The simplistic account is that eighty percent of women are having sex, and twenty percent of men are having sex – a hell of a lot of sex.
It kind of feels as if it is true, it is emotionally true, but it is not literally true. The number of men and women getting sex is not hugely different. More woman are having sex than men, and substantially more women are having regular sex with a regular partner than men are having regular sex with a regular partner (reflecting substantial levels of polygyny), but not hugely more, the numbers are not all that different.
What, however, makes the simplistic account feel true, is that ninety percent of men never get to pop a virgin. Every man, except for a rather small handful of men, are getting sloppy seconds. There is not a huge asymmetry as to how many men are getting sex compared to how many women, not a huge asymmetry as to how many men are in a sexual relationship as compared with the number of women in a sexual relationship. Rather the problem is that we don’t see virgins entering relationships with other virgins, and then having sex with each other. This is the huge inequality between men and women, and between the vast majority of ordinary males, and the small minority of males that females notice – the problem is that almost every women gets popped by a high status alpha male, while very few men get to pop a hot virgin. (more…)
