Love 'Em And Forget 'Em

Men sleep around more than women, right? Perhaps not, says one
researcher. He found that men seem to err on the high end when asked
about the number of sexual encounters they've had. Women, however, seem
to keep better track.

When asked, "How many partners have you had in your life?" two out
of three women said they remembered exactly and reported an average of
six people. Men "guessed" an average of 12 people, says Norman Brown,
Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. Brown
interviewed 1,100 people from Alberta, Canada, in a telephone
survey.

"It's not that men are lying, it's that men and women may be using
different [memory] strategies," says Brown. Men seem to use a rough
approximation to answer the question because they have not kept a mental
list of their lovers. Even in good faith, a rough guess will usually be
an overestimation, he says. Brown deduced that men were overestimating
the number of partners they'd had because in a large sample, men and
women should report roughly the same number of partners.

Brown honed in on male miscalculation because the number of overall
sexual partners was the only item on which men and women differed
substantially in the survey. Both sexes reported that they had slept with
roughly the same number of partners in the last year. The same percentage
engaged in risky sexual activity. Men and women even reported that on
average, they had sex the same number of times in the past month.

"Women tend to be more relational about sexuality," says Janet
Hyde, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and women's studies at the
University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the survey. She notes
that differing attitudes about sex may explain why men don't keep better
track of their bedroom activities. Men may have actually forgotten
individual partners, or it may have been too much effort to remember
accurately when put on the spot.