men and women evaluate certain sex practices differently.

However, the biggest factor in the emergence of this difference is that men tend to inflate the figure consciously or unconsciously, while women, on the contrary, tend to decrease this figure.

Prejudices Against Women

Data from the USA also showed that there was a large difference between men and women in the estimates made on women. Men estimated women's number of sexual partners to be 27, while women thought of it as 13, which was pretty close to the real average of 12.

In the sample of 1,000, as many as 20 American men estimated the number of sexual partners for women to be 50, leading to an increase in the overall average.

These misconceptions reveal a lot about how we see the world. It offers serious clues to our deep-seated biases, as we automatically, without thinking, make our predictions of what is 'normal'.

The estimates in this study indicate the existence of misconceptions about youth and women, especially among a small fraction of men.

Like other misperceptions, what needs to be done here is not to pump data to correct these wrongs, but to address their underlying causes.