Women Fake Sex Numbers

16/07/03

Mark Henderson

WOMEN are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives.

They are so concerned about society's dim view of female promiscuity that they routinely claim to have slept with fewer partners than they actually have.

Men are more honest, accurately reporting their true number of partners, despite social pressure to look like a Don Juan.

The findings of a US study offer the best explanation yet for a paradox that has baffled psychologists since sex surveys began in the 1960s.

Heterosexual men routinely report they have slept with more partners than do women. These figures, however, are statistically impossible - the average for both genders should be about the same.

Women are serial liars when it comes to sex. Not only do they "forget" about certain partners, but they also add years to the age at which they lost their virginity, and refuse to tell the truth about masturbating or using pornography.

The results, published in the Journal of Sex Research, suggest the sexual proclivities of men and women are much closer than traditional research has indicated.

"Women are so sensitive about being labelled 'sluts' or 'whores' that they are very reluctant to be honest about their sexual behaviour, even in supposedly anonymous surveys," said Terri Fisher, who led the study at Ohio State University. "You would assume that when a heterosexual man has sex, a woman is having sex at the same time, but the statistics always suggest otherwise. That can't be true. We thought males would be over-inflating their experience while females under-report it, but that's not what we found."

In the study, Dr Fisher and Michele Alexander, of the University of Maine, asked 96 men and 105 women, all of whom were heterosexual students between the ages of 18 and 25, to answer questions about their sex lives under three different conditions. Members of one group were left alone in a room, and told their answers would be completely anonymous. A second group filled in the same questionnaire, but respondents were told a researcher was watching the survey and could match their face to their form.

With the final group, the scientists attached electrodes to the volunteers' necks, forearms and hands, and told them they were being wired to a lie detector test.

Those women who thought they were being watched reported an average of 2.6 sex partners, compared with 3.4 in the anonymous group. Those who thought they were attached to a lie detector were still more forthcoming, giving an average of 4.4 partners. There was no such spread among the men. Those on the dummy polygraph claimed four partners, compared with 3.7 for the other groups - a difference that is not statistically significant.