Does how many people you’ve slept with really matter? It’s time to finally retire the ‘body count’ debate

Lily*, 25, had been dating Luke* for a few months when the inevitable ‘body count’ conversation came up. “That was the start of our break-up spiral,” she says. What started as a friendly conversation soon turned into Luke throwing sexist double standards around — it eventually became so insufferable that Lily had to get up and leave. “He said he wouldn’t want to date, or even be friends with, a woman with a high body count because they ‘wouldn’t have a good personality’,” she recalls. “I asked him if his male friends have high body counts and he said yes, so I asked him how that was any different and he didn’t really have an answer.” Such is the gendered double standard at the heart of the age-old ‘body count’ debate. For some reason, despite it being the grand old year of 2025, strong and steady discourse about body count — and what is considered ‘too high’ — persists in the mainstream. It’s a question that’s most recently been given a new lease of life in viral TikTok vox pop interviews, as well as on reality TV shows like Love Island and Olivia Attwood’s Bad Boyfriends, all of which shine a light on and reinforce this double standard, revealing that what’s usually considered high for a woman is lower than for a man. Even more disturbingly, the body count conversation is more prevalent among Gen Z than any other generation: according to recent Lovehoney research, 42% of 18 to 24-year-olds say a high body count would bother them, compared with 29% of the general population. It seems to be a mostly heterosexual phenomenon. As a queer woman, I’ve never once been asked my body count on a date with another woman — let alone shamed for it when I choose to reveal it further down the line. By virtue of engaging in non-heteronormative relationships, I’ve noticed most people who identify as LGBTQ+ have a much less rigid perception of sex — what counts as sex, who’s ‘acceptable’ to have it with, and how often — than straight people. In a quick straw poll of my queer friends, most said they wouldn’t care about a high body count; they’d care more if someone hadn’t had queer sex before. Maybe that’s because what constitutes queer sex is more nebulous than heterosexual sex, or at least there’s less of a blueprint for it. But, although it is rooted in misogyny, it’s not just straight men who are bothered about body count. So, what gives? We’re supposedly living in a world where sex is less stigmatised than ever. Hello, you can buy sex toys in Boots and Sainsbury’s, and younger generations are much more likely to talk about sex among friends, on TV, or even seek therapy for it than previous generations. Yet it seems many of us still care. Is it time we retire the debate — and how can we do so once and for all? Method behind the madness According to Dr Andrew Thomas, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Swansea, there are lots of legitimate reasons we might care about body count. “One is that it can signal potential health risks,” he says. “We know that as the number of casual sex partners increases, so does the likelihood of sexually transmitted infections.” (Although it’s worth noting that someone can get an STI even if they’ve only slept with a few people, just as someone who’s slept with hundreds of people might be well-versed in how to have consistently safe sex.) There’s also a perception that a higher body count could signal a tendency towards infidelity. “We know that people with a large number of past sexual partners often have a higher appetite for casual sex,” explains Thomas. “For someone seeking a long-term relationship, this may raise questions about whether the person is genuinely oriented toward commitment.” When sexual encounters have taken place matters, too (for both men and women). Thomas’ recent research shows that people favour partners whose sexual activity is evenly spread out, or slows down, over time, rather than sleeping with more partners over time or regularly sleeping with new partners.There’s also the lingering (but still incredibly pervasive and often contradictory) prudishness we have towards sex as a society. This is especially true of sex outside the confines of a heterosexual, monogamous, long-term relationship — which, surprisingly, Gen Z is more likely than any other generation to say they have fantasised about (the dating scene is so brutal that it’s made us trad! Save us!). On top of that, our sex ed in schools is, let’s face it, abysmal; we can’t even say the word ‘sex’, or anything related to it, on social media; and, the cherry on top, one in eight Gen Z men have positive views towards Andrew Tate, who claims to reject women who have slept with more than three men. Mix that all together and you have yourself a severely sex-positively-starved society, the effects of which are felt most keenly among women and marginalised groups. Double standards No wonder, then, that the body count double standard has stood the test of time — or, maybe more accurately, is gaining traction among younger generations. “One time I slept with a guy who had slept with over 100 women, but he thought women couldn’t sleep with over five people,” Amy*, 25, tells Cosmopolitan UK. “He was the kind of guy who had never gone down on a woman.” Although Amy doesn’t care about body count herself, she has been shamed for hers. “The only man who’s judged me for my body count had never had sex,” she says. “I genuinely think men who care about women’s body count are just insecure about their own.” Several of the women I spoke to shared this opinion — and remember feeling most judged by their body count when their date, or partner, had slept with fewer people than them. “A guy asked me my body count on the first date because he knew I had gone travelling,” says Olivia*, 25. “When I told him, I could tell he was upset and he kept bringing it up while we dated [non-exclusively] on and off for three months. Eventually it became a big issue; he said we saw dating differently because I’d slept with ‘so many more’ people than him. He even brought it up when we ended things, because he seemed to think I’d just go and sleep with someone new the next day.” Lily