Bitbitch writes:
> Listen.  If you pull numbers like that without a fact, the automagic
> assumption is yes, they were extracted out of your neither orifice.
> Point wasn't to conclude otherwise unless you had any relevant bits.
> Its not my job to do _your_ bit searching for you, but I figured I'd
> humor fork with this bit of finding:
>
> http://www.thebody.com/bp/apr01/research_notebook.html  (Pointing ot
> averages of about 13 for every 3 months (for gay men), which totals to
> about  52 a year.  52 a year doesn't equal 3000.   Or even 300.
Er, that study would seem to lend credence to Eugen's
estimations, rather than casting fresh doubts.
52 a year *does* exceed 300, in under 6 years' time. The average
age of that study's participants was *39* -- meaning some
participants may have had 20-25+ years of active sex life.
At that age, and further ** HIV+ **, it seems reasonable to
think that some the participants may have actually slowed
their pace a bit.
So while this study's summary info is incomplete, you could
easily conclude that the *average* participant in this one study
will have had over a thousand partners over a 40-50+ year active
sex life, and so the even-more-active tails of the distribution
could easily be in the 3000+ range.
Of course this says very little, almost nothing, about the overall
population behavior, gay or straight, and the relative prevalence
of 3K+ individuals in either group. But it does strongly suggest
that gay males with 3K+ partners exist in measurable numbers, so
people should stop treating Eugen's anecdotal estimation as if it
were sheer fantasy. BitBitch's own citation suggests otherwise.
- Gordon

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