Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men.
Of course, the study reports how many sexual partners participants said they had had, not how many they wanted. Since it was filtered for an all-heterosexual population, the fact that men and women have about the same number of sexual partners (duh) doesn't tell us anything about whether one sex wants more than the other.
Link to the original study: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224490309552164
As far as to the sample they studied:
An initial sample of 248 male and female undergraduates at a regional campus of a Midwestern university participated as partial fulfillment of a research requirement in their Introductory Psychology course. To keep the sample somewhat homogenous, we used only data from unmarried, heterosexual, 18- to 25-year-old participants.
On a lighter side, this study reinforces (by a small quantity, due to all the caveat outlined in the comments) my idea that women are as promiscuous as men, but they are culturally forced to lie about that: not really big news.
On a more interesting side, the "fake lie detector" is another one of the techniques that are used to circumvent lies that occur even in anonymous surveys: the first that I heard of, anyway, was employed in a survey regarding illegal owning/hunting/farming of something in some parts of Africa (yes, I've lost almost all the details: can someone point me to the original article?). It consisted of telling people that for some answers, you need not to answer truthfully, instead you needed to throw secretly a dice and report the answer that came up. Apparently this, instead of randomizing the answer, gave the 'farmer' an excuse to tell the truth (yes, I really need to dig up the source).
ETA: see Alicorn's comment for the exact reference.
Surely the mean number of sexual partners must be equal for both genders, unless one is numerically larger?
Edit: Or is homosexual sex is responsible for the whole difference, I suppose.
No, the study is run on heterosexual undergraduates between 18-25 years of age.
Women are more likely to have sex with older guys than guys having sex with older women.
What's omitted is that previous research has shown ridiculous differences, including counting strictly heterosexual partnerships. The scientists in question generally know the number is wrong, and have some rather entertaining comments about it, but reporters frequently -don't-, and treat it like it's accurate.
but reporters frequently -don't-, and treat it like it's accurate
That kind of stuff happens with everything. I no longer consider reporters any more reliable than word-of-mouth.
Not nearly as sketchy as the reporting on it. I've seen too many newspaper articles treating claims that strictly heterosexual men have more sexual partners on average than strictly heterosexual women on average seriously, to take -any- reporting on the matter seriously. (Hint for those puzzling about what's wrong with this: The two numbers have to match. ETA: As Luke_A_Somers points out, the numbers don't have to be identical, and within particular subsets of the population it's possible for large disparities.)
One other case where the numbers may not match: differences in age.
For example imagine a population where everybody lives for 60 years, men always marry at 40 where they have sex once, and women marry at 20 where they also have sex once (assume they always have twins). Women over 20 will have had on average one partner, and men over 20 will have had 0.5.
So, the numbers don't need to match if you have more pairings where the man is older than the woman than the other way around (which seems to be the case); I expect that to account for some of the difference, though I expect exaggeration and flexible interpretations of what is meant by "sex" to account for a bigger chunk.
The numbers don't need to match, even if everyone was counted and reported accurately.
To take some extreme examples:
The population is Alex, Betty, Carrie, Daphne. Alex hooks up with each of the others. Mens' average: 3. Womens' average: 1.
Now take Alice, Bob, and Cindy. Alice hooks up with Bob and then leaves the population (emigrates or dies) Womens' average: 0. Mens' average: 1
Tmp
"America can do some stupid things sometimes, but we would never elect a Stalin, a Pol Pot, or a Kim Jong-Il"
Odd here you are implicitly arguing against Monarchy, by saying Hitler is the worst thing that can happen (you really should think about that for a second or two more). But at least we won't get a Stalin, Pol Pot or Kin Jong-Il! Oh wait those aren't monarchs. Can you say with a straight face that Louis XVI or Nicholas II where anywhere near as bad as those?
Oh and speaking of how democracy never picks leaders terrible for the majority......
From The New York Times:
Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).
So how sketchy is the research on human sexual behavior, anyway?