Are You a Man Whore?

Facebook may help you figure that one out

No.

A good friend I used to date called me a manwhore the other day. She was laughing, and it was done with good humor and fondness (I think), but I was thus crowned all the same. The lesson might be to not talk about the girls you currently have a thing for, both on and offline, with an ex. Then again, as someone who was raised with a house full of women and one distant, emotionally abusive male figure, I figure I come by my girl craziness honestly. And I also figure that if I can use "slut" as a compliment with certain female friends who understand exactly what I mean when I say it, I imagine "manwhore" is a valid term for a man who's a little too into the ladies. I don't have sex for money with women I find unattractive, so "gigolo" didn't work.

But "manwhore"? Really? I decided to put it to the test, using hard numbers (no pun intended) and the king of all internets, Facebook. After all, the 722 individuals currently residing on my friends list represent just about everyone with whom I've ever had a personal or professional relationship. Because I'm straight, I removed the men from my new list, and even though I was born and raised in the Deep South, I removed my relatives, too. The 356 women that remained, in part, represent quite a bit of my romantic and sexual past. The first girl I ever kissed is on there. So is the girl I took to prom. And the first great love of my life. Not to mention the majority of women I've dated.

There's an app for that.

None of that, however, had anything to do with where I was now, with how many women took up space in my mind at this moment, and in what capacity. So I did the math. By maneuvering through Failbook's ever-more-difficult navigation (Friends > Edit Friends > Create A List) I was able to make lists for the women I considered somewhat romantically compatible, as well as those I was merely sexually attracted to. Facebook totals up the numbers on the list as you add to it.

The results: Slightly below 8 percent of the females on my Facebook were good enough to date, and a full 30% were sexable. (This is not to say they weren't good enough to date; in many cases, I simply didn't know them very well.)

So I'm horrible, right?

Not really, at least as far as the sexuality goes. Studies show that upon joining any group of people, a woman will subconsciously pick out three or four men (or women) whom they find sexually attractive. This holds true whether the crowd of people equals 30, or, 300, or 3000. Three or four people, tops. Men, on the other hand, will always find half of the women in their vicinity sexually acceptable. It doesn't mean he'll make the attempt on all or even any of them; it means male sexuality is pass-fail. The question among men, when it comes to discussing sexual attractiveness, is never "What do you think of her?" but rather "Would you?"

This is happening.

Again, forget the size of the group: if a straight man accidentally parachutes into a crowd of 3,000 women, he will potentially consider 1,500 to be worth sexing up (assuming he didn't accidentally interrupt a meeting of the Ellen James Society). My 3 out of 10 result was actually on the low end -- though I have to admit, were all 356 of my female Facebook friends in one room, that number might go up considerably. So I wasn't a manwhore, just a man.

But what about that other number? Was it normal to consider taking 1/13th of the women I ran into every day out to dinner and a movie? Or was I some sort of stalker?

To discover that, I made a new list of those I considered my closest Facebook friends, totaling 172 in all, which is fairly close to the magic number of friends -- 150 -- sociologists tell us a human being can keep close to themselves at the same time. And the numbers jumped. Among my closest friends, I wanted to date 30 percent of the women, and I found a full three-quarters of them sexually desirable. The average single man has six "first dates" in the course of a year, but I had 28 women in my dating pool. Hmm.

Please be careful.

However, removing the women who were unavailable (I wasn't interested in dating the uninterested, and so didn't count them) brought that number down to an even dozen. And half of those dozen ladies were women I'd already had some sort of romantic or sexual entanglement with; I simply found them still entangleable. That left -- ta da! -- six women I could conceivably go on first dates with at the present, always assuming I had a teleportation device for the ones who weren't in my general vicinity. (We can thank the internets for that latest wrinkle.)

The most fascinating aspect of all this, however, was that sex number. If straight men truly want to have sex with most or all of the women they feel close to, as we can usually agree they do, but only find half of the women in any given group sexually attractive, then the staggering implication is this: you're twice as likely to be sexually attractive to a man if he likes your personality. See? It does matter. I know it works that way for me: my 3-in-10 sexuality turns into a 3-out-of-4 among those I love best.

So there you have it. Men, check your Facebook friends list, if most of your peeps are on it -- should you find yourself wanting to bed more than half of them, you're a manwhore. Likewise, if Dateable Women - Available Women - Previous Women > 6, you may be a stalkery manwhore at that. Now all we need is a survey to determine the average, healthy amount of porn taking up our hard drives. I have a feeling I overshot that one.