Women lie about their sex lives

Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives as a study reveals they routinely claim to have slept with fewer partners than they have.

The report points to discrepancies in the results of sex surveys since the Sixties which have indicated heterosexual men exaggerate the number of their partners, with British men claiming an average of 13 over their lifetime.

Yet women in the UK claim an average of nine - leading to the unlikely conclusion that the majority of Britain's menfolk are having sex with foreign women. Similar studies elsewhere suggest that this is statistically impossible.

Until now, scientists had thought that both sexes were lying - with men inflating the number of partners and women understating them.

But the study reveals women's embellishments include adding years to the age they claim to have lost their virginity and lying about masturbation and use of pornography. The survey in the Journal of Sex Research quizzed 96 men and 105 women. Some were told their answers were anonymous, some were told a researcher was watching and the rest were told they were being monitored by lie detector.

"Women are so sensitive about being labelled 'whores' that they are very reluctant to be honest about their sexual behaviour, even in supposedly anonymous surveys," said Terri Fisher, who headed the study at Ohio State University in the US.