Everyone seems to think people — particularly young women — are having a lot of sex, but that's not really true.

Men in the US think women are having a lot more sex, with a lot more people, than they actually are. Imtmphoto / Getty Images

Men think women have nearly four times as much sex as they actually do, according to a survey looking at sexual misperceptions in the US and UK. In the survey, researchers asked men and women how often they thought people aged 18 to 29 had had sex within the last four weeks. Men guessed that women had sex 23 times, but the actual number was an average of 5 to 6 times. Women were slightly more accurate, guessing that women had sex an average of 12 times a month — but that was still double the reality. But overall, everyone thinks everyone else is having more sex than they actually are. Those polled thought men had sex 13 to 15 times over the last month, while the actual number was around 4 to 5 times. The survey was conducted by Ipsos, a research and marketing firm based in Paris. The findings are to be released in a book called The Perils of Perception in September.

Ipsos

Men also greatly overestimated how many sexual partners women had had by the time they reached middle age. The researchers polled people in three countries for this one, including the US, the UK, and Australia. Men guessed that women had slept with 27 people by the time they were aged 45 to 54, but the actual average number is 12. (Women were better at guessing, estimating 13 partners by middle age.) Both sexes were more accurate with their guesses for men, estimating they'd slept with an average of 20 people by middle age. The actual number is 19. People in the UK and Australia answered the same questions, but the gender disparity was most pronounced among US respondents. "It’s interesting that this misperception is so profound. It really illustrates the extent to which men really don’t understand female sexuality," Chris Jackson, a spokesperson for Ipsos, told BuzzFeed News. "Men just don’t seem to have a good understanding of the reality for women. I guess that’s not actually news."

Ipsos