On the Dangers and Drawbacks of Body Counts

Life is qualitative, not quantitative

Life can sometimes feel like an endless list of qualifying questions. From “What do you study?” and “What do you want to be?”, to star signs, favourite pets, party tricks, and “What’s your biggest red flag?” After a while, as someone who is much more comfortable writing an article than making conversation, this can become tiresome. Onerous, even. But there is one question which irks, confounds, and aggravates me more than any other: “What’s your body count?”

There are several things wrong with this question. Not only is it incredibly invasive, but it euphemistically poses as chill. It’s putting on a chic little cap, ordering a flat white with full-fat milk, telling you how it just doesn’t believe in taking life too seriously. The two words “body count” function under the assumption that you are comfortable sharing something so personal with anyone who asks. Indeed, if for whatever reason you don’t want to answer, your body count must be crazy high or crazy low. After all, don’t you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide? It’s just a number. Which brings me onto the second assumption which “What's your number?” makes: that by acting so nonchalantly about sex, reducing it to one little number, we really can take away its power.

I’m not trying to sound like a priest or your mum, or some 18th-century ghoul in grey clothing standing behind you in the mirror, harping on about the virtues of a chaste life. I don’t believe that sex is bad or that the entire population should abstain. Nonetheless, no matter how blasé our generation treats the concept, sex still matters. On a personal level — between two (or more!) people — and on a societal level. Someone’s body count, or rather our opinion of someone’s body count, affects how we view them and the value we place on them. Otherwise, why would you ask? In fact, the Institute for Family Affairs published an article this year showing that we are still more likely to judge our partners more harshly based on the number of partners they’ve had before us. 

Moreover, the resurgence of traditionalist, right-wing cultural politics sharpens this latex knife. The first hits on YouTube for “body count” are “Dangers of a High Body Count”; “Body Count Meaning for a Girl vs. A Boy.”; and, my personal favourite, “She Said Her High Body Count Had Nothing To Do With Her Cheating!” No matter how much we dress it up in not-that-deep tissue paper, adorn it with tequila-flavoured bows, “What’s your number?” holds far too much cultural meaning for us to consider it a chill question. 

As my deep dive into YouTube’s purity police shows, double standards still prevail for men and women surrounding the ‘acceptable’ number of people to sleep with. Aside from sexist “hot-take” influencers, we can see this wrapped like ivy around the stone foundations of our cultural upbringing. The term slut, for instance, has been actively used within our society since 1450. Slightly more recently, in the admittedly underrated 2011 rom-com What’s Your Number? (sound familiar?), we see the heroine nervously downing champagne as she realises she’s slept with more people than her friends, then undertaking Herculean efforts to get back with an ex so as not to go over a certain body count. In Four Weddings and a Funeral, we see Hugh Grant keel over in shock at Andie MacDowell’s character’s list. In every season, nay every episode of Sex And The City, we see how quickly four ‘best friends’ turn to slut-shaming Samantha. Yes, we undoubtedly live in a different world now. But given how ingrained our societal perspectives on sex have been for so long, how removed can we really expect to be from the 1450s, 1990s, or 2010s? 

This enduring notion creates a pressure to conform to social norms — so much so that people feel the need to lie in order to seem more ‘innocent’ or more ‘manly.’ But who decides these norms? Who decides what’s innocent? What’s manly? What is the perfect number?

Aside from its invasive nature and misogynistic underpinnings, I believe that the question of body counts poses a deeper, subconscious danger. Our focus on encapsulating experiences in lists and numbers, such as a Kiss List (and you know what else), can give off the impression that life is quantitative — that it is made up of figures. “How high is your body count?” can be read as “How much of a man/woman are you?” When travelling, my friends kept lists of hookups as proof of “how much fun” they had.

On one level, this is natural; as we know, the human brain does love a listicle (See: ‘For the Love of the Listicle’ in our last issue). However, with more complex topics, we forget that lists and numbers serve to simplify, not to define. Unlike in the scientific world, we cannot categorise human experience by a set quota. How many bodies doth a slut make? And how many make a man? 

Our understanding of life is not built in this way. Human experience is fundamentally qualitative. By this, I mean we are shaped by our thoughts and feelings, not statistics. Can you really gain any idea about someone’s personality or worldview by asking how high their body count is? Can something as human, as diverse, as formative as sex really be explained by a number on a list? Every encounter is unique and will have affected your partner or friend in ways unique to them. If you’ve slept with ten people, five of them might have left you feeling less than yourself. Let’s be honest here, not all sex is good sex. The idea that one number can define someone’s personality is, to me, not only misguided but plain dumb. 

This reductive view of the world does not account for our vastly differing situations in life. It excludes its own defining ingredients: whether you’ve been in long or short-term relationships, life experiences, religion, culture. These ingredients make up a person. Body counts, on the other hand, essentially do nothing more than pluck a number out of thin air. It’s almost comical that we change our perspectives of people based on a number which could, for all we know, be entirely fictitious. Why should we use it to form an opinion of people over far more valuable questions? Why have we given one number so much weight? Especially given its personal, invasive nature, its gendered double standards, and how reductive it is of life’s experiences. Really, we would be better off sticking to star signs. 

Illustration by Isabella Abbott