If I were on the witness stand, under oath, and asked, “How many people have you had sexual intercourse with?” my response would be one or two digits higher than what I commonly tell people. It’s not that in either case I’m lying per se; it’s just that a few of my partners just don’t register on the same scale as the rest and I don’t want to count them. And I’m not alone. In everyday life, there may be a couple partners that the average person would leave out. There is just some sex that doesn’t really, well, count.

Either I am the world’s greatest slut (and need a T-shirt that says that, pronto), or there just isn’t enough love in this world! According to the National Center for Health Statistics, women have an median average of four sex partners in their lifetime. Please, I’ve been trying to have four partners this week!  Now, perhaps this statistic also includes Granny No-One-Gets-In-My-Panties, but the number seems amazingly low with women like me, Madonna, Jenna Jameson, and Jezebel’s old Slut Machine, who are so beyond the average we’re probably off the CDC’s graph!  Really, with all the tramps in the world upping the statistic, the national average still four? We can’t do all the men by ourselves! Actually perhaps we can. Men, on average, have nearly double the amount of sexual partners women do—lucky number seven. Guess everything I heard in high school was true, some girls are sluts and some girls are prudes. But one thing is clear, every dude is a sex machine. Lifescript.com]

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine came to me for advice, and I think the advice I gave him was pretty good advice, if I do say so myself. Because when it comes to love and relationships, those who can, do. Those who can’t give love and relationship advice.

My friend had just proposed to his girlfriend. The wedding promised to be epic, “Vegas-style” and planned with Pentagon-like precision. The sort of wedding where you wouldn’t be surprised if a trained monkey dressed like a butler exploded out of a 17-tier wedding cake, holding a smaller, 10-tier wedding cake, as fireworks exploded, and an ABBA cover band parachuted in next to the champagne glass pyramid, while howling “Take A Chance On Me.” No expense spared.

Whoopi Goldberg recently revealed on The View that she’s had 50 sexual partners. Carla Bruni, pop singer and wife to French president Nicolas Sarkozy, has had 30. And little ol’ me has had 15. The three of us are comfortable with our numbers—though I am not necessarily psyched about the dudes in particular who occupy the notches on my bedpost. Though we retired the debate over what makes a person a “slut”, it nevertheless remains the case that each person has some general feeling on what number of partners they’re comfortable with, for themselves and for their partners. For one person, it may be five, for another 5,000—after the jump, some sound bites from women on how many notches are too many.

Where do people come up with these ideas for studies? In Finland, some researchers just discovered that people in their late teens and twenties who weighted less than 3 lbs. 5 oz. at birth were less likely to have left their parents’ home, be living with an intimate partner, or having sex than people of the same age who were a normal weight at birth. In terms of sexual experience, low birth weight women were more than twice as likely to still be virgins, and low birth weight males were nearly three times more likely to virgins. But, being born small might not be a bad thing. Low birth weight adults had fewer sexual partners, and the way people are contracting diseases these days, that means fewer chances to get infected with an STD. [Reuters]

We love sex. You love sex. Well, that’s out of the way.

Seeing as we’re both in agreement over the importance of sex, the excitement of sex, the giggle-inducing, gasp-inspiring, slow-motion tsunami of gooseflesh-triggering awesomeness of sex, we can move on to why it is we can’t really talk about S-E-X.

Women think men are mysterious when it comes to knocking boots, or worse, single-minded and simplistic. We’re not. You’re mysterious, and that’s not playground rhetoric. The difference between what we want and what you want, our needs and yours, is the difference between banal home theater instruction manuals and more exotic hieroglyphics.

Condom brand Durex did a study on the sexual partners of people around the world and found out the following: New Zealand’s women are the most promiscuous, averaging 20.4 sexual partners. This makes New Zealand the only country where women out-whore men. Austrian men, however, are the most promiscuous of the dudes, averaging 29.3 sexual partners (is the .3 a hand job?), more than twice the world average of 16.8 sexual partners. This is in an entire lifetime people. Um, yeah. We are soooo dangerously close to that world average for dudes, and given the fact that we are just a few years shy of 30 and we totally plan on living till at least 90, the Kiwi’s lady number is looking quite doable. Which got us wondering…