Oldest profession may explain why studies show men have more sex partners

WASHINGTON -- For years scientists have puzzled over why surveys show that the overall population of men has more sex partners than does the women's population. It should come out even.

Now they think they have the answer: The surveys didn't measure the activity of prostitutes.

"The number of partners that (heterosexual) men have had must be equal to the number of partners that (heterosexual) women have had," said Devon Brewer of the University of Washington. "Each new partner for a man is also a new partner for a woman. So, in reality, it must be equal. By definition."

But the General Social Surveys, conducted by the University of Chicago, and the National Health and Social Life Survey, financed by private foundations, found that men were claiming up to 74 percent more partners than women.

The government uses this data to design public health programs to combat sexual diseases.

Brewer said social scientists, scrambling to explain the embarrassing inconsistency, suggested that either survey subjects were lying or there was some fundamental flaw in the way the data was being collected.

"One explanation was that men are boasting or bragging about their number of partners and that women were being modest," Brewer said.

That may be a factor, he said, but a study he co-wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the biggest cause of the discrepancy is that the surveys ignored the professionals: women who perform sex for profit.

"We found these high-activity women, prostitutes, were inadvertently excluded by the design of the surveys," said Brewer, whose study appears today in the academy journal.

Brewer said the national surveys sought answers from people who lived in "households," and left out dwellings like jails, motels, shelters and rooming houses where prostitutes are more apt to be.

Also, in order to find people in the households, the surveyors rang doorbells during evening hours, and on weekends and holidays. Although those are the times when most people are at home, they are also the times when most prostitutes are working, Brewer said.

To test this theory, Brewer and his colleagues analyzed other studies to gain an estimate that there are about 23 prostitutes for every 100,000 people in America.

A second study, Brewer said, concluded that the average prostitute had 694 male partners a year.

"That is an average," Brewer said. "Some have far more and some have far fewer, but that is a representative sample."

Applying these estimates of prostitute activity to the national surveys put the final numbers for sexual partners about into equal balance between the genders, Brewer said.

Male prostitutes, he said, were not included because "we believe that is quite rare. There is not a big market out there for women to buy sex from men."

Tom Smith, director of the General Social Surveys at the University of Chicago, said Brewer's study "offers a likely explanation for at least part of the discrepancy," but that there are also other factors.

The General Social Surveys, first published in 1988, are paid for, in part, by the National Science Foundation. Smith said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses the data to help design and target public campaigns to control sexually spread diseases.

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