Every survey on number of sex partners has the conclusory and glib disclaimer "men lie up and women lie down!!11!"

But they never study or discuss the mechanisms, and attribute the reasoning to a simple "man want be stud, woman no want be slut"

My theory for why all those surveys end up being off is that, in a lot of instances, men and women will have a different perspective on whether the same exact sexual encounter counts as a partner or not.

So if there's a grey area of whether it should count (e.g., the girl allowed the guy to penetrate, the guy tried to penetrate but wasn't hard enough to go all the way in),

the guy is more likely to count it as a sexual encounter ("I was pretty much in, it counts")

and the woman is less likely ("he wasn't all the way in, it doesn't count")

because of the incentives.

So, in a context where you've been asked to reveal your number of past sexual partners,

whether on a date, a chat with friends, one of those surveys that inevitably comes with the disclaimer "women deflate and men inflate",

what factors motivated you to inflate or deflate

(e.g., shame? fear of judgment? desire to be seen as awesome?)

and what mechanisms did you use to alter your number?

(e.g,

only relationship sex counted,

it counted as sex even if you weren't able to get hard enough to penetrate all the way,

it didn't count if you were blacked out,

a threesome counted as two partners even if you only penetrated one of them

just picked a number that sounded good at random--but how did you come to think it sounded good?)