Dr. Andrew Smiler checks the numbers and finds that most guys aren’t promiscuous.
Guys are promiscuous. They want sex, not relationships, and they’re only looking to score. At the cultural level, and for many people in the culture, that’s what we believe.
But is it really true? Many of the guys I know don’t fit that profile. Most of the guys in my fraternity didn’t fit that profile, even though we fit other stereotypes about fraternities quite well. (Don’t walk barefoot in the house. Trust me. You don’t want your feet on that carpet.)
It certainly doesn’t fit the teen boys and young men I see for therapy. Many are in committed relationships. Some are looking for partners and that’s why they come to therapy. I don’t think I’ve ever had a client complain about an inability to hook up, nor have I ever had a dude start therapy because he couldn’t find someone to get laid. (If the Isla Vista shooter had come to therapy because he couldn’t hook up, would it have made a difference?)
But that’s just guys who choose to come to me for therapy. What do the numbers say?
Let’s start with the number of partners a guy says he wants. After all, fantasy tells us what a dude would want without the pragmatic constraints of having to find a partner. According to Sexual Strategies Theory (SST), developed by David Buss and David Schmitt, this is exactly the question to ask. And SST’s proponents have asked this question a lot.
Mostly, they’ve asked it to college students. And really, who better than a bunch of unmarried 18 to 21 year old men who are living on college campuses, away from parental supervision, and with fairly easy access to a slew of unmarried and unsupervised people their same age who are also unsupervised. If there were ever a group of guys who could fantasize about getting laid – and possibly even do it – undergraduates are the group. So when researchers hand out anonymous surveys and ask these young men how many sexual partners they want in the next month, what do you think they say? It turns out that about 25% of these guys say they want 2 or more partners in the next 30 days. 25%, or 1 guy in 4. That’s a minority of all guys. If you were in a two person election and only got 25% of the votes, that would be embarrassing.
If there were ever a group of guys who could fantasize about getting laid–and possibly even do it–undergraduates are the group, yet only 25% say they want multiple partners in the short term.
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But hey, perhaps those survey-taking undergrads are shy or don’t want to somehow look bad in front of the researchers. (Are young men really concerned about that? On anonymous surveys?) And really, maybe we shouldn’t pay attention to what they say, maybe we need to focus on what they do. Other researchers, from public health to psychology, have asked the question for decades: how many sexual partners have you had in the last year? Among 18-29 year olds, whether college students or not, about 15 to 20% of guys have had 3 or more partners in the last year. If you think about it, 3 partners per year isn’t that many; it’s a new partner every 4 months. That doesn’t even require a hookup, although it doesn’t say much for staying power. 15% (or so). That’s about 1 guy in 6 or 7.
If we really want to know about male promiscuity, we shouldn’t stop there. I mean, it’s one thing for a guy to have a year where he has a couple of partners, but if we think promiscuity is the end-all and be-all of male sexuality, then guys should have multiple partners year after year after year. We’ve got those stats too: about 5%. Yep, 1 guy in 20 has three or more partners for three consecutive years. That’s truly a small percentage of guys.
So why do we think guys are only interested in sex? The 25-15-5 numbers for males are about 5 times the rate for women answering the same questions, so there’s a rather substantial male vs. female difference. If you focus on the difference without noticing the low base rates, it seems like men and women want very different things. But that’s not the case; the reality is that the male vs. female difference is due to a minority of guys.
Maybe we’ve bought our own hype. Fifty years ago, we didn’t think “nice guys” were promiscuous. Then we met James Bond, Fonzie, Hawkeye Pierce, and a parade of others ever since.
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Maybe we’ve bought our own hype. Fifty years ago, we didn’t think “nice guys” were promiscuous. Then we met James Bond, Fonzie, Hawkeye Pierce, and a parade of others ever since. They were good guys, the stars of the show and we liked them. Since then, promiscuity alone isn’t enough to make a male character unlikeable anymore.
And Science says so! At least SST, which is part of the Evolutionary Psychology movement, says so. But as we’ve already discussed, their numbers are low. Besides, if guys were just roving inseminators, then who were the dudes who stayed home and provided for the women and children? Were there really only a handful of them?
If we really want to understand the realities of male sexuality and stop being scared of it, then let’s stick to the numbers. Study after study after study, from a variety of fields, and across decades of research, all point to the same conclusion: only a minority of guys are promiscuous or want to be. If you’re in that minority, good for you (and use a condom). If you’re in the majority, good for you (and use condoms). It’s time we all recognize that there are (at least) two ways guys approach their sex lives and stop teaching guys–and the people who partner up with them–that most guys only want sex.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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“Guys are promiscuous. They want sex, not relationships, and they’re only looking to score. At the cultural level, and for many people in the culture, that’s what we believe.”
Yes, but wanting sex is not the same as wanting an endless stream of different partners.
Unless you claim that a happy, fulfilling, and frequent sexlife is an anomaly in any longterm relationship…
To elaborate to some degree on my previous post.
I think that simply asking how many partners guys would like to have is at best irrelevant and maybe even misleading to the subject at hand.
