Our own David Gale from the tenth floor is made to look ridiculous by Gina Kolata--you see, she didn't tell him that the survey didn't ask about means--about averages--but about medians. Which means that she doesn't know the difference between means and medians. Which is a very bad thing for a science reporter:
"In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women. One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners.... But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct."
There's the contradiction, right there in the lede. But still, either the male/female distributions were very, very different (meaning Yglesias' sluts and virgins theory is correct) or there actually is a tendency to lie on both sides or a bit of both. Perhaps it's a bit of both!
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