Gucci Little Piggy

Who has more sexual partners, highly attractive women, women of average beauty, or unattractive women?

(A note before we get started. Many people are turned off by an impersonal and seemingly arbitrary scale such as the 1-10 scale for hotness. It’s somewhat difficult to peg any given woman as a certain rating, but it is possible to think abstractly about hypothetical groups of women. To fully understand these topics one has to think in the abstract more than in the tangible. It’s somewhat easier to think about two hypothetical women in relation to one another; perhaps a hypothetical 8 and a hypothetical 4.)

I’ve seen no statistical studies on this issue, but it’s possible to develop an a priory theory. As lurker on Roissy’s board pointed out, I believe that women’s number of sexual partners follows a bell curve (normal) distribution dependent on physical attractiveness. In short, women in the middle range, 5’s, 6’s, and 7’s have more sexual partners than women at either tail of the distribution, 1’s or 10’s.

My thesis rests on a couple of assumptions. First, women of all levels of attractiveness are equally horny. A one has a similar sexual appetite as a five, and her appetite is as robust as a ten’s. Another assumption is that each grade has an equal ability to perform sex. While 1’s may have gross deformities or impediments to sexual intercourse in real life (excess skin, multiple FUPAs), I’ll assume here that those factors don’t exist so that we may compare melons to melons across a broad spectrum. Another assumption is that human attractiveness is also distributed along some sort of bell curve. It’s hard to figure out the exact distribution; human attributes are difficult to model, but it seems reasonable to say that there are absolutely more 5’s than 10’s and 1’s. Most human traits tend to regress to some sort of mean creating a cluster around it. Similarly, there are many more men who are of average height, 5’10”, than 5’2” or 6’3” (a standard deviation or so away, but not outliers.)

People sort out potential mates and dates according to several factors. Like any good variable used in statistical regression models, a person’s choice of attractiveness is autocorrelated meaning it rests largely on that person’s own “value”. Eights tend to date 8’s. Actually, they’ll likely date in some range around that value as personal tastes and preferences enter the equation. Eights might occasionally date 6’s, more often 7’s, usually 8’s, and they might get lucky and nab a 9.

Likewise, 1’s and 10’s tend to date people close to them in overall attractiveness. A 1 will likely only get 1’s or 2’s. They are downwardly constrained because there is no such thing as a zero on this scale (another assumption). Tens are “stuck” dating 9’s and 10’s, for the most part, because they are upwardly constrained by a lack of 11’s.

It’s now easy to see the structure of the supply available to women of different ratings. Women in the middle of the attractiveness scale have a leg up, if you will, in the sexual partner tally because they are “available” to more men. A 6 might be willing to date down and hook up with a 5, and there’s an equal chance that a male 7 might date down to her. She has the benefit of being “attacked” from both sides.

Women at the tails don’t have this advantage although it’s obvious that 10’s have a much more rosy scenario. Ones can get male 1’s, but male 2’s will have to be marginally desperate to hook up with a female 1. Female 10’s can hook up with male 10’s, but the females have to be somewhat desperate to date down the scale to 9’s or an occasional 8.

Mix this tendency for hook-up behavior with the fact that there are many more men in the middle ranges of attractiveness which increases the odds of mixing and matching partners, and we have a recipe for mediocre lovin’.