This may be the dumbest topic I’ve ever written about.
“Body count” discourse has been trending on Twitter, and sadly, it’s not about serial killer competitions because that reality show would get killer ratings.
“Jason has been falling behind in the standings, but this weekend in a bravura performance that had audiances across America cheering in disbelief, he took out an entire family, four generations in one go, to rocket into second place! So how are you feeling about your chances now Jason?” “Well, pretty good, Sally, the Hendersons really helped me even the score, but I still need two more to pass Butcher Bob. Speaking of which, where will you be Friday night?” [They both laugh.]
No, I’m talking about tweets like this:
Fifteen thousand “likes” for a tweet that bemoans women having too many sexual partners. (Benjamin is commenting on a Reddit post that I’m 99.98% sure is fake.)
Or here is YouTube celebrity Tim Pool with some buddies talking about shaming women as “ho’s”1 (whores) because of their high body count.
These dudes live in the manosphere where it’s normal for guys to sit around, seeing who can grab their crotch with the most aplomb. Consider that Pool’s definition of a “high-quality dude” is someone who has “really nice watches and pulls up in a Bugatti.” (To be fair, Jesus said something similar in Matthew 6:24.) But these idiots have millions of fans who lap up their hateful nonsense. Pool has 1.34 million subscribers on his YouTube channel!
All these guys (and some gals)—from Benjamin to Pool to trad-influencer/Hitler songwriter Pearl Davis (seriously, she wrote a song about maybe believing Hitler conspiracy theories), to British sleaze-influencer Andrew Tate—are arguing that if women have a lot of sexual partners, that’s bad. It makes them “low value.”
This is classic Madonna or whore misogyny. Either women are angels who stay virginal till marriage, or they’re sleazy tramps. Joining the manosphere bro’s, conservative influencers wrap up their misogyny in sanctimony, arguing they’re merely protecting women from the consequences of their folly. Their shaming is helping to stop women from becoming someone a man would not want to marry.
What makes a lot of this discourse so toxic is much of it is fueled by angry men who clearly don’t get much sex. The current name for these guys is “incel,” meaning involuntary celibate. It’s sad that frustrated young men have found a label to rally around that encourages them to hate all the women who are not sleeping with them. There are forums where these men gather to brood about the injustice they suffer. Elaborate nomenclatures are created to describe their worldview. It’s filled with “Chads” (handsome, successful guys who get all the sex), “Stacys” (the hot women who will never sleep with the poor, unattractive incels), and various subcategories of incels (volcels, ricecels, dickcels, and, I kid you not, wristcels, who claim their thin arm bones keep them from attracting women).
Many guys pushing these ideas, both incels and traditional conservatives, buy into a crude evolutionary determinism. They make vague hand waves in the direction of Darwin and claim women are naturally this way, men are naturally that way, and SCIENCE explains everything. (There are behavioral tendencies in each sex, of course, but viewing them as completely deterministic is very unscientific.)
Notice this guy’s use of “naturally inclined.”
Much of the hostility these men feel towards women seems to be because they imagine a type of woman who exists only on Instagram pages. She’s beautiful, expensively dressed, and completely mercenary. To get their revenge on these curated women who won’t sleep with them, angry young men, and the influencers who feed their rage, talk about body counts and call women who enjoy sex whores.
I worry that young men will fall for this kind of bitter nonsense. I read that young people are having less sex, and some men see relationships with women as beyond their reach. To me, this all sounds bizarre.
I’ve never viewed women this way. I did some teasing in middle school (Sorry Julie Bradlow), but mostly, I liked girls. As I got older, I kept on liking women. And the women I’ve known don’t match the strange stereotypes I read about on the Interwebs. They’ve been cute, plain, funny, brilliant, not-so-smart, over-achievers, uber-slackers, and just plain human. Dehumanizing them never had any appeal. And a shocking number have been willing to date me!
