We all know men lie when it comes to reports of their own sexual prowess, but now the nerds at Berkeley have proven it mathematically. Apparently, contrary to what most sex surveys claim, it is statistically impossible for men to have more sex partners than women. (That is, if they’re not having gay sex!) After wading through some theorems we can’t understand in the New York Times story, we got to the meat of why these inconsistencies exist:

One [theory] is that men are going outside the population to find partners, to prostitutes, for example, who are not part of the survey, or are having sex when they travel to other countries.

But David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the university disagrees:

He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, “would be negligible.” The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted.

And by “numbers”, Professor Gale means your blowhard friends down at the lodge.

The Myth, the Math, the Sex [New York Times]