In 2007, Patrick and Charlotte Markey, psychologists at Villanova and Rutgers University, respectively, published a study in the Journal of Research in Personality called “The Interpersonal Meaning of Sexual Promiscuity”. They measured the interpersonal characteristics of two hundred and ten adults using personality tests, then asked each participant to indicate the number of partners with whom they engaged in specific sexual activities. As previous studies have suggested, socially dominant personalities tended to have more sexual partners than those with submissive dispositions. The Markeys’ study took the relationship between personality and promiscuity one step further: they found that warm, friendly people and cold, misanthropic individuals are typically more promiscuous, while those with more moderate personalities have fewer sexual partners.
A dominant personality makes it possible to take an active role in pursuing sexual relationships, giving those individuals more control over their number of partners. The Markeys speculate that misanthropes prefer to maintain multiple sex partners to avoid intimacy. Meanwhile, overly warm personalities may experience sex as a way to share their warmth with others. It is particularly interesting that warm, friendly people tend to have more sexual partners than people with moderate dispositions because it conflicts with the conventional moral notion that promiscuity is bad—and an indication of a deviant personality. “It could be that someone’s not doing it to achieve the most pleasure. Someone actually might be doing it as an expression of their warmth to other people,” Patrick Markey said in an interview with LiveScience magazine, “A warm person might hug lots of people; a warm person might kiss lots of people. Well, maybe a warm person might sleep with lots of people.”
There has been a lot of research and a lot of speculation about patterns of sexual behavior, some into what accounts for “promiscuous” behavior among human beings. Many attribute promiscuity to biological factors, suggesting that the (sometimes irresistible) impulse to mate with many partners has or had some sort of evolutionary advantage, and is therefore “hardwired” into our genetics. Others claim that social norms govern sexual behavior, independent of genetic programming. This study proposes a causal relationship between personality and promiscuity; it assumes a directionality in the relationship that the data does not support. First of all, the Markeys’ study does not address the social meaning of sexual activity. Sex does not occur in a vacuum—rather it is deeply entrenched in a complex network of meaning. At best, they have discovered a correlation between personality type and number of sexual partners. Further, they did not investigate the role of early sexual experiences in the development of personality (problematic in terms of causal vector), nor did they take into account the impact of those experiences on future decisions about sex. While their findings are certainly interesting, they are hardly conclusive in that they fail to eliminate other variables of an individual’s history as causal elements of their “promiscuous” behavior.
The problem of conceptualization, however, is the most relevant to our research: the Markeys use the term “promiscuity” without clearly defining it. It is clear that, for them, the number of sexual partners is an important constituent of promiscuous behavior, but how many partners must one engage with before he or she can be called “promiscuous”? Is promiscuity characterized by sleeping with a certain number of people within a certain length of time? Suppose one individual has had four sexual partners over the course of five years, while another individual has had four sexual partners in the span of five months, which individual can we call “promiscuous”? Can an individual be promiscuous if they have kissed or had oral sex with a specific number of partners without ever having had sexual intercourse with anyone? Are there different definitions of the word when applied to men and women? Can this word be divorced from its moral connotations and used as a scientific term denoting a numerical assessment of sexual behavior?
These are some of the questions we intend to answer.
Source: Markey, P. M., & Markey, C. N. (2007). The interpersonal meaning of sexual promiscuity. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 1199-1212.
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