sex math

We Did the Sex Math on John Mayer

John Mayer.
John Mayer. Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

On Wednesday morning, the internet was roaring and gnashing its teeth in delight at new information about John Mayer’s sex life: On a recent episode of his Instagram Live show, the self-proclaimed “recovering ego addict” admitted to Cazzie David (his honored guest) that he’d slept with “a soft 500” women — or so said Celebitchy, “Page Six,” and E! News.

At first blush, the number seemed outlandish, but in the interest of objectivity, we decided to do the only logical thing and filter it through the cool, rational lens of a mathematical equation.

Assuming Mayer lost his virginity when he was 24, a number we obtained from this totally unsubstantiated claim, and not factoring in any of Mayer’s periods of monogamy:

500 women (+/-x) / 17 years of having sex = 30 women/year, with (+/-x) factored in because of “soft.” Given there are 52 weeks in a year, that means Mayer has slept with less than one woman per weekend. Honestly, for a famous musician, that’s not … totally unreasonable?

But once we had arrived at this conclusion, we realized there had been some human error we hadn’t accounted for: After relistening to the Instagram Live interview, we were alarmed to discover that Mayer had, in fact, said “sub 500,” not “soft 500.” Again, we turned to the logical world of numbers to soothe our confusion. We decided to instead use a limit equation, as we’re assuming that the number of women Mayer has slept with is approaching 500.

So: lim x → 500 = (365/17), solving for x yields 25 women/year. This means that Mayer had, at most, sex with a new person every 14.4 days. Again, this number isn’t all that surprising.

Unfortunately for the Casanova, it sounds like the average number of women he sleeps with each year is decreasing, as they have come to realization that he kinda sucks: “I find people not being into me brings a real level of reality into my life, whereas when I was in my early 20s where I really couldn’t miss, I kind of abused that,” Mayer said. “Not so long ago I gave a girl my number and she said, ‘I probably won’t use it.’ ”

(Disclaimer for the men: This is not real math, and therefore, we will not be issuing any corrections.)

We Did the Sex Math on John Mayer