So
Have I shagged Paris Hilton or haven't I?
The average Brit shags 2.8m people during his or her lifetime, albeit indirectly, according to a handy "Sex Degrees of Separation" calculator from Lloyds Pharmacy. According to the Telegraph, the calculator uses data gleaned from 6,000 British adults, with blokes on average boasting nine sexual partners, and women 6.3 lovers …
The current one? Or the one mentioned last month:
73% of Brits too shagged for a shag (10 August 2009)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/10/fitness_survey/
What this means that only 27% of Brits are shagging each other and that amounts to 2.8m? Serious chances of in-breeding there.
Given approximately equal numbers of males and females in a population the following is dubious.
"According to the Telegraph, the calculator uses data gleaned from 6,000 British adults, with blokes on average boasting nine sexual partners, and women 6.3 lovers."
Of course it could be that it is the median they are referring to and not the average (a few, very, very active females would skew it, rasing the average but not the median - prostitution being the most obvious factor). Or it might be that there's a large number of homesexual male partners in those stats. Or maybe British men are going abroad for these extra encounters. Or maybe it's a sampling error or perhaps poor recall - or male boasting, or women with selective memories.
In any event, as is usual with these things, these are stats of highly doubtful accuracy.
...blokes have nine sexual partners, yet women make do with just 6.3 lovers? Well, I can account for the 0.3 (not speaking personally, natch) but are we to assume that each of us blokes sleep with 2.7 other men? The alternative is that men over-estimate and I can't see that happening; I've told by son a million times that exaggeration is just plain wrong.
Paris icon - you didn't expect anything less, did you?
Insert your own (fnarr, fnarr) punchline about 6.3 as an average here.
Surely if men average 9 sexual partners and and women average 6 sexual partners, then it begs the question, who are these 3 other sexual encounters with?
Actually a couple of studies have shown that in these types of survey, women tend to lie about their partner count. When these questionaires are repeated with the same woman attached to a lie detector, the numbers are generally in line with the male answers.
All those people querying the hetro/gay crossover quantiities should apply for a job with the Scottish Government.
Go to their website and download an application form. Under their discrimination section, you are asked your sexual orientation:
1. Heterosexual
2. Gay
3. Lesbian
4. Bisexual
5. Transgender
6. Other
Other ? OTHER? wtf is other ????
Now I know some smartarse will suggest sheep, however since that's not legal, I think we can discount that from the diversity monitoring.
OK, this seems like a standard graph theory problem, and unless some arbitrary limit is set on the graph diameter, it would seem likely that there is one main isolated sub-graph covering the majority of the sexually active population, with a large number of small isolated two-person subgraphs where people are still doing it the old-fashioned way (virgin+virgin), and of course a very large number of isolated individuals (Reg readers? ;-).
It would be interesting to know if there are significant numbers of isolated sub-graphs of N>2, but my instinct would be that they would end up connected to the main graph in almost all cases, especially if the average vertex connectivity is somewhere between 6 and 9.
So to get 2.8m they must have limited the diameter of the graph by some number of "degrees of separation" - maybe the classic six?
Doh! I should have read the linked site: They are indeed using "six degrees of separation" (graph diameter from target individual) - but why? This is arbitrary. OK, six edges is supposed to get you to anyone in the world in terms of people you _know_, but there's no reason to limit to this when calculating the other way.
The real question is whether you're on (one of the?) main graph(s) or not, and my hunch would be the largest of these probably contains a significant proportion of the _global_ population.
It seems to me that there is no way of knowing overlap. If person A slept with B and C, who both slept with D, Then from A's perspective D gets counted twice. So the estimate ends up high.
But then, D could have slept with E, who slept with F as well, and so on and so on. And on and on. And on. So the esitmate ends up low, because it doesn't come up with the complete population of adults who have ever slept with anyone.
Since the estimate is both too high and too low, it is wrong.
It even gets it wrong if you say you've had no sexual partners:
"You have had 0 indirect and direct sexual partners.
Based on information entered into this calculator, people in your age group have had -944,723 indirect sexual partners"
Other...
