Sex on Tuesday
Baby I Got Your Number

Before I begin, I would like to ask for your help. I will be flying to New York this Thursday to participate in a roundtable discussion with sex columnists from other college campuses. I will have the chance to speak with Dr. Drew Pinsky-you might know him from the show "Love Line" with Adam Carolla or "Strictly Sex With Dr. Drew." What issues would you like covered at the discussion and what questions should I ask Dr. Drew? E-mail me your response. Thanks! Now back to our regularly scheduled programming ...

The baseball world really hit the nail on the head with trading cards. If only sexually active people could hand out some cards with pictures and statistics, what team they play for and perhaps a phone number. Then everyone could avoid the awkward moment when a lover asks, "How many people have you been with?"

Damn. How are you supposed to answer that? Should you even answer? If you cite a high number you are a dirty whore but if you mumble something lower, you are inexperienced or undesirable. If there is such a thing, what number is "average?"

Luckily, some researchers have been whispering this lover's query into the ears of people all over America and the world. You've probably caught the buzz about the federal sex survey published last month, which revealed some pretty interesting information on those spicy Americans.

So in case you were wondering how your stats compare, here are some numbers from the federal survey. By age 17, about one-third of males and females have had vaginal intercourse and about a third have also participated in oral sex. Four percent of males and 8 percent of females report having sexual experience with the same sex at that age. But 8 percent of males report having had anal sex-figure that one out.

Once you hit ages 20-24, if you haven't had sexual intercourse, you are a minority. About 80 percent of Americans have had intercourse by then. But it only takes one lover to get a majority membership, so what happens after that? For the heterosexual ladies we have four male partners by age 29, and then it plateaus. Yup, no more after 29, so get 'em in while you can. And for the gentlemen we have eight female partners by age 44.

This doesn't make sense. Those of you that are intimately familiar with the practice of heterosexual intercourse should see something wrong with the aforementioned numbers. Unless American men take to exclusively foreign fornication after a certain point, the numbers for men and women should match-yes, no? Maybe-now hear me out-maybe men are over-reporting just a teeny-weeny. Or women are under-reporting, or some combination thereof.

One explanation of the discrepancy, from a psychologist's perspective, is that men evaluate their numbers differently. When asked, women tend to think about each individual partner to come up with their toll. Men, on the other hand, just guestimate. So if you are a heterosexual woman, ask for a list of names and addresses, rather than a number.

Another survey hosted by Durex condoms reports even higher honey-lovin' averages for Americans and the rest of the world. The average number of sexual partners for all Americans is 10.3. That's pretty close to the worldwide average of 10.5 but pales in comparison to China's bedroom batting average of 19.3. So all you guys that have been asking me how to get more sexual partners, I say move to China.

What do you really get out of asking someone how many sexual partners they've had? It is true that the more playmates you've had, the more likely you are to have an STD. There are also studies that report a correlation between some types of cancer and number of sexual partners; however, the cause has not been established. By the way, I learned in Physics 10 this semester that simply spending time in bed with another person increases your risk for cancer because all humans are slightly radioactive. So rather than focusing on numbers, the questions you really need to be asking each other in bed are: (1) Do you have protection? (2) Have you been tested since your last partner? and (3) Do you like my sexy ass?

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