I am more than a little shocked that those numbers are so high. That's almost one in seven men! I guess it just goes to show how much society has conditioned me to believe that everyone is having sex.
It's kind of a vicious cycle. If everyone believes everyone else has had sex, people will be less likely to admit (or at least bring up) that they haven't had sex, and so further contribute to the idea that everyone has had it.
I'd be just as shocked if the title of the article only reference people over 25. Once you've been out of school for a few years, I imagine the odds of ending your virginity in any particular year goes way down. ie., a 25 year old virgin stand a pretty good chance of becoming a 40 year old one. A 20 year old virgin stands a pretty good chance of not being one for much longer.
edit - Or so I'd expect, but this article has me questioning a lot of those expectations.
I didn't mean it as a bait (my first title attempt was too long, so I shortened it to that). I would edit it to say "25-45 yrs/old" if I could, but the 'edit' button is gone.
As it happens, most polygynous societies have much less polygyny than you'd think because the average man can't afford all four wives. I believe the average man throughout history has been a monogynous man living in a polygynous society.
Average = mean, median, or mode? I'd expect the mean man (no pun intended, and excluding those who never reproduce) to have 2-ish wives - that's what the "the average person is descended from twice as many women as men" quote is about. I'd expect the median man to have one wife - that's what your comment is about. I'd expect the modal man to have no wives - after all, if some folks are ending up with the harems, that means a bunch of people with no women at all.
"I'd expect the mean man (no pun intended, and excluding those who never reproduce) to have 2-ish wives - that's what the "the average person is descended from twice as many women as men" quote is about."
Surely you mean (ahem) the mean man-who-actually-reproduced.
If the mean across all males (not just those who reproduce) is one wife, as expected by a 50/50 sex distribution, then that means King Solomon's 600 partners meant that 599 men have no wives. Dunno how that would compare with the number that had 1 wife, but I wouldn't be surprised if the former is greater.
I don't think you can consider what goes on in prisons as sex. Most of the time it's rape.
It is interesting to observe how Americans view sex in prison as if it was inevitable. If inmates were raped in my country, there would be an outrage. And the number of rapes in prison here are very close to zero (don't have the stats but I remember reading that it almost never happen). And this is a western European country, so in theory the culture should be relatively comparable.
In my country (South Africa) prison rape is also common. I've read a study (not going to search for it now) that the AIDS prevalence for people in prison actually goes down (which is suprising).
A lot of sex in prison also isn't rape.
The biggest cause for the rape problem in prisons is prison overcrowding (Europe doesn't have that problem at the scale of the USA or RSA). The problem is that the USA has a much higher incarceration rate than European countries.
Historically, maybe it's not so shocking. According to the article below,
Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men...To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
Nature needs us to have sex in order to continue the species, so it has built in very heavy biases to get us to do that. It's the number one imperative besides keeping ourselves alive.
I believe that even for a reasonable person who is well practiced in recognizing biases in his own point of view, getting past all biases involving sex would be extremely difficult.
It's kind of a vicious cycle. If everyone believes everyone else has had sex, people will be less likely to admit (or at least bring up) that they haven't had sex, and so further contribute to the idea that everyone has had it.