About the only thing that could possibly make you feel less like a male slut would be to survey this unusual bunch of guys who are probably as big or bigger sluts than even you are. The flaw in your approach is that you'd only be deluding yourself because probably not one single person on this board is any where close to being representative of the general population.
According to this
MSNBC story, only 29% of men report having had more than 15 sexual partners in their lifetime (and 9% of women). The
median number for men was only 7 (and 4 for women). Sheeit, I've done that many different partners in one day! Another study, by British researchers, came up with only a slightly higher figure for men at 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes (and women had 6.5). I've done that many in just one week.
An interesting aspect to these findings is the debate on how could women have so many fewer partners than men? Some people think this mathmatically impossible since it takes 2 to tango. What those people don't understand is the difference between median and mean. I won't go into that here, but suffice it to say it would be impossible for men and women to have different means or averages but is entirely possible to different MEDIANS. But even if we just look at the medians, it raises some interesting questions regarding the differences.
The most basic explanation is that guys just screw around more than women do, but that is boring so lets look at the other explanations that have been offered.
The first one is that people lie. Unless they're as slutty as most of us CRTers, most NORMAL guys inflate the number of women they say they've been with in order to appear more manly. Obviously, very very few of us have to do that. In fact, if a regular woman asked me how many other women I'd been with I'd have to lie grossly in the OTHER direction (admit to only the non-pros I've been with or otherwise fudge over the question) lest she realize how completely corrupt a whoremonger I actually am. Women, on the other hand, don't want to appear slutty so they tend to understate their true numbers just as we true man-sluts do. In other words, these survey results are tainted by our trying to conform with our preconceived stereotypes (and the survey results in turn reinforce those stereotype). What this means in terms of numbers is that the ACTUAL number of partners that the average guy has had is even LOWER than the numbers reported above and that much fewer than 29% have had as many as 15 partners. I bet you're all really feeling slutty now.
Misreporting could explain part of difference but another reason given is even more interesting for us. This theory is actually known as "the foreign prostitute theory". The way this goes is that the "missing women" that all these guys say they've had sex with aren't part of the sample population that was surveyed in the female half of the study. This phenomena has even been studied by the National Academy of Science (wonder how I can get a grant for something like that):
Quote:
One of the most reliable and perplexing findings from surveys of sexual behavior is that men report substantially more sexual partners than women do. We use data from national sex surveys and studies of prostitutes and their clients in the United States to examine sampling bias as an explanation for this disparity. We find that prostitute women are underrepresented in the national surveys. Once their undersampling and very high numbers of sexual partners are factored in, the discrepancy disappears. Prostitution's role in the discrepancy is not readily apparent because men are reluctant to acknowledge that their reported partners include prostitutes.
(source:
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/22/12385.abstract)
Basically what this means is that the only reason the reported number of partners is even as "high" as it is is because a lot of them were hookers (I know a lot of mine are) and the number of non-pro partners is something even less than what is reported above.
If you figure the average monger has probably done at least the number of average LIFETIME partners in a SINGLE mongering trip, has done multiple trips and has probably done more than his fair share of local P4P before he got into foreign mongering, then the numbers who have done more than 15 partners in their lifetime is easily 100% and the average has to top 100 or more.
I wouldn't expect too many surprises there, except perhaps who will claim top score. A more interesting aspect of these might be the breakdown between pro partners and non-pros. With such an extensive history with hookers, if I was talking to "civilians" I'd have to leave them (or nearly all of them) out of my totals rather than include them all to inflate my totals like most regular guys have to do. OTOH, when it comes to my non-pro count I'm probably not so different from those regular guys. My NON-PRO count is fairly close to their average TOTAL count, though, if truth be told closer to the figure in the US study rather than the one from the UK. So like them, I'll sometimes stretch the truth a bit, at least for the non-pro part.
One question that I'd be curious about is whether most mongers have a higher or lower non-prostitute count than guys who don't consort with prostitutes as much or whether, when you factor out the hookers, we're much like anyone else.
Another question that I'd be curious about is whether you guys admit to lying about it - overstating your non-pro count and understating your total particularly if interrogated about it by a non-pro girlfriend (wife or whatever). What are your actual counts and what are the amounts that you'd admit to others (outside the mongering community)?
Oh yeah, my total count? Last time I tried to add it up, I lost count at well over 100. I'm sure I've done much more. I don't THINK I've gone over a 1000, but ya never know. I usually go with an estimate of 200+/- but even that might be overly conservative. I'm betting someone else should be able to top that 200 figure easily.