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The argument that people are actually engaging in a certain behavior, but lie when asked about it, is the kind of argument which quickly leads to conspiracy theories. Sure, they could all be lying, but that’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.
That’s not my claim. My claim is that men have reason to lie upwards about body count, and women have reason to lie downwards about it. This is a well known effect in human sexuality research.
Alexander & Fisher (2003) https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/239672/original/Alexander%252B%252526%252BFisher%252B%2525282003%252529.pdf
I think my disclaimer is important when drawing conclusions from self-reported data about sexual behavior. I’m not committed to the “carousel” theory, as you argue against above, rather I’m surprised you would use that data without caveat.
I take that in to account.
“the reported number of partners female claim to have compared to men is lower, but we can normalize for that: around 30% of the men have 70% of the reported female sexual partners, and, likewise, around 30% of the women have 70% of the reported male sexual partners”
As long as there is correlation between the reported number of partners and actual number of partners, there is a pattern that there are about as many promiscuous women as promiscuous men. For 80/20 to be true, we would see just under 80% of men with low partner count and 20% of men with high partner count, but that’s not the pattern we see. 20% or so are virgins, about 50-60% have a handful of lifetime partners, and about 20-30% have a lot of partners. This is true for both women and men.
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