Sorry, yeah part of me wasn’t sure about that word.
I don’t see any reason not to count that as a sexual partner, unless you’re trying to weasel the number down for some reason. The way “virginity” is defined can be a bit more of a grey area, but “sexual partner,” at least how I’ve always read it, refers to a partner you do anything sexual with.
I knew I was paraphrasing a famous comedian, but couldn’t remember which one off the top of my head. Thank you!
Are a couple who’ve never met in person, but exchanged messages with sexual content, sexual partners?
Physically sexual. (I suppose the line doesn’t need to be drawn there, but that’s how I interpret it.)
Yeah, my take is that if you could plausibly have caught a sexually transmitted infection from that person, they count as a sexual partner. (Maybe make an exception for forms of herpes that are transmissible through kissing without other forms of contact, since I’m not sure merely smooching somebody fully clothed would count.)
I’ve pretty much always held that a reasonable number of sexual partners to have had is always one more than whatever I’m currently at.
It depends on what sex means to you. To a person for whom sex means profound intimacy or lifelong commitment, the answer is going to be very different than someone for whom sex is casual recreation.
- It’s the answer to everything.
I’m counting it. 
In a way, I completely agree with you. Yet, making love to someone is a very different experience from getting a handjob (taught you something, right ?). My point being, while I’d agree to consider all the women who skillfully used a part of their body to make me come as “sexual partners”, the ones I actually made love to have a special place in my… memories shall we say.
I’m only available between 2:00 and 2:15.
If we’re talking about heterosexual partners, the number would have to be pretty close to the same for men and women. Every time a man has sex with a different woman, that’s also a woman having sex with a different man. Divide the number of couplings by the number of men, and you get the average. If you have the same number of men and women (and it should be pretty close), they’d have the same number of average partners.
Same-sex pairings change the numbers. If gay men have more partners than lesbians, then men would average more partners than women.
How do we know it’s not the same woman having sex with all the different men? Couldn’t you theoretically have 100 men with one partner each and one woman with 100 partners?
AM, PM, or both?
Sure, but if there are 100 women and 100 men in the group and all hundred men have sex with one woman and the other 99 women don’t have sex at all, the “average”* number of partners for both men and women will be one- which shows that the average is kind of meaningless.
* “average” usually refers to “mean” unless otherwise specified
In fact, the actual numbers support the idea that men, overall, report having had more sexual partners than women do.
The link below cites a CDC study, which reported that men ages 25-44 report having had a median number of 6.1 partners, while women report having had a median of 4.2 partners.
The “median” is the number at which half of the population is reporting a number above that, and half is reporting a number below that. It’s a more meaningful measure than mean/average in this sort of case, because no one’s score can be below zero, but a minority of respondents with very high numbers pull the average score up disproportionately.
(Also, those medians don’t include people who have had zero sexual partners.)
In the study details, which are broken down by age group, by the time we get to the oldest group in the study (40-44 year olds), 39% of the men report having had 10 or more sexual partners over their lifetimes, while only half as many women (19%) report having had 10+ partners.
I would suspect that that study was blind/anonymous, but it may also be that some men are over-reporting their number of partners, while some women are under-reporting. It may also be that there is not a universal agreement on what does, or does not, qualify as a “sexual partner” (see discussion earlier in this thread).
1 woman having sex with 100 different men makes for 100 distinct couplings. Divide the number of couplings by the number of women (or men) and you get the average number of partners. In doreen’s example, the average (or mean, if you prefer) is 1 for both the men and the women.
To me, that’s where this question starts getting interesting. If you limit the question to heterosexual pairings, the math dictates that the average has to be about the same for men as it is for women. So why does a survey show higher numbers for men, and why do people seem to expect that the number will be higher for men.
Men in this society are often expected to be proud of having had sex with a lot of different partners, and women are often expected to be ashamed of it.
Or, as I see that you noted:
The CDC data doesn’t appear to make any distinction between hetero and gay respondents, while other data reported in the article found gay men to have 2.5X the number of partners as lesbians. That could account for the difference in the CDC report.
Math takes all the fun out of sex. 