Crunching Numbers

SAM SHARPE

After reading Skye’s Top 10 Tall Tales Told in the Bedroom, I was struck by one thing – the fact that women out there are still worrying about ‘their number’ and working hard to keep the ever escalating tally under wraps.

Ladies, when a man asks you how many sexual partners you’ve had do you:

a) Lie?

b) Tell the truth?

c) Refuse to answer?

Well, according to Skye, most of you would pick ‘a’ and falsify your numbers by ‘forgetting’ to count a few of your past bedmates. Personally, I can only ever remember asking the question after having been asked first, but I must confess that it is not a conversation that fills me with dread. I’m not afraid of learning that my partner has had countless lovers before me. Nor am I afraid of hearing that a potential lover has had more partners than me. To me it’s just a number.

There’s a scene in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral where Carrie (Andie MacDowell) reveals to Charles (Hugh Grant) that she’s had 30+ sexual partners in her life. Many men I know would be mortified to know their current or potential paramour had this much mileage on the old odometer. But Charles (who reveals he’s only had 9 partners) doesn’t seem all that disturbed. And you know what? I wouldn’t be either. In fact, if given a choice, I’d rather date the woman who’s had 50 partners than the woman who only had 5.

For numerous reasons (too numerous to expound upon here) upon hearing that a woman has had say, 50 partners, many men would assume some variation of the following:

“Damn, she’s been around the block.”

“God, she must be a slut/whore.”

Apparently you women are quite aware of this. So, to avoid societal judgments and your beau deeming you to be a card carrying ho for having slept with more than 10 guys, you choose to lie rather than face the crushing weight of someone else’s morality. To my mind however, this kind of logic and thinking on the part of men is really just coded language for, “man she has lots of experience, has seen many a phallus and how can I compete with that”? Whereas men like me (and presumably Charles) think:

“She’s experienced and should know how to handle her business. Sweet.”

That’s not to say that every woman who’s had many sexual partners automatically qualifies as a love goddess (as anyone who’s read A One Sided Conversation or Rise of the Starfