Why GSS Sex Questions Should Be Taken With A Flat Of Salt

The problem with sex surveys has been the same since the first white-coated experimenter got it in his head to ask women about their sex lives —

women lie about sex.

Not only do women lie about sex, but their vaginas and brains aren’t even on the same page when it comes to what they find sexually stimulating. Their own vaginas seem to be lying to them.

A study from a few years ago examined this problem and found that women lie worse than men on sex surveys, and lie about a whole host of behaviors that they are afraid might label them a slut:

Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives as a study reveals they routinely claim to have slept with fewer partners than they have.

The report points to discrepancies in the results of sex surveys since the Sixties which have indicated heterosexual men exaggerate the number of their partners, with British men claiming an average of 13 over their lifetime.

Yet women in the UK claim an average of nine – leading to the unlikely conclusion that the majority of Britain’s menfolk are having sex with foreign women. Similar studies elsewhere suggest that this is statistically impossible.

Until now, scientists had thought that both sexes were lying – with men inflating the number of partners and women understating them.

But the study reveals women’s embellishments include adding years to the age they claim to have lost their virginity and lying about masturbation and use of pornography. The survey in the Journal of Sex Research quizzed 96 men and 105 women. Some were told their answers were anonymous, some were told a researcher was watching and the rest were told they were being monitored by lie detector.

“Women are so sensitive about being labelled ‘whores’ that they are very reluctant to be honest about their sexual behaviour, even in supposedly anonymous surveys,” said Terri Fisher, who headed the study at Ohio State University in the US.

Women lie to cover up their sluttiness? Who woulda thunk it!

A lot of bloggers like to use GSS (General Social Survey) data to track changes in society’s sexual behavior. Many of these bloggers have found in this data evidence that American women are becoming less slutty in the past ten or twenty years. This does not jibe with my personal experience, so I knew something was amiss. I mused that perhaps American society is bifurcating into two female camps, with the urban blue state camp waving the banner of Team Slut and the religious red state camp hoisting the flag of Team Prude. Since there are more red state godly girls than there are blue state heretic hos, I figured that would account for the overall trend toward less sluttiness.

But studies like the above point out a real problem with sex survey data like that found in the GSS — women just aren’t going to tell you the truth about their sex lives under most normal circumstances, even when anonymity is guaranteed. And that may be the real reason why the GSS gurus are finding chimeras of chasteness that don’t really exist — the data are corrupt.

The only way you are going to get an accurate reading of what kind of sex lives women lead is to secretly videotape the numbers, and types, of men she bangs with her pussy or ass, blows, or pleases with an old-fashioned, because women will conveniently rationalize anything other than penis in vagina as “not really sex”.

Now that’s science I can get behind.