Promiscuity
American experiments in 1978 and 1982 found the great majority of men were willing to have sex with women they did not know, of average attractiveness, who propositioned them.
[7] Other studies have suggested that people with multiple casual sex partners are more likely to be diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections.
[citation needed] A 2014 nationwide survey in the United Kingdom named Liverpool the country's most promiscuous city.
[17] A study funded by condom-maker Durex, conducted in 2006 and published in 2009, measured promiscuity by a total number of sexual partners.
[7] According to the 2005 Global Sex Survey by Durex, people have had on average nine sexual partners, the most in Turkey (14.5) and Australia (13.3), and the fewest in India (3) and China (3.1).
[21][18][22] According to the 2012 General Social Survey in the United States by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, Protestants on average had more sex partners than Catholics.
[27] In the United Kingdom, a nationally representative study in 2013 found that 33.9% of heterosexual men had 10 or more lifetime sexual partners.
[28] A 2003 representative study in Australia found that heterosexual men had a median of 8 female sexual partners in their lifetime.
[29] A 2014 representative study in Australia found that heterosexual men had a median of 7.8 female sexual partners in their lifetime.
[32] An extensive 1994 study found that difference in the mean number of sexual partners between gay and straight men "did not appear very large".
"[35][36] The 2013 British NATSAL study found that gay men typically had 19 sexual partners in a lifetime (median).
Examples of this type of sampling includes surveying men on dating apps such as Grindr, or finding volunteers at gay bars, clubs and saunas.
[39][41] For example, the British and European convenience surveys included approximately five times as many gay men who reported "5 or more sexual partners" than the nationally representative NATSAL study did.
[42][40] Probability sample surveys are more useful in this regard, because they seek to accurately reflect the characteristics of the gay male population.
Unprotected receptive anal sex, which holds a much higher risk of HIV transmission, appears to be the major factor.
[49] In and before the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, terms like "strumpet" and "whore" were used to describe women deemed promiscuous, as seen, for example, in John Webster's 1612 play The White Devil.
[51] In Norwegian students, Kennair et al. (2023) found no signs of a sexual double standard in short-term or long-term mating contexts, nor in choosing a friend, except that women's self-stimulation was more acceptable than men's.
[54][55][56][57][58] Hetaerism is a theoretical early state of human society, as postulated by 19th-century anthropologists, which was characterized by the absence of the institution of marriage in any form and in which women were the common property of their tribe and in which children never knew who their fathers were.
[59] The reconstruction of the original state of primitive society or humanity was based on the idea of progress, according to which all cultures have degrees of improvement and becoming more complicated.
It seemed logical to assume that never before the types of families developed did they simply exist, and in primitive society, sexual relations were without any boundaries and taboos.
This view is represented, inter alia, by anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan in Ancient Society and Friedrich Engels' work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[60] In the first half of the 20th century, this notion was rejected by a number of authors, e.g. Edvard Westermarck, a Finnish philosopher, social anthropologist and sociologist with in-depth knowledge of the history of marriage, who provided strong evidence that, at least in the first stages of cultural development, monogamy has been a perfectly normal and natural form of man-woman coexistence.
[68][69] Many animal species, such as spotted hyenas,[70] pigs,[71] bonobos[72] and chimpanzees, are promiscuous as a rule, and do not form pair bonds.
[4][73][74] In the animal world, some species, including birds such as swans and fish such as Neolamprologus pulcher, once believed monogamous, are now known to engage in extra-pair copulations.
[75] The Darwin-Bateman paradigm, which states that males are typically eager to copulate while females are more choosy about whom to mate with, has been confirmed by a meta-analysis.
