What this literally means is, if you walk up to a woman on the road and ask her how many people she had sex with (okay, may be not in India), the number she quotes would be much smaller than the response you are likely to get from a man for the same question.

Mathematically, it doesn’t make any sense. Because, if men are indeed having sex with women, as they say, then the numbers should roughly be the same. Yet the discrepancy persists like a mystery, giving further credence to the popular notion that men have higher libido than women.

One reason for this discrepancy is the way women look at sex, even today with all the relative progress in gender relations and sexual attitudes.

Women as a thumb rule are likely to endorse conservative sexual attitudes than men thanks to centuries of cultural conditioning and sexual double standards instilled in them. Many women rarely approve of casual sex and one-night stands, often discounting the number of such partners.

To know more about the discrepancy, we asked Dr Lawrence I Sank, a Harvard trained clinician, Co-director of Cognitive Therapy Centre, Greater Washington, US, and a founding member of Vvox.

Dr Lawrence I Sank: The truth is there is there isn’t much of a gap in the number of sexual partners both men and women have.

The discrepancy exists mainly due to the way both men and women keep an account of their sexual partners. Men are likely to go for estimation giving rise to extreme values, compared to women who actually count the number. Women are also likely to exclude paid sex-partners from their total number, leading to the discrepancy.  A recent study published in the Journal of Sex Research proves this.

Both men and women have more or less the same libido. People often equate male libido with teenage years, when testosterone level usually peaks. This unfortunately is the popular image
that persists in public imagination even when men grow older. There is a great deal of variability in male desire that comes with jobs, responsibilities and fatherhood.