This isn’t because I’m an alpha male. In high school, I was a painfully shy, bookish nerd and barely dated. Despite this, I never felt any resentment towards women. My shyness wasn’t their fault. In college, I still wasn’t handsome or ripped, so I focused on being jokey. And it worked! I got a girlfriend! My sex life picked up infinity%. We broke up after I graduated, so I got involved in theater because I heard there were girls there. This was accurate! Notice what I didn’t do? I didn’t stay home and complain that women wouldn’t sleep with me.
I eventually met the future Mrs. HistoryBoomer and had 28 years of regular snuggles until my divorce five years ago. That hurt, but I didn’t start hating women (or even hating my ex-wife). Post-divorce, I did the dating app thing. (Pro tip: Many things about dating apps suck, but they help shy guys like me make the first move.) These days, I’m middle-aged, underpaid, my hair is thinning, and I’m overweight, yet I still date! I’ve had some relationships, including two years with a lovely woman who wasn’t quite a match, but we stay in touch.
I give this potted history of my dating life not to brag (what’s to brag about?) but because I’m not one of Tim Pool’s “high-quality dudes,” and yet here I am, still spending plenty of time with people cuter than me. I am the poster guy for showing that all that alpha male crap is garbage. Mature humans don’t judge men by how much stuff they own or women by how much sex they’ve had (or vice versa).
I have never in my life asked a woman about her body count. These days, when I sit across a restaurant table on a first date, I’m not thinking, “How many guys has she slept with,” I’m wondering, does she read books? Is she a Wes Anderson fan? Will she pretend to think my jokes are funny? I already know she’s had sex before. How many times doesn’t interest me. I’m sure some of the women I’ve slept with have had more sex than me. So? Is it a contest? My only red flag is someone who’s never been in a serious relationship (that would beg some questions).
At this point, some odd puppy on Twitter always chimes in, “Oh, so if she’d slept with a hundred guys, you wouldn’t care?”
This proves that much of body count discourse is fed by young men who haven’t had any sex. They spew lurid hate fantasies of wild women with dozens of partners, but that rarely happens. This National Institute of Health survey shows that the most common number of lifetime sexual partners for women at age 44 is 2 to 4, followed closely by 5 to 9. Forty or more sexual partners is incredibly rare. Less than 2% of all women claim that rate.
But fine, if my date had Wilt Chamberlain numbers,2 I might be taken aback.3 It’s never happened.
The current emphasis on body counts comes from the manosphere right, but it feels related to a different kind of Puritanism on the left, which sees sex between the wrong people (too big an age gap, too much power differential) as problematic. And don’t forget that the traditionally religious still at least pay lip service to the idea that women should remain virgins until marriage. All these Puritans give me hives.
Luckily, most of us humans don’t care about someone’s sexual history. We realize that while sex is fun, we want to find someone to share a life with, and what they did before they started hanging with us isn’t very important.4
I struggled over whether to write “hos” (which sounds like a Western nickname) or '“hoes” (which is a garden implement) before settling on “ho’s” because Wikipedia tells me that an apostrophe can be used to “mark as plural written items that are not words established in English orthography" for example "P's and Q's"
Basketball great Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women.
Or I might be intrigued!
Unless they were a serial killer, because that would be bad.
I think some of this is part of millennial culture becoming more apparent in the public sphere, and not necessarily a right-wing/political thing (even if where we're seeing it is in right-wing X).
First I ever heard about "body counts" was in college circa 2006 where I was told that the appropriate number before marriage was 5. Any more, and you're a whore who no one will want to marry.
And, it was a young woman telling me this.*
*Reader, I do see how this could be construed a certain way... but it wasn't.
Either way, the emergence of this perspective in the early 2000s might be a reaction against the sexual revolution and the rise of internet pornography. It also reminds me that there was a brief moment in college when a friend tried to normalize calling women "sluts" because, as the logic went, if they self-identify as a "slut" it's more likely that they'll have sex with us. That didn't turn out too well for him.
Thank you for this article. I now know what bodycount means in a modern context, which has forestalled the following:
Them: what’s your bodycount
Me: umm...0 *checks exits nervously* but I’m prepared to take it to 1 if necessary *hard stare*
This scenario goes nowhere good from here.