At dinner in a restaurant over a bottle of wine, toward the end of the meal a couple eyes each other speculatively and each wonders silently what will be the next step in the evening. For example whether they are headed to one or the other’s apartment for a session of locked lips and grinding bodies? The guy—or the chick—looks over her glass or his glass and asks a preliminary, tentative question, “So, like, what’s your body count?” Meaning, how many people have you slept with up until now?
Body counts—one’s sexual history, notches in your penis or vagina if one looks thru the lens of a Western movie—have become an obsession recently in the blackosphere and for good reason. Modern society has advanced to the point where frank (although not necessarily truthful) conversations among men and women about sexuality, even in casual circumstances, are common. This crosses all cultural lines except perhaps devout Muslims and some Catholics.
Even Asians, for example, who usually act like China got a billion inhabitants through immaculate conception? And certainly Latinos, who like African Americans are known to go horizontal at the drop of a hat—all are now offering up some pretty lurid details to their dates or even mere acquaintances that in years past would never have been mentioned except to best friends and/or priests or rabbis. Black people who are generally regarded as experts on the subject of fucking have been the first to de-stigmatize sexual scorecards and talk openly about what was forbidden before. Especially on podcasts. There is an important caution, however: It doesn’t mean that what people are saying about their sexual histories is true. In fact the couple at the dinner table are both about to tell some pretty big whoppers. But luckily there is a way to “suss out” the truth, as our British cousins say. There’s actually a formula—and it’s a different formula for men and for women.
If for example the chick says that she has slept with ten guys previously, the rule of thumb is to multiply by two and add three. Does that make sense? The take-home lesson is that women are being more forthcoming but are still lying which, and this is said in a completely non-judgmental way, is not new because women lie so much anyhow! How cool is that? Now, however, because there’s no longer so much opprobrium being heaped, it’s easier to find out how many bodies she really has to her credit.
And because sexual conquests are an area where guys like to lie too, to exaggerate their personal scores, like embellishing your golf handicap or bragging about one’s nonexistent skills on the basketball court? So, like, there’s absolutely no condemnation involved, no feeling that women are any “worse" than men. Guys tell just as many whoppers about sex but the goal of the lying is different. Men want to appear to be good in the sack in order to attract more chicks. Women however do need to beware because he's almost certainly lying.
If a man brags, for example, “I’ve slept with fifty women in my life,” the basic rule is to divide by two and subtract two. That’s the lying bro algorithm.
See how the two scores for men and women start to line up?
In the limit, as mathematicians say, the two numbers approach each other, just like in calculus. The aggregate body count for guys begins to approach the aggregate count for women, at least among heterosexuals. Does that make sense? And the beauty of correction factors like these—the two formulas for guys and girls—is that they take account of men’s propensity to exaggerate their sexual prowess and women’s tendency to exaggerate their claim to sexual purity and promote their own, well, not innocence exactly—not these days—but that they aren’t just giving up the box to any random nigger who asks. Does that make sense too?
There are exceptions that must be noted. National Basketball Association great Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have slept with 20,000 women during his heyday. We know after employing the formula that the actual figure is closer to 9,998. And even that number is suspect because a United Press International reporter once told me that NBA groupies will come to a player’s hotel room “and ask to go down on him and he never even knows her name,” not to get all graphic or anything. The point is that Chamberlain may have included blowjobs in his body count which the algorithm doesn’t really allow.
And when somebody’s elderly grandmother is counseling her pubescent granddaughter against promiscuity, and Granny says that she can count the men she ever slept with in 90 years on Earth on the fingers of one hand, the truth is that she almost certainly did more than a dozen guys if you use the corrective calculation. But why does it matter, you may ask? Why is it important how many people a potential partner has slept with before? Not just because women lie and guys exaggerate and you want to call somebody out. In fact that’s not the reason at all.
First, in the case of guys, women say that they want men to “level up” in the emotional/feelings domain and talking about how many chicks they’ve laid may actually lead some men to discuss their feelings for the women involved. It’s not a certainty by any means but at least it’s a possibility? And by asking a woman about her body count, you may know before you ask that she’s going to lie, but there is at least the possibility that there is some truth in her answer. How cool is that? And in today’s polarized society, in which we’re all looking for ways to connect with others, body counts offer that chance.
After all discussing politics is a minefield. Even music can be polarizing. Movies are no good anymore and unless you’re a Marvel freak, there’s nothing to discuss. But sex! Everyone fucks or likes to talk about fucking, no? Asking a body count is the ultimate ice-breaker.