I’m firmly convinced that even among guys with a higher than average sexdrive, the majority is vastly more concerned about the quality and frequency of the sex itself, than about the number of partners they manage to rack up.
FlyingKal, but men’s relationships to pornography doesn’t exactly give off the impression that men care about quality and frequency over quantity and variety.
I’m glad to see people thinking about the time factor, e.g. “per year.” Otherwise the absolute numbers are pretty meaningless. I’ve seen articles debating how what number counts as “promiscuous” without taking into account the age of a person — clearly articles written for a very young audience.
“10 partners” means very little by itself. 10 partners in a weekend is very different from 10 partners over 30 years.
Erin, I am a 20 year old undergraduate student. I just came out of a three year relationship a few months ago. I decided that I was going to simultaneously break-up with pornography. Sex tends to be the last thing on my mind. I, for one, am more interested in forming a strong, lasting, intimate, and healthy relationship – rather than random tinder hookups and porn. However, since you learn so much about yourself during a breakup, I have been putting myself first. I am more engaged in my school work as well as fitness and extracurricular activities.
Mark, you make me wish I was 10 years younger! You’re exactly the kind of man I am looking for. Someone that values in a strong, lasting, intimate and healthy relationship over the shallow and fleeting. That invests his time and energy in things he cares about. Thank you for the response. It makes me feel hopeful.
Andrew, I would be interested in the role pornography pays on these numbers. How much are men using pornography as a substitute for variety, quantity and numbers in regards to women?
That’s an interesting question Erin and I don’t know that we have a good answer. I can say that data regarding # partners/year have produced the same numbers since the 1990s, which makes me think online porn hasn’t changed the big picture. At the same time, there are probably guys who are satisfied with the internet’s endless variety and choose to stay home, while other guys are inspired by that variety and try to hookup more..
Wasn’t online porn around in the 90s?? The internet was around in the 90s. It might not have been as prolific as it clearly is now but it was still around. I think we would need to examine years prior to get a better picture of how men’s relationship with themselves, women and sex have changed due to pornography. You say internet porn hasn’t changed the big picture. But if guys are choosing to stay home for the endless variety or even if they are choosing to hookup more because of it, clearly online porn is affecting their choices either… Read more »
I do not know if anyone has studied the role of pornography and its effect on seeking sexual interactions in general. However, the Malcolm and Naufal paper did try to argue that the availability of pornography as an alternative method of sexual gratification made men less inclined to marry. Specifically, they concluded “Using the bivariate probit model, each 1% increase in propensity to look at pornography is associated with a 0.6% decline in the probability of being married.” http://ftp.iza.org/dp8679.pdf http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/21/americans-arent-getting-married-and-researchers-think-porn-is-part-of-the-problem/ Since the reason pornography allegedly dissuades men from marriage is because it provides lower-cost sexual gratification, then presumably it may… Read more »
I’ll have to take a closer look at the studies, but my first reaction is that it takes TWO people to be married. If watching porn makes a man less likely to be married, that may be much more to do with women’s choices than with his choices. We can’t conclude that men who are less likely to be married are men who are less likely to WANT to be married. By the same token, the number of sexual partners a young man has isn’t necessarily the number of partners he WANTS to have. It’s possible that young men are… Read more »
I am not vouching for the validity of Malcolm and Naufal’s paper about pornography’s alleged effect on marriage. I do know that anti-pornography advocates did bandy about its results as some great revelation. I think the premise makes sense on an intuitive level. Sexual gratification is usually one reason that men seek marriages and relationships. If they can now obtain such gratification elsewhere with less risk and cost than is required for marriages and relationships, then perhaps some men will forego or neglect seeking such relationships or marriages. but my first reaction is that it takes TWO people to be… Read more »
“If watching porn makes a man less likely to be married, that may be much more to do with women’s choices than with his choices.” How so? I think all you got to is actually talk to women, especially women that grew up in the inbetween times before the internet and after, and women who were sexually active in the 90s compared to the 2000s to see how men’s sexuality has changed due to pornography. As I’m one of those women on the tale end of the 90s, I saw a marked difference in men and sexuality because of porn.… Read more »
Some women may not wish to marry or be in a relationship with a man who views pornography. And I am sure you would agree that women may have many good reasons for deciding that way.
Hi Megladon Do men get married because of sex? All over the Western world the marriage rate is falling but couples still set up house and live together , cohabit or committ to each other and choose to live apart but be commited . What I try to say is that maybe we should not be so focused on if men marry or not but if they committ or not. In my country 70% of those living together under age 30 they are not married. We do not know if they will choose to marry later on. They do have… Read more »
Do men get married because of sex? Not solely for it, but historically, sexual gratification was one of marriage’s biggest selling points. Marriage is certainly not the only relationship that can involve emotional connection and intimacy. What traditionally set marriage apart from other relationships (parental, sibling, platonic) is that sexual activity was an expected part of it. Perhaps we will see a rise of celibate marriages. If marriage was once the primary, legitimate means of obtaining sexual gratification and now there are many alternate means of doing so, it is plausible that some people may choose not to marry. Marriage… Read more »
“Do men get married because of sex?”
I don’t know, but I think very few men get married in spite of it.