Naughty Numbers

A story in June 28th´s "20 Minutos" claimed that Spanish male homosexuals are more promiscuous than Spanish male heterosexuals. The newspaper based its claim on the data collected from a National Institute of Statistics study that interviewed 10,838 people aged 18 to 49. Based on those interviews, somebody somewhere decided to make the blanket statement that only 17.2% of heterosexual men have sexual relations with more than one person a year, while a whopping 62% of homosexual men are out on the town doin´two or more hotties.

Now, what I want to know is what year the study is referring to. Was it 2001? No, maybe 1988? No, no, I know, it´s 2056. Because I believe in "good" and "bad" sex years. Some years you get a lot. Some years you get a little. Some years it all comes from one source, while others it comes from a multitude of sources. But one thing we can all agree on is that not all years are alike, sexually speaking of course. So while 2005 may have been a bad year for heterosexual males, who´s to say 67% of the boys who like girls won´t be getting it on with a lot more honeys in 2006? Hmmmmmm.....And the good lordy above knows that the 49 year olds aren´t getting around as much as the 25 year olds. Could there have been some discrepancy in the age groups? Could all of the hetero men interviewed have been 49 and all of the homo men 25? Maybe all the heteros were married (not that that ever limited a Spanish man´s sex life) and all the homos single (although gay marriage is now legal in Spain - hooray for equal rights!).

If what I´ve already written doesn´t make you question the integrity of this study, keep reading because here is where the stats start to take on a fishy stink. Not only does the article not bother to mention what percentage of the 10,838 people interviewed were male, but 96.12% of the participants were heterosexual, 2.78% bi-sexual and a whimpy 1.10% homosexual. How can you claim to compare homosexual practice to heterosexual practice when your supposedly random sample hardly includes any gay men (especially not enough to represent the +/-10% of world´s population that makes up the global gay communty) ?! Are we supposed to believe that that 1.10% of a test group represents the entire gay community of Spain?

This is just another case of bunk statistics being used to peddle stereotypes, and I think that stinks. Never believe the numbers unless you know how they were collected, because numbers can lie. Cheeky lying numbers!

And when all is said and done and the last lab rat is sent home, if gay men are more promiscuous, it´s only because heterosexual men can´t find enough willing partners. Uh huh.