Sex partners over time among men and women

Game's golden tongue on self-reported sex surveys:

The problem with sex surveys of this sort — i.e., the kind that ask in no uncertain terms just how slutty (women) or charming (men) you are — is that people lie. They lie to assuage their egos, and they lie to meet social expectations. And lo and behold, there are attenuating studies which discredit to some extent the reported results of sex surveys.

It's a point Heartiste Chrysostom has put pressure on several times before, and the finding that men average 2-3x as many lifetime sexual partners as women do has, as its prerequisite for being true, a world in which women outnumber men by a similar factor in the general population. That isn't the world we inhabit, of course, and consequently male self-reports, female self-reports, or both, are unreliable.

But just because women low-ball their counts and men inflate theirs--despite his sworn testimony, Bill Clinton probably would've counted Monica Lewinsky as a partner for the purposes of a survey like this while she likely would not have--doesn't mean data like these are worthless. There's a signal mixed in with the noise. It's difficult to definitively detect the former and separate it from the latter, but it doesn't mean that there is no value in giving a listen. Like so many other areas of human experience, the truth is stretched and excused but rarely ignored outright in perpetuity.

To the question of changes in sexual behavior over time, for example, social expectation bias suggests that we should see some increase in the number of reported partners among women as we progress forward in time due to the decrease in societal slut-shaming and the corresponding steady drop in marriage rates even if there is no change in the actual average number of partners women have today compared to what women tended to have in the past.

So without further ado, the following graphs track the percentages of white men and women aged 25-40 in lifetime sexual partner ranges over the nearly 25 years that the GSS has been querying respondents on as much. Subsequent tables show the mean, median, and modes for each year's total responses. First, men:

Female partner averages for white men aged 25-40 by year:

Year	Mean	Median	Mode
1989	12.00	6	1
1990	11.91	4	1
1991	10.70	5	1
1993	12.19	6	1
1994	11.23	5	1
1996	12.74	7	1
1998	10.83	6	1
2000	14.06	6	1
2002	15.41	6	1
2004	20.95	5	1
2006	10.15	5	1
2008	18.38	7	3
2010	12.39	6	1
2012	27.67 (!)	5	1

Parenthetically, mean = total instances/number of samples (what we conventionally think of as "average"); median = the value at the 50th percentile of the sample distribution; mode = the most frequently occurring value in the sample.

(!) The 2012 mean is skewed by one respondent claiming to have had over 989 female partners, the only year in which Adonis was available for survey participation. Removing him from the year drops the mean to a more terrestrial 17.15.

There is very little in the way of any detectable secular trend here, although there are faint empirical traces of a bifurcating male sexual market in which the percentages of men earning 20+ notches and the percentages of 40 year-old virgins are both increasing modestly at the expense of men in the moderating middle.

And male partner averages for white women aged 25-40 by year:

Year	Mean	Median	Mode
1989	4.59	2	1
1990	3.91	2	1
1991	4.72	3	1
1993	4.51	3	1
1994	5.46	3	1
1996	5.65	3	1
1998	4.95	3	1
2000	6.15	3	1
2002	5.46	4	1
2004	5.50	3	1
2006	6.45	4	1
2008	5.24	3	1
2010	5.87	4	1
2012	6.83	3	1

The results for women are less sporadic than they are for men, and there is an apparent slight but perceptible increase in the number of male partners women are bedding over the last couple of decades. This could conceivably be due to a reduction in shame among women in admitting to having high partner counts, it could be a result of real increases in novel sexual encounters in the US, some combination of the two, or something else.

Heartiste writes:

I’d add that, despite the above GrateFacts, it’s a good bet that lower-N count monogamy is still hanging on as the norm among Eurasian peoples. Well, serial monogamy, at any rate.

As the medians and modes show, that is indeed still the case.

Finally, 2012 was an especially lascivious year for GSS participants. The 2014 data will be released in the next couple of months. It will be interesting to see if 2012 turns out to be an aberration or the seminal year of an enduring trend towards more faux inseminations.