believes Luke’s opinions about body count were also down to insecurity — but a different kind. “His last partner cheated on him, so I can understand from that perspective why he might have felt insecure, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s to do with personality,” she says. “I’ve also been cheated on, but I don’t care about body count, even if my partner tells me theirs. The only time I’d be wary of a high body count was if I thought there was a risk of them cheating on me.” Regardless of gender, having sex with more people than someone you want to hook up with or date (or vice versa) isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to sex and relationships educator Ruby Rare. “I can’t really think of anything else where more experience would be viewed as a downside,” she says. “There are loads of ways of learning more about yourself, your body, your desires, as well as other people’s and how you communicate. But a really good way of doing that is to get stuck in and sleep with a variety of different people.” That’s not to say that everyone should go out and sleep with lots of people, “because that can easily swing the other way and feel performatively competitive”, adds Rare (although Feeld’s 2024 State of Dating report suggests Gen Z’s penchant for a low number of relationships and sexual partners could be fuelling their loneliness). But the suggestion that it’s inherently wrong to sleep with as many people as gives you pleasure is ridiculous, Rare claims. “This is also rooted in moral panic and purity culture in Western countries, particularly linked to religion,” she says. In the same way that the idea of sex before marriage being ‘bad’ was forced on women for centuries, manfluencers are using body count discourse as an excuse to control women’s behaviour. “Whenever I see clips of men talking about body count, ‘high-value women’, and this incredibly hyperconservative evangelical view of womanhood, it is the most pathetic behaviour I have ever seen,” says Rare. “It’s ludicrous. If you are a straight woman and you are even considering letting a man like that into your orbit, please stop. There are nice people in the world and men shaming women for a wealth of sexual experience is obviously such a double standard, and a clear indicator that they are not going to be a good sexual partner.” What women think But women are not innocent in body count shaming, either. Even when the straight women I spoke to claimed they didn’t care, that often came with a caveat. Research as recent as 2024 shows that women judge body count just as much as men, if not more. Lovehoney’s study also found that across all age groups, 72% of men say they don’t care about body count, compared to 66% of women. Perhaps women who sleep with men are just as wary about high body count because casual sex for straight women can often be fairly lacklustre. In fact, compared with three quarters of men, just a third of women report reaching orgasm during casual sex with someone of the opposite sex. Not that orgasms reflect a total lack of pleasure, but they can be reflective of a partner caring about yours; as this viral Instagram post points out, ‘Maybe his body count is so high because nobody came back for seconds’. A high body count in men, then, might (somewhat ironically) signal to women a lack of experience — or as one 27-year-old woman I spoke to put it: “You can bake as many cakes as you want, doesn’t make you a great baker.” And Gen Z men are the least likely generation to be able to locate the clitoris, just saying… Pleasure first This emphasis on what’s pleasurable for each of us individually should take precedence over conversations around body count, Rare argues. “We should be celebrating sexual autonomy, and that can look very different for different people,” she says. “For some people, sexual autonomy is about exploration, whether that’s on your own or with partners. For others it’s about finding comfort, like connecting with spirituality through sex and intimacy. Those are just two examples.” When your approach to sex could become concerning is if you feel there’s a standard way to engage with intimacy. “An obsession with body count is so reductive because you are chaining yourself to a specific way of doing sex,” explains Rare. This can come at the exclusion of other kinds of intimacy, like attending a sex party, group sex, non-penetrative sex, or even sharing a fleeting, but non-sexual, emotional connection with someone. As a queer woman, I find it much more difficult to quantify my body count since I steered away from dating men. When I was sleeping with random men I met on dating apps, penetration defined whether or not we’d had sex (and, in my experience, the majority of men weren’t bothered about anything outside of that). But no one is to say whether the time I gave a man a hand job and we didn’t have penetrative sex ‘counts’, or the time I grinded on a woman fully-clothed until she came. Even I’ve stopped counting. The point is, the way each of us quantifies sex, and therefore body count, is different (I even heard about one woman who counted kisses in hers), and isn’t that what we should be striving towards? “Imagine if instead of a body count, it was an intimacy count,” Rare poses. “I still don’t like that you’re having to number it, but what if it was the number of people that you’ve shared intimate moments with? That could be sexual pleasure, or emotional intimacy.” While sexual history might tell you whether a partner can provide emotional or physical safety, we need to move away from hyperfocusing on how many people we’ve slept with. There’s so much more to be found in the respect, pleasure, and intimacy behind those interactions, than projecting some arbitrary meaning on ‘sex’ (whatever that even means). Whether those past experiences have been good, bad, or even mediocre, for each of us, all roads have led to here. *Names have been changed

Does how many people you’ve slept with really matter? It’s time to finally retire the ‘body count’ debate

There’s so much more to be found in the respect, pleasure, and intimacy behind our sexual histories, as opposed to hyperfocusing on ‘stats’.

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