Asexual (preference for no sexual contact - as opposed to no preference, which would be bisexual)
Then there are all the specialists - leather, discipline, etc, where it isn't the partner that drives the participation, but the tools.
Which of course might be where Boots' 'plug' comes in.
Oh, I've chosen the icon, because the alt text starts with 'man the pumps' which seems appropriate somehow.
Having been to the GUM clinic I'd probably pay £75 for a check. But only to save the hassle of going to hospital, finding and paying for parking, sitting around for ages in a room full of other people all wondering what everyone else is in for and trying not to feel embarrassed when someone gets called by their number which is waaaay lower than everyone else's... So yeah, £75 got to be worth it for me.
More thoughts: In terms of what matters for sexual health, it's actually rather more complex, because transmission of STDs is not retroactive - only sexual partners they had before (or simultaneously?) count. This means that in flooding a graph to find the connected sub-graph from a target individual you have to prune any edges from a vertex that happened later than the ingress edge - that reduces the size of the graph somewhat. I think that's probably why they ask you for the ages of the partners at the last time you shagged them - so they can estimate a proportion (left-skewed?) of the average number of partners according to their age.
The other thing that I've been wondering about is the spread across generations. The graph probably becomes denser within an age group, but I wonder which age group has the densest graph (highest average number of parners) - is it the twenty-somethings now who are shagging like mad, or the forty-somethings who used to shag like mad when they were 20 but have now had more time to top up a bit more?
Of course, there is blurring between age groups as well. This may make it possible that the Nth member of your graph is not Paris H but Maggie T. Sorry.
>> Go to their website and download an application form. Under their discrimination section,
>> you are asked your sexual orientation:
>> 1. Heterosexual
>> 2. Gay
>> 3. Lesbian
>> 4. Bisexual
>> 5. Transgender
>> 6. Other
>>
>> Other ? OTHER? wtf is other ????
Abstinent? Or perhaps someone who 'loves' bicycles or other inamimate objects.
"You have had 0 indirect and direct sexual partners.
Based on information entered into this calculator, people in your age group have had -944,723 indirect sexual partners"
944,723 is how many people in the UK, on average, would have liked to take the cherry, or whatever the saying is?
About the 9 for blokes against 6.3 for the broads: there is absolutely no problem with that. Actually it could even be an average of 0.01 or lower for women and 5000 for men, it would still be possible. It only takes 5000 women who spend their whole life in bed (or on the copier) while the others enter convent. Or there could be more women than men around. Or there could be more gay men than gay women. Or gay men could tend to swing more.
Was a complete shag-fest. 30 in the first 2 years, and all of them with someone else, rather than Mrs Palm and her 5 daughters. One of my colleagues got picked up in a bar about 10p.m. by a fit-looking bird, took her to his hotel room to do the dirty deed. Met up with him again in the hotel night-club at 2am, then he picked up another. First bird introduced them, natch. NOT unusual. "More tea, vicar"? becomes "Another shag, foreigner"?
Dammit, once a month makes me feel dirty and used. Nowadys.
I'd recommend a holiday in Finland for all the blokes with hairy palms. (Dammit - blew my anonymity...). If you don't get laid here, you must be gay. errrr....OK. Got me coat. Icon's obvious.
Assuming an average lifespan of say 86 years, (of which 70 years are hard at work, so to speak) and taking into account 365.25 days per year on average, then we get 365.25 * 70 = 25567.5 days
So 2800000 people divided by 25567.5 days is 109.5 people per day. So assuming 9.5 hours of vigorous exertion per day, (and the remaining time for food/sleep/coma) its an average of 11.5 per hour, so 5.2 minutes each.
Wow, I have to go, I need to keep up my quota! (which is one way of saying it).
Thumb up icon, as it'll be the only thing I will have strength to lift up by the end of today!
When I went to do the test and entered my age and the number of partners (over 50) the calculator announced it couldn't do the calculation.
Made me feel quite the stud.
It would be interesting to see the algorithm. It would have to weight the average number of encounters for each partner since the highly promiscous are likely to have more sex with the highly promiscous than others, and also whether the encounters were homo or heterosexual (and discount the figures for the number of sheep shagged).