ISSUE #2

DO BODY COUNTS REALLY COUNT?

Merry Christmas, everyone, and welcome back to the Bad Choices Club! For whatever reason, the peak merriness of the giving season has motivated me to indulge in my man-hating ways; therefore, I want to discuss a topic that seems to become specifically significant when navigating the dating pool around early adulthood: body counts. 

In my experience, and the experiences of my friends, the body count question tends to be brought up when a person is sexually interested in someone else, and they want to gauge just how much sex generally is worth to the other person. This doesn’t strike me as too crazy, and I’m guilty of the same artificial prejudices, but what really gets me is the obvious double standard which praises men but scrutinises women for having slept with a larger number of people (my tendency is the opposite). It likely stems from the regressed perspective that men choose/pursue while women are chosen/pursued, and therefore, it represents a trophy, a manifestation of how many women they can successfully convince to have sex with them. But does anyone in the big 25 really, truly believe that men have the skillage to bed a woman who had no intention of having sex beforehand and didn’t intentionally shave before leaving the house? Women choose way before men can even comprehend that they have been chosen.

Also, what is an appropriate number of people to have sex with in your lifetime? Is it according to age, or is it dependent on when you lost your virginity? I feel like there is such vague criteria as to how many sexual partners are considered normal. Are we not more curious about the circumstances in which sex is had? I’d much rather hear that the person I am interested in has had 5 sexual partners and each of them has been meaningful, authentic encounters as opposed to 3 random Tinder hook-ups, but then this also leads me to my next question… 

Why do we actually care? I am personally torn between believing that life is short and sex is immensely pleasurable, so why not? I smoke, and I drink, which are significantly worse for your health than sex, and sex is completely natural, an inbuilt pleasure you could say. I doubt you would have caught Adam and Eve drunkenly chain-smoking a pack of Benson & Hedges at their local, but Adam sure couldn’t resist a bite of Eve’s forbidden fruit. So why do we punish ourselves for enacting a biological function? I feel that we should be entitled to exploring our sexual identities even if that involves the average white boy you spot at the pub who made eye contact with you once and has no intention whatsoever of buying you a drink. 

Why do we even make it such a big deal? I enjoy it, you enjoy it, and we need each other to enjoy it, so why not enjoy it together? I’m not saying that we should all be shagging in the middle of the street and pounce on each other whenever we feel like it, but if two consenting adults who are attracted to each other at any time (who are not related, sorry Norfolk) then I think they have no reason to not live it up. Why was Samantha Jones typecasted as a slut and scandalised when she was genuinely the happiest out of all the SATC characters combined? She looked 15 years younger than her age, had an incredibly fruitful job and was a wonderful friend, all while having copious amounts of sex. I think she is legendary and a role model to generations of women to come. 

There should be no ethical value attached to sex. Having sex does not reflect anything about your character, and I genuinely think it is anti-feminist to suggest it does. Society pressures us into abstaining from self-gratification under the notion that something is sacrificed during sex, but did you lose your virginity, or did you gain access to a whole new world of pleasure? When I have sex, I don’t believe I am any different after the experience, merely that I may get a full night’s rest without the melatonin dreams. 

Lastly, when did it become normal to ask other people what their body count is? We don’t ask people how many friends they have to determine whether they are worth being friends with. And what the actual fuck is a “body count”? Who chose that eerily ominous name? I’m waiting for the day a guy tells me his body count is three before telling me that he is a bit nervous, as it is his first time. 

In conclusion, I think we need to start fucking, stop asking and bring back perverted women (love you forever, Samantha Jones!). Xoxo