tiger tiger for ultimate November, also St. Andrew’s Day (Scotland’s national day); meanwhile, I bring you two dinosaurs trading ideas about popularity and sluttiness
A pair of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics strips, coming in succession on 11/10 and 11/13, in which T-Rex rambles on to his buddy Utahraptor about a fairly well-known paradoxical-sounding phenomenon in social networks, the friendship paradox. Actually, it applies more generally, and I’ll talk you through the (apparent) paradox in the general case. Yes, I’ll get to the comics, and to the way T-Rex uses the adjective slutty, but first let’s talk about your lunch partners.
The symmetric-relation paradox. Brace yourself for some mathematician-talk, but don’t despair: I’ll work up a concrete example (about you and your lunch partners) along the way.
Consider a a set N (for example, the set of people in a social network) and a symmetric relation R between members of N; R might be being friends with, say, or having gone to grade school with or — my concrete example — having had lunch with. Then for any member m of N (like you, for definiteness), define m’s R:N-cohort to be the set of members of N that m bears R to (like, the set of all your lunch partners), and m’s R:N-index to be the size of m’s R:N-cohort (like, how many lunch partners you’d had). Then it can be shown that, on average, the R:N-indices of members of m’s R:N-cohort are greater than m’s R:N-index — like, on average, the number of lunch partners your lunch partners have had is greater than the number of lunch partners you have had. Yes, it sounds paradoxical. But it’s provably so.
Now, listen up: what the symmetric-relation paradox does not say is that (all) your lunch partners have more lunch partners than you do. That would be genuinely paradoxical. All it says is that the (arithmetic) mean of their lunch-partner figures is higher than yours, which is a great deal less thrilling (though it still has a whiff of the perverse about it). So let’s look at the special case, the friendship paradox, where N is a social network and R is the being friends with relation (which is where T-Rex starts in his Dinosaur Comics ramble, before he goes on to the having had sex with relation (parallel to the having had lunch with relation) and to sluttiness, having had many sexual (rather than lunch) partners.
The friendship paradox. From Wikipedia:
The friendship paradox is the phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991 that on average, an individual’s friends have more friends than that individual. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with more friends are more likely to be in one’s own friend group. In other words, one is less likely to be friends with someone who has very few friends. In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.
The same observation can be applied more generally to social networks defined by other relations than friendship: for instance, most people’s sexual partners have had (on the average) a greater number of sexual partners than they have.
… In spite of its apparently paradoxical nature, the phenomenon is real, and can be explained as a consequence of the general mathematical properties of social networks. The mathematics behind this are directly related to the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality.
Technical details follow in the entry.
T-Rex hanging out with Utahraptor. The two strips (which I was alerted to by John Baker, who also reminded me that T-Rex is straight, while Utahraptor is gay); after these two successive strips, Ryan North promised his readers that there would be no further friendship-paradox strips.
(#1) The 11/10/23 strip: being friends with and also having had sex with; T-Rex is dismayed at his presumable lagging in popularity and sluttiness (both of which he views as desirable states); and in the last panel slips into the erroneous “all my friends” (rather than “on average, my friends”) formulation
(#2) The 11/13/23 strip: T-Rex gets more unhinged and dips into the math, and also gets some more sex on the side; meanwhile, Utahraptor waves the Gays Have More Sex and More Satisfying Sex Than Straights Do flag (in a nutshell, Sluttier Than Thou), which comes at the beginning of a sentence he intends to be soothing to T-Rex but is clearly sliding downhill, so he brings it to a halt with a but
Sluts N Whores R Us. What NOAD says:
noun slut: 1 offensive a woman [AZ: but see below] who has many casual sexual partners. …
adj. slutty: derogatory (with reference to a woman [AZ: again, but see below]) sexually promiscuous or provocative in a way that is considered in bad taste: she wore one of her slutty outfits and practically poured herself onto his lap.
noun whore: 1 [a] derogatory a prostitute. [AZ: orginally applied only to women, now used for male hustlers as well] [b] a person who is willing to do anything to get a particular thing: he’s a shameless publicity whore | you come across as a complete attention whore. [AZ: see the snowclonelet composites below] 2. offensive a woman [AZ: again, but see below] who has had many casual sexual encounters or relationships. [that is, ≈ slut]
verb whore: [a] [no object] derogatory work as a prostitute: she was forced to whore in order to support herself | [with object]: I whored myself in the streets. [b] (of a man) use the services of prostitutes: they had whored and drunk like madmen. [c] debase oneself by doing something for unworthy motives, typically to make money: he had never whored after money.
[not in NOAD: verb whore around: (esp. of a man) have sex promiscuously]
Also: X slut (as in Scrabble slut) and X whore (as in attention whore) as snowclonelet composites, referring to someone who craves, or enjoys, X extravagantly.
Now what Wikipedia says:
Slut is an English-language term for a person, usually a woman or girl, who is sexually promiscuous or considered to have loose sexual morals. It is usually used as an insult, sexual slur or offensive term of disparagement. It originally meant “a dirty, slovenly woman”, and is rarely used to refer to men, generally requiring clarification by use of the terms male slut or man whore.
Referring to sexually promiscuous men. The male counterparts of slut, slutty, and whore used for sexually promiscuous women. The history is complex.
Now rather antique are the terms Don Juan (despite Leporello’s catalogue aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, listing the number of women and girls despoiled by the Don in various countries — 1,003 in Spain! — the label Don Juan still has a romantic aura about it) and womanizer (with its vague suggestion of the male as some kind of tool, gadget, or appliance).
Then came the metaphorical slang compounds hound dog and horndog; and the awkward expansions of slut and whore with modifiers, the nominal male slut / maleslut and the compound man whore / manwhore.
And slang player, which suffers from having a host of other senses, or its clearer AAVE variant playa.
Finally, I’m told by young informants (in their 20s or around there) for whom this is the favored variant, the still vibrantly taboo compound fuckboy / fuck boy.
Meanwhile, many men are now comfortable with calling themselves slutty (≈ promiscuous); and with calling themselves sluts, or sometimes also whores (≈ promiscuous men); and with applying these terms to other men in similar ways. Semantic extension. My impression is that this usage is more common among gay guys (who don’t mind, or even celebrate, the historically feminine associations of these terms) than among straight guys, but that might just be because I’m a gay guy who’s entirely comfortable with the usages.
In any case, this usage of slut(ty) — which the dinosaurs are comfortable with, too — is also a reclamation, washing the opprobrium out of slut(ty). See my 5/29/11 posting “Sluts”, about SlutWalks, public demonstrations to (among other things} reclaim the word slut.