In the Kinsey survey only 1 per cent of women had, for example, pre-marital coitus with as many as twenty-odd different partners. Yet the same percentage of men had pre-marital coitus with more than a hundred different partners. Kinsey accepts "the male's greater inclination to be promiscuous" yet this belief is going beyond the data. Perhaps, for instance, women desire wide sexual relationships as much as men but are more inhibited or lack the opportunities, a consequence of male-orientated society. Anyway a number of historical performers- Cleopatra, Messalina, etc. - are quite as impressive as the men. The record is surely held by Madame de Saint-Ange, who argued that a woman can be ruined by lovers but that mere acts of libertinism are quickly forgotten - "That is the conduct I would always prescribe to all women who would follow in my steps. In the twelve years I have been married I have been had by perhaps ten or twelve thousand individuals." (Quoted in J. Atkins' "Sex in Literature".)