GSS variables used: YEAR, SEX, RACE(1), AGE(25-40), NUMMEN(0-989), NUMWOMEN(0-989)

State IQ estimates (2013)

Like presidential elections, it has become standard for updated state IQ estimates based on NAEP scores for 8th graders on math and reading tests to be offered here every four years (for estimates based on 2005 and 2009 NAEP results, please click on the corresponding links).

The scores for both tests are on a 500 point scale, with a designed standard deviation of 50. In the proceeding table, these are converted into IQ estimates with a mean of 97.4--corresponding to the national average NAEP scores of 283.62 for math and 266.02 for reading--and a standard deviation of 15. The math and reading scores are given equal weighting.

I'm operating under the presumption that the average IQ in the US is 98. The reason the IQ estimates are based on a national mean of 97.4 is to take into account private schools, whose students on average score 15 points higher on the math test and 19 points higher on the reading test, corresponding to an estimated 5.1 IQ advantage over their public school counterparts. Representing one-tenth of the school age population, this yields a national average of 98. The estimates assume that the private school advantage relative to public schools is equal across states. That is, the public school score, plus 5.1 multiplied by the percentage of a state's students enrolled in private schools, gives the state's overall estimated average IQ.

Again in the spirit of the 2004 IQ hoax, states are colored in accordance with the way their populations voted in the 2012 Presidential election. Light red (blue) indicates the margin of victory for Romney (Obama) was less than 10%; dark red (blue) indicates it was 10% or more:

State	IQ
1. Massachusetts	102.2
2. New Jersey	101.4
3. New Hampshire	101.0
4. Vermont	100.9
5. Minnesota	100.4
DoDEA	100.1
6. Pennsylvania	100.0
7. Maryland	99.8
8. Washington	99.8
9. Montana	99.6
10. Connecticut	99.5
11. Ohio	99.5
12. Colorado	99.5
13. Wisconsin	99.1
14. North Dakota	99.1
15. Maine	99.1
16. Wyoming	99.0
17. Kansas	98.9
18. Idaho	98.9
19. Virginia	98.8
20. South Dakota	98.8
21. Indiana	98.8
22. Nebraska	98.8
23. Iowa	98.6
24. Utah	98.4
25. Illinois	98.3
26. Delaware	98.3
27. Rhode Island	98.2
28. Missouri	98.2
29. Oregon	98.2
30. Kentucky	98.1
31. Texas	98.1
32. North Carolina	98.0
33. New York	98.0
34. Florida	97.6
35. Hawaii	97.4
36. Michigan	97.4
37. Tennessee	97.1
38. Georgia	97.1
39. Alaska	96.8
40. South Carolina	96.7
41. Arizona	96.3
42. Arkansas	96.3
43. Nevada	96.3
44. California	96.0
45. Oklahoma	95.9
46. Louisiana	95.5
47. West Virginia	95.0
48. New Mexico	94.7
49. Alabama	94.5
50. Mississippi	94.2
51. District of Columbia	92.8

And a map of the same. The darker the state's shading, the higher it's estimated average IQ:

Proximity to the Canadian border continues to show salubrious effects. Cold is good for the constitution, dontcha know!

The Department of Defense entry might reasonably be colored dark red rendering it, rather than Montana, the strongest showing among solidly GOP 'states'. Red-staters' creme de la creme in governmental positions, yikes!

This is the third set of IQ estimates I've comprised based on NAEP data. The inter-year correlations are strong, .91 between 2005 and 2009, and .97 (p-value =  1.6E-30) between 2009 and 2013. One state has shifted upwards markedly, however. Maryland was 34th in 2005, 11th in 2009, and 8th this time around. As those able to feed at the public trough eat ever more gluttonously, gentrifying out NAMs and white plebes, the scholastic performance of the entire state rises. It's almost as if our political masters behave privately in a way that is diametrically opposed to the diversifying ideals they sing paeans to in public!

