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From fork-admin@xent.com  Sat Sep  7 21:54:10 2002

Definitional nit to pick:
Robert Harley writes:
> It is perfectly obvious that (heterosexual) promiscuity is exactly,
> precisely identical between males and females.
>
> Of course the shapes of the distributions may differ.
You've redefined "promiscuity" above as "total" or "average"
activity, which seems to rob it of its common meaning:
activity above some specific threshold (usually "one") or
norm, or involving extra or indiscriminate variety.
"Promiscuity" is thus inherently a description of
distributions rather than averages.
Consider a population of 3 males and 3 females. Let
there be three pairings which result in each person
having sex once. Then, let one of the males also have
sex with the other two females.
Sure, the average number of sex acts and sex partners
is equal between the sexes, tautologically.
But here more women than men are:
- above the single partner threshold
- above the overall average 1.67 acts/partners threshold
- above the overall median 1.5 acts/partners
- above the overall mode 1 acts/partners
And here women have a higher mode (2) and median (2)
number of partners.
So in this contrived population, females are more
"promiscuous" than males, unless "promiscuity" is
defined uselessly.
- Gordon