What's Your Body Count?

 

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 hips? The guy—or the chick—looks over her glass or his glass and asks a preliminary, tentative question, “So, what’s your body count?” Meaning how many people have you slept with previously? 

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? Yes, the Chinese too.

     Certainly Latinos—who like African Americans and generic white people are known to go horizontal at the drop of a hat—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 are generally regarded as world-class experts on the subject of fucking and 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 a couple of pretty big whoppers. But luckily there is a way to “suss out” the truth, as our British cousins say. There’s a formula—actually two different formulas, one for men and one for women. Keep in mind that men want to appear more experienced in bed, in order to attract women looking for someone who knows what he's doing, while with women it's often the exact reverse. They may want to appear as if they only give up the box in special circumstances.

     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 in the age of female liberation 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. The formula offers a more accurate count than she does.

  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 partners. But women 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, actually. 

  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 separately for girls—is that they take account of men’s propensity to exaggerate their sexual prowess and women’s tendency to exaggerate their claim to purity and promote their own, well, not innocence exactly—not these days—but that they aren’t just giving it up to any random nigger on the street. Does that make sense too? 

  There are exceptions that should be noted. National Basketball Association great Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have slept with 20,000 women during his heyday. He was as formidable in the bedroom as he was on the basketball court. We know however after employing the formula that the actual figure for his conquests is closer to 9,998. And even that number is suspect because a United Press International reporter once divulged 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 score which the algorithm doesn’t really count. 

    

    Misinterpreting the algorithm is also possible. For example: Take those two thirtysomethings at dinner. Both say, coincidentally, that their scores are thirty bodies a piece. In quantum sexual theory thesis known as the 30-30-30 dilemma or the thirty-cubed problem and it is like those word problems from math class. You may imagine that it's fate and this couple is destined to sweat up the sheets but you have to stop and really think. What the guys is saying is his actual score is closer to a dozen, after living almost half his life as an adult, and that he may have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time playing video games in his mom's basement. The chick is equally problematic but for a different reason. He real score is closer to sixty and if only half of those were one-night stands, no problem, but that means the other half were men she was in relationships with, which means she may be cray-cray or high maintenance and may not be suitable material as the mother of your children. If on the other hand her date is just looking for access to the box, she may be the perfect candidate. Does that make sense? 

     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 more like the fingers of both hands and a couple of toes as well. 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 today 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 not much good anymore and unless you’re a Marvel freak, there’s nothing really to discuss. But sex! Everyone fucks or likes to talk about fucking, no? Asking a body count is the ultimate ice-breaker.