Obama's half-nephew on the maternal side could look like Grant Ronnebeck

Illegal Alien With Criminal Record Kills AZ Clerk Over a Pack of Cigarettes:

The corpulent cherub had been arrested on previous occasions on his way to acquiring a felonious rap sheet. Inexplicably, he still wasn't deported.

Don't expect to hear anything about this from the Justice Department or from Barack Obama about how Grant, the clerk, could have been his son. Nope, while the evil, white-hating president uses the bully pulpit to express sympathy for the dregs of society like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, because they're all black, he doesn't have a kind word in his lexicon for an innocent white kid whose totally avoidable death occurred due to his administration's utter dereliction of duty when it comes to enforcing the nation's immigration laws.

I've now started explicitly identifying myself as a dissident and a secessionist. I want nothing to do with the 21st century political entity referred to as the United States of America. My federal government hates me and I hate my federal government.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the numbers I'm standing next to, even if silently for now. From Ipsos-Reuters polling, the percentages of people who either "tend to support" or "strongly support" the idea of their "state peacefully withdrawing from the USA and the federal government", by age range:

18-29: 38.8%
30-39: 28.0%
40-49: 24.0%
50-59: 21.4%
60+: 15.3%

While support for secession tilts conservative, it's more of a generational thing than it is a partisan one. More young Democrats (34.0%) support secession than do older Republicans (23.9%).

Twenty years ago, no one took Scottish secession seriously. Then it almost happened. Catalonia could be next. Who thought Sudan would break up into two countries? The artificial lines on the Middle Eastern map that putatively demarcate the geographical dividing lines between titular countries have become almost meaningless in many places. There are more euroskeptics in the European Parliament now than there have been at any point since the founding of the European Union.

Consider same-sex marriage. Support for it was a distinctly minority position just ten years ago, and now most Americans support it. Things can change pretty quickly, and with each affront like this, that change gets propelled forward further.

The US is way too big, too disparate, too divided culturally, socially, religiously, politically. It's too diverse, and diverse societies never last. Never have, probably never will. The federal government, whether it be split, Republican-controlled, or Democrat-controlled, leaves hundreds of millions of people feeling unrepresented and forced to pony up for things they don't support, like wealth transfers to scofflaws and deadbeats or unending attempts to impose predetermined governmental structures on tribalistic countries that want nothing to do with what we tell them, at the barrel point of a gun, they should want.

Abortion aborts itself

The percentages of GSS respondents who say that a woman should be allowed to have an abortion for any reason she wants to, broken down by sex and also by the number of children respondents have had. The question is dichotomous, with "yes" and "no" as the only two answers permitted. For contemporary relevance, responses are from 2000 onward. To avoid racial confounding, only whites are considered. To allow for family formation to have occurred, only responses from those aged 35-50 are included. Sample sizes for each of the six categories are in the hundreds.

For men:

# of kids	Easy abort
0	58.7%
1	53.0%
2+	43.3%

And for women:

# of kids	Easy abort
0	63.6%
1	53.0%
2+	41.2%

It's not as detrimental to evolutionary fitness as homosexuality is, but a permissive attitude towards abortion isn't associated with fecundity. Shocker, I know. Hey, validating stereotypes is this place's raison d'etre, after all.

So go ahead and tell the joke about unfettered access to contraception and the legalization of same-sex marriage as a clandestine strategy for social conservatives to win the long war secure in the knowledge that, jocular though it may sound, it enjoys some empirical grounding.

GSS variables used: CHILDS(0)(1)(2-8), RACECEN1(1), SEX, ABANY

Bread and circuses

Despite the general vernacular understanding of the rule, it is not necessary for a receiver to maintain control of the ball as he goes to the ground unless previous control was never established, control being defined by Rule 8, Section 1, Article 3 of the official 2013 NFL rule book as follows:

"A catch is complete... if a player, who is inbounds:

a) secures control of the ball in his hands or arms prior to the ball touching the ground; and

b) touches the ground inbounds with both feet or with any part of his body other than his hands; and

c) maintains control of the ball long enough, after (a) and (b) have been fulfilled, to enable him to perform any act common to the game (i.e., maintaining control long enough to pitch it, pass it, advance with it, or avoid or ward off an opponent, etc.)."

