Jan 122010
(asked by Madeline from somewhere)
While with a cab driver in Paris I stuck up a conversation about French men and monogamy to which he replied:
“There are two women for every Frenchman but it’s great because half the men are gay so it’s four women for every Frenchman!”
I wouldn’t have doubts for any other reason other than he was the most creepy man in the world and had a strange fascination with murder.
So Madeline, if you were in France at that moment, you must have seen that there were about as many French men as French women in the streets and pretty much anywhere else (except maybe in Zara or at a soccer game). Because guess what? The cab driver was joking! A non-funny slightly sexist and homophobic joke, but a joke nonetheless.
But still, it’s my duty to answer this question, so I will.
At the last census, in 2006, it was established that there were in France:
-28,696,033 French men.
-30,841,909 French women.
(source: INSEE)
I know, those numbers don’t include French people living abroad, we assume that there are between 1 and 2 millions of them, but as there are no official number (not all of them are registered in the their consulate) we are going to assume that the ratio is roughly the same as the one in France.
And that ratio is: 1.075 French women for every French man.
Why are there more women? Because, like pretty much everywhere else in the world, there are slightly more women that are born than men (edit: actually not, my bad, see comments for details), and like pretty much everywhere else in the world, women tend to live a few years longer than men.
Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to find the ratio between straight men and women.
Like everywhere else in the world, between 3 and 10% of French men are gay (no official statistics on homosexuality, hence the big margin), as you see we’re far from 50% (who in their right mind thinks that?).
So, if we have 3% of the male population that is gay, that gives us about 860,880 gay men in France and 27,835,173 straight men (for the sexist purpose of these statistics, bisexual men will be considered as straight, we’ll just take them in a moment when they’re attracted to a woman).
In this case, there will be 1.1 French woman per straight French man.
But the number of gay people is most likely closer to 10%, so that gives us about 2,869,603 gay men in France and 25,826,430 straight men.
In that case, there will be close to 1.2 French woman for every straight French man.
I’m sure your outlook on life has changed after learning that.
But wait? What about lesbians? Why are they included in the final count? Wasn’t the whole thing about finding out how many women on average a polygamist could get?
Hahahahaha, brilliant, made me laugh!!!
Ooops, There are more boys than girls born, makes no sense but there you go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio
I know, knitpicking! I have been in France too long to be this fussy. Anyway, excellent excellent blog lots of smart, interesting funny stuff in here.
Whoops, my bad.
Actually, it makes sense. Males are more likely to die than females, so we need more of them at birth.