For many people, math is a real drag. It was a chore to have to get up early to make your math class, and the concepts you were learning didn’t actually affect your life in any way. You might be forgiven for thinking that advanced math was even a waste of time. However, you’d be very wrong in that respect. It turns out that math can actually be used to answer some of the dirtiest questions we’ve ever wanted to know about sex. If you’ve ever wanted to know how much penis a vagina takes in volume during penetrative sex, or how much the leg hair a woman shaves will weigh over the course of her life, the only way to answer that is with math. Math is a double-edged sword, it can bore us to death, or keep us endlessly entertained. Welcome to the world of sex mathematics, where people solve math problems that are decidedly not safe for work.
Math was probably your least favorite subject in school. I know it was mine when I got to high school. I remember struggling with trigonometry in the ninth grade and almost contemplating suicide when I was almost moved up to calculus in high school. I was totally at a loss when it came to a lot of more advance mathematical concepts.
If I’d been learning math this way, it might not have been so hard. Welcome to the world of sex mathematics, where advanced mathematical concepts are used to answer life’s burning questions. Some of these questions are pretty tame, like the amount of unlock patterns there are for an Android smartphone. However, others are very not safe for work, and that’s what we’re here to talk about.
The main community for this is a subreddit. Specifically, it’s the subreddit r/theydidthemath. It’s a forum for anyone to present and/or solve burning questions that can only be solved with math. Needless to say, if these guys were teaching our math class, we’d be a lot more interested in advanced mathematical concepts.
Here’s a good example of an average question. One recent question that made it onto the subreddit was “How long would it take to pet a dog 16,500 times?” in response to a photo saying they’d pet their dog once for each upvote the post got. The answer was found, and it was actually pretty easy. “Timing a more relaxed pet of my cat, which for this purpose should be similar to a dog, comes out to two seconds per pet. Assuming You constantly pet at this same rate uninterrupted, that comes out to 9.16 hours.” said Reddit user dave_ama.
Vice attempted to figure out why people were so obssesed with solving sex with math. "My friends and I were sat around drinking and wondering if it were possible to calculate the ‘d**k mileage' of the p*rnstar Jenna Jameson,” subreddit member Matthew told Vice in messages sent over Reddit. "It seemed like too good of a conundrum to not figure out. As I recall we accounted for individual 'pumps' at 7.5 inches with margin either side for what we referred to as the 'just the tip' factor and estimated 300 pumps per session.” The answer to this question is 6.14 miles of penis, if you were dying to know.
They didn’t come up with that answer right away. They’d originally arrived at the magic number of 27.7 miles of penis, but they were corrected by someone who adjusted the formula they used to account for a more reasonable amount of sexual partners. "It inspired some controversy as to the veracity of the equation but we did the best we could without actually watching hours and hours of p*rn with a note pad.” Matthew said.
However, there’s still a big question. Why do people even want to solve sex related agh problems anyway. Matthew had a pretty good answer for this one. "There's something rebellious about applying mathematics, which is innately elegant, to the crude act of sex or masturbation," he said. "I liked the work of the guy who figured out it would take 951 years of masturbating once per minute without stopping for food or sleep to fill an Olympic swimming pool. It's completely useless information but the conundrum was still intriguing."
Sometimes these questions come from a source. For example, Reddit user James wondered just how many Eiffel Towers would it take to have sex with the world, based on the Kenrick Lamar song “Backseat Freestyle.” Believe it or not, there’s an answer for this one, too. "I chose this specific one because I was listening to the song and it got me thinking how big your dick would actually need to be, because even though the Eiffel Tower is big, it is small compared to the Earth," he said. "I first did my calculations very messily on a paper that would only make sense to me and later rewrote them to post online."
For James, sex mathematics is a no brainer to get interested in. For him, it’s a way to marry two subjects that don’t often intersect. "I think it can lend a bridge between two things that don't usually connect. It can lessen the contradictory stigma about sex, since it is everywhere in society but also taboo, and help us understand both sides of it,” he said.
For other people who like these math problems, it’s a way to express themselves. The community on r/theydidthemath is a great place for people to indulge in their interest in sex (and math, for that matter) without being judged. Anyone who’s ever had a really weird hobby or even a hobby that the people around you didn’t understand knows how it feels to have an outlet where people do understand.
As for Reddit user Lance, sex math was a good place to get his questions answered. He has a cousin who’s the head of a math department at a college in his state, but because that cousin is a conservative Christian, there are certain math questions he can’t ask him. "I take all my non-sexual questions to him and use Reddit to help with the more sexual things," he said. "[But] I wouldn't say sex lends itself [to maths]. I just think everything should be questioned, considered, and refined—and sex is a part of life."
Even the experts are weighing in. Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals is a sociologist, and she wrote Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment. She sat down with Vice to talk about why people are drawn to sex and math, and she touched on basically what the guys on Reddit solving the math problems did.
Dr. Tibbals makes an argument that’s hard to refute. She made the argument that numbers are unbiased, and in this case, they’re being used to make the subjective and ephemeral concepts of sex more tangible. "Think about it: Being able to pull stats is a sure fire way to win an argument or at least be lauded as an authority. So in terms of why we're interested in the empirical knowledge of salacious acts, it's exactly this—the same social norms that tell us 'numbers are most correct' also tells us that sex is weird or dirty or not a worthwhile query. If one can find a way to quantify those socially 'unworthy' questions, it suddenly legitimizes them as a preoccupation."
She went on to talk about how we tend to paint ourselves into corners. Sex is still a taboo for many people, and nobody really wants to talk about it in a quantifiable way. However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that sex can be fascinating in itself. "It's unfortunate that we have painted ourselves into such a social corner with sex because it could be that the people who are doing these maths on Reddit see sex for what it is: interesting, compelling, and totally ordinary," Dr. Tibbals said. "Human behavior, though not always kind or uplifting, is fascinating. When we ignore the parts that make us uncomfortable because we have been conditioned to feel discomfort, we lose out on knowing that."
Math has helped us to understand human nature. This is true now, and it’s true for much of human history. If we didn’t have math, we wouldn’t be able to quantify anything in a finite, objective way. Sex mathematics is just one way of doing that.
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