Sam Trenholme’s blog

The 80/20 sex partner myth

November 29, 2025

While I have touched on the incel 80/20 myth in a previous blog, I want to go in to more detail on why 80/20 is a myth.

The myth explained

An imaginary world where 20% of men have sex with 80% of women. The dark grey line highlights the percentage of male and female partners the “top” 20% have.

There’s a famous scene in the Netflix series Adolescence where one of the characters tells the other character there is a myth online where 20% of the men sleep with 80% of the women. This hateful and misogynistic myth is one which gained ground in the 2010s among far right online communities, including the “incel” community.

Whether this myth originates from a comment by one Baumeister or from a 2008 OkCupid blog entry, it has become viral on social media, even though there is no scientific evidence to support this myth.¹

That in mind, I have done some research myself to see whether this myth is true.

Let’s us imagine a world where 20% of the men have sex with 80% of the women. In this imaginary world, which I have modeled, we can see that women have a fairly linear distribution of sex partners; e.g. 26.75% of women have 40.7% of lifetime male sex partners and 99.80% of women have 100.0% of lifetime male sex partners.

Contrast this with the men in this incel fantasy, where 20.95% of men have 81.7% of lifetime female sex partners, and there is a nearly 50% male virginity rate.

The actual data

The actual NSFG 2022 data. The dark grey line highlights the percentage of male and female partners the “top” 20% have.

For me to find the actual figures of reported sex partners, I looked up the 2022 NSFG data, where they asked about 10,000 men and women how many lifetime sex partners they have had.

I got the number of female lifetime sex partners from page 448 of the NSFG 2022 female codebook and male lifetime sex partners page 254 of the NSFG 2022 male codebook.²

I then took that data and made a graph of the data. Note in particular that:

32.18% of women have 79.7% of lifetime male sex partners
27.69% of men have 81.1% of lifetime female sex partners
There is a 22.3% male virginity rate

Notably, both the men and women have what look to be a polynomial distribution of partners, instead of the reasonably linear distribution of partners among women we see when we model the imaginary 80/20 world incels have made up.

Also, the male and female partner count distributions are very similar to each other. This indicates that while about 20% of men have 70% of the lifetime female sex partners, about 20% of women also have about 70% of the lifetime male sex partners. So, while a small number of men do, in fact, have the majority of female sex partners, the women they are sleeping with, in turn, have a large number of male sex partners.

Methodology

The files used to process this data and generate these graphs are available here:

https://github.com/samboy/blog/tree/main/80-20-myth

Some more of the methodology is described in a page dedicated to scientifically comparing the 80/20 incel myth to the actual numbers we see in the 2022 NSFG data; that page is based on this blog entry, but with more technical and mathematical details.

Footnotes

1: The notion that women want to cheat on their male partners when they ovulate has been shown to be false.

2: Note that these are opposite sex intercourse partners.