A and B were clearly met. C is the item at issue, and by its nature is almost unavoidably subjective, but it needs to be kept in mind that the parameters for overturning a call made on the field are, according to Rule 15, Section 9, Article 3, as follows:

"A decision will be reversed only when the referee has indisputable visual evidence available to him that warrants the change."

If it was plausible that Bryant was stretching for the end zone after both feet made contact with the ground, which would constitute an "act common to the game", it shouldn't be overturned.

Is there indisputable evidence that Bryant would have clearly lost his footing even if he were not stretching for the end zone? Quite possibly--heck, probably--he would have, but it's conceivable that he might not have, and that bare minimum possibility is the standard for the ruling on the field to stand.

Had the pass initially been ruled incomplete, it'd be an open-and-shut case, but the ruling on the field was a completed pass and thus should have been left to stand.

Speak already

Commenting on a story about a minor celebrity in Scotland being investigated by police for making an uncouth joke about ebola, Dennis Mangan suspects women to be the primary moving force behind the lodging of the formalized complaint that led law enforcement to get involved:

Notably, the police acted after 12,000 people signed a petition asking them to investigate. Lots of people, mostly women I'd say, are all on board with this. The reason why I say mostly women is that a huge number seem to think it is or ought to be illegal to say anything they deem offensive.

The GSS contains several dichotomous questions about whether or not proponents of various controversial belief systems should be permitted to publicly advocate said beliefs. For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward. The percentages, by sex, who say that those favoring military dictatorship, white supremacism, homosexuality, atheism, and anti-Western Islamism should be allowed to speak in public. Sample sizes are in the several thousands:

% allowed to speak	Militarist	Supremacist	Homosexualist	Atheist	Islamist
Men	68.6	66.4	83.7	80.1	47.2
Women	66.3	55.9	85.0	74.3	37.5

Except in the rather unsurprising case of strident homosexuals, women tend to express less support for free speech than men do, although the gender gaps are pretty modest.

Conjecturing about what this suggests regarding the validity of Mangan's point, it suggests he's more likely correct than not, specifically since this particular incident involves putative racism.

GSS variables used: SPKMIL, SPKRAC, SPKHOMO, SPKATH, SPKMSLM, YEAR(2000-2012), SEX

Flight from white?

Commenting on the threshold of 28% sub-Saharan African ancestry for people in the US to self-identify as black, I suggested it likely a consequence of the broader flight from white phenomenon. Long-time blogging polymath and budding regular NYT op-ed writer Razib Khan disagrees:

I don't think you can say [people tend to emphasize their non-white ancestry rather than their white ancestry] much anymore. Living in California it's pretty obvious people of white/asian and white/latino background don't fall into the same tendencies as people of black/white heritage. They don't deny non-white heritage, but since they look white and are treated as white, unless they are SJW types who are faking it, they pretty much assume they are white.

If by adopting an assumption of whiteness he means they don't adopt conspicuously underclass behaviors mostly associated with blacks like mixed black/white and lower class whites often do, I get it.

If, however, the contention is increasingly the case in formal or professional settings, I'm not so sure I do. Here are racial self-identifications among GSS survey participants of Mexican ancestry, Asian ancestry, and Native American ancestry, respectively, by year. The question includes just three possible responses: White, Black, or Other. The middle answer is mostly negligible across the groups considered and is therefore subsequently excluded.

For those of Mexican ancestry living in the US:

The transition away from white and towards other self-identification is also apparent in the US Census, where 42% of those who identify ethnically as Hispanic choose the option “some other race”, a racial categorization that is almost exclusively used by those who identify as Hispanic.

For Asians:

For Native Americans:

The trends are less pronounced for these two groups but they move in the same direction; in any case the patterns here don't appear to be towards greater association with whiteness.

