I am more than a little shocked that those numbers are so high. That's almost one in seven men! I guess it just goes to show how much society has conditioned me to believe that everyone is having sex.
It's kind of a vicious cycle. If everyone believes everyone else has had sex, people will be less likely to admit (or at least bring up) that they haven't had sex, and so further contribute to the idea that everyone has had it.
I'd be just as shocked if the title of the article only reference people over 25. Once you've been out of school for a few years, I imagine the odds of ending your virginity in any particular year goes way down. ie., a 25 year old virgin stand a pretty good chance of becoming a 40 year old one. A 20 year old virgin stands a pretty good chance of not being one for much longer.
edit - Or so I'd expect, but this article has me questioning a lot of those expectations.
I didn't mean it as a bait (my first title attempt was too long, so I shortened it to that). I would edit it to say "25-45 yrs/old" if I could, but the 'edit' button is gone.
As it happens, most polygynous societies have much less polygyny than you'd think because the average man can't afford all four wives. I believe the average man throughout history has been a monogynous man living in a polygynous society.
Average = mean, median, or mode? I'd expect the mean man (no pun intended, and excluding those who never reproduce) to have 2-ish wives - that's what the "the average person is descended from twice as many women as men" quote is about. I'd expect the median man to have one wife - that's what your comment is about. I'd expect the modal man to have no wives - after all, if some folks are ending up with the harems, that means a bunch of people with no women at all.
"I'd expect the mean man (no pun intended, and excluding those who never reproduce) to have 2-ish wives - that's what the "the average person is descended from twice as many women as men" quote is about."
Surely you mean (ahem) the mean man-who-actually-reproduced.
If the mean across all males (not just those who reproduce) is one wife, as expected by a 50/50 sex distribution, then that means King Solomon's 600 partners meant that 599 men have no wives. Dunno how that would compare with the number that had 1 wife, but I wouldn't be surprised if the former is greater.
I don't think you can consider what goes on in prisons as sex. Most of the time it's rape.
It is interesting to observe how Americans view sex in prison as if it was inevitable. If inmates were raped in my country, there would be an outrage. And the number of rapes in prison here are very close to zero (don't have the stats but I remember reading that it almost never happen). And this is a western European country, so in theory the culture should be relatively comparable.
In my country (South Africa) prison rape is also common. I've read a study (not going to search for it now) that the AIDS prevalence for people in prison actually goes down (which is suprising).
A lot of sex in prison also isn't rape.
The biggest cause for the rape problem in prisons is prison overcrowding (Europe doesn't have that problem at the scale of the USA or RSA). The problem is that the USA has a much higher incarceration rate than European countries.
Historically, maybe it's not so shocking. According to the article below,
Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men...To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
Nature needs us to have sex in order to continue the species, so it has built in very heavy biases to get us to do that. It's the number one imperative besides keeping ourselves alive.
I believe that even for a reasonable person who is well practiced in recognizing biases in his own point of view, getting past all biases involving sex would be extremely difficult.
The 13.9 per cent of men would include homosexuals. Let's say there are 1000 men, 5 percent of which are homosexuals.
So 950 straight men, 50 homosexuals and 139 virgins between them.
950 * x + 50 * y = 139, where x is the straight virginity rate. y is the homosexual virginity rate, and y = 11 * x.
So 950 * x + 50 * (11 * x) = 139
950x + 550x = 139
1500x = 139
x = 0.0926
9.26 percent of straight men are virgins, 101.9% of gay men are.
If homosexual men make up 10% of the population
900x + 1100x = 139
x = 0.07
76% of gay men are virgins.
If homosexual men are 20% of the population
800x * 2200x = 139
x = 0.046
51% of gay men are virgins. Less than 5% of straight men are.
The first situation is impossible. I guess 10% homosexual one might be plausible if they very narrowly defined losing one's virginity to having had anal intercourse. A lot of gay men exclusively have oral sex.
I was wondering if Wolfram's logs would show a bunch of queries for P(gay), P(virgin | gay), and P(virgin | not gay), then realized you'd given them variables. More's the pity. I'd love to see the face of the employee that sees a bunch of queries for P(virgin | gay).
I have a friend who is an epidemiology research for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says that the best evidence is that the percentage of gay men is considerably less than the often-said 10 percent of the population (derived from Kinsey's unscientific survey), so a small percentage of gay men in your calculation would be the most plausible. This depends crucially on the definition of "gay," but for most epidemiologically relevant purposes, an estimate nearer to 2 percent seems warranted by scientific surveys.
Have you got any links to these surveys other than your friend? I would be really interested to know the incidence. The actual number is ludicrously hard to pin down:
The biggest problem is that nobody really agrees with what a "gay man" is for the purposes of counting them anyway. Does just one homosexual experience count? What about if (as this survey suggests is common) you have a lifetime of clear homosexual thoughts but no opportunity to act on them? What if you're any of the infinite variations of bisexuality between completely homosexual and completely heterosexual?
I tend to work with 4%-8%, depending on definition, but I'll be the first to admit it's a total shot in the dark.
I wish I could help with more authoritative data. Thanks for asking, but I cannot. All I know is that the 10 percent figure comes from Kinsey, but Kinsey's anecdotal reports were not scientifically gathered by means that would ensure that the percentage is representative. I could agree with the whole range you think is plausible, not being able to point to definitive figures.
13.9% of men includes all age groups. It's probably something like 50% of 18-22 men, and a much smaller number (e.g. 0.5-1% or so) of 35-45 men.
I'm guessing that perhaps 5.5-11% of male homosexuals are virgins?
That seems strange, however, considering that it's vastly easier for gay guys to get laid than for straight guys. (I'm basing this last statement on common sense and my own experience; I've been approached by strange men offering sex, but never by women I've never met.)
"Self-hating" gays too; who are uncomfortable with themselves.
Heterosexuals have an easy time since their sexual identity is sanctioned by society. Gays go through their youths being forced to be something they are not. For some, even when they become comfortable in their own identities in private, it's still impossible for them to confess to them socially.
All the more reasons to encourage gay-friendly communities in town and cities, somewhere they can be themselves.
The study did not include young, it is was an age group of 25-45. And I would think that past the age of 25 the marginal increase in chances for having sex for the first time is significantly lower then before.
Straight people don't know the fear, oppression and loneliness gay people might face in small towns.
We all have this image of wild, cruising gay guys and girls, when in fact, a huge percentage of them live under the laws, both written and unwritten, of despotic communities.
Even in big cities, unattractive gay people might be alienated by potential partners.
I doubt the second is really as much of a factor. While ugly straight men have difficulty due to the "winner take all" aspects of the male/female sex market, I can't see how gays would have a similar problem.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I'll assume that you're implying that college girls are slutty partiers, and respond to that.
That may be somewhat true, but in general women with college degrees come from financial backgrounds/households where there is more information available about the risks of sex (with regards to pregnancy/STDs). Also, if you haven't been on a campus lately, the religious voice is VERY loud. If you were a woman thinking of remaining a virgin until marriage, you could easily find company who would make you comfortable with that decision.
Thanks for the link. While the reason for the link is unknown to science, I suspect that people with high IQs just tend to not start using certain parts of their brain until later in life. It seems very possible to reprogram your brain though if a person wants to and has adequate help and resources.
Not surprising. A lot of people in college have a lot of sex, but a lot have none. It makes sense for a lot of reasons that people who are sexually not precocious would be more intelligent.
I think the result was actually that people on both ends of the bell curve have less sex than people in the middle. More intelligent people tend to be less sexually precocious, but so do less intelligent people.
This sorta makes sense from an assortative-mating POV. People tend to mate with people of roughly equal intelligence. When you get to the outer edge of the bell curve, there're many fewer people of roughly equal intelligence, and you're far less likely to run across them randomly.
Perhaps grad school's real contribution to human science has been the perpetuation of genes for intelligence. Without it and similar institutions, a bright person might never find someone they care enough about to have sex with.
Universities has not existed for more than a few thousand years, so I don't think they could have made much of an impact on the natural selection yet. And I would be surprised if the admittance of female students wasn't quite a recent phenomenon.
It's kind of a vicious cycle. If everyone believes everyone else has had sex, people will be less likely to admit (or at least bring up) that they haven't had sex, and so further contribute to the idea that everyone has had it.