As has been previously noted, there has been a marked scramble away from Americans identifying as ancestrally English over the last several decades, resulting in a reported decrease so drastic that it might suggest, if not merely the result shifting preferences, that secret but deliberate ethnic cleansing was taking place in the US.

GSS variables used: RACE(1,3), ETHNIC(5,16,20,31,40)(17)(30), YEAR

Kwanzaa

, the "fake holiday invented in 1966 by a black radical", looks to have a lifespan of about 60 years. Interest in Kwanzaa--primarily among elementary and middle school teachers obliged by public school curricula to mention it, I presume--has been steadily decreasing each winter and there is little reason to expect this trend to be interrupted. May its twilight years be tranquil:

So long, Kwanzaa. We hardly knew ye.

The black handicap

The idea that contemporary "white privilege" exists is hard to reconcile with real world actions and behaviors. Data from 23andMe shows that the threshold for black self-identification is around 28%. That is, among people who are, say, 20% black by ancestry, the tendency is to identify as white. But among people who are only 35% black, the tendency is still to self-identify as black rather than as white.

In other words, Americans are more likely to emphasize their non-white ancestry than they are to emphasize their white ancestry. Barack Obama is only the most prominent example of this--if everything about him were the same except he had two white parents and his name was Barry Johnson, no one would have ever heard of him, let alone elected him President. Blackness is, ceteris paribus, a benefit rather than a hindrance when it comes to getting ahead in modern America.

We see something similar to this among SWPLs who vociferously talk up their alleged native American heritage (ie, "My great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee"--never mind that the person who says this, even if being truthful, is only 3% American Indian). It also crops up in the observed tendency for people to identify less with and feel less pride in their ancestry the more accomplished that ancestry is, which conversely expresses itself as a tendency to identify with and take greater pride in one's ancestry the more that ancestry is said to have suffered historical grievances.

"White flight" is a phrase most people are familiar with. As Steve Sailer has noted on several occasions, one people need to start becoming accustomed to is "Flight from white".

Abort mission War-on-Women

Razib notes that men tend to be, on average, more pro-choice than women are, despite all the talk about a putative "war on women" being waged by the patriarchy. He traces GSS responses on the issue over the life of the survey and finds that in most years men are more inclined to the idea that there should be no restrictions on abortion than women are.

Restricting the time frame from the turn of the century to the present for contemporary relevance, we find the same: 41.5% of men and 39.8% of women think "it should be possible for a woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason" (n = 9,236). It's a dichotomous question that presumes that even if the father of the prospective child objects, the woman should be able to make the ultimate decision without offering any justification for her choice. In other words, the question is set up in a way that gives an individual woman maximal authority over her reproductive choices. Even so, men are more supportive of the idea than women themselves are.

The sex differences are marginal, though. The more consequential point is that while the issue is often framed as one in which there are stark sex differences in opinion, that's a total fiction, and an intentionally mendacious one at that, with the objective being to turn the largest 'minority' (which, of course, is actually a numerical majority) in the direction of the Democratic coalition in its unifying opposition to the heterosexual white male 'majority' (which constitutes less than one-third of the US population and is declining by the day).

This war-on-women strategy was parlayed into the the 2012 and 2014 national elections, although without much success. As Steve Sailer has pointed out on multiple occasions, the gender gap pales in comparison to the much larger marriage gap. Knowing whether a voter is male or female provides much less predictive power over electoral behavior than knowing whether a voter is married or not, irrespective of sex.

This phenomenon applies to the abortion issue as well. While there is less than a 2% gender gap in contemporary opinions on abortion, the marriage gap is five times larger, with 38.0% of married adults assenting to the idea of unrestricted female choice compared to 46.1%--nearly half--of never married or divorced adults (n = 8,450).

GSS variables used: YEAR(2000-2012), ABANY, SEX, MARITAL(1)(3,5)

Happy New Year

The unconquerable son performing a mid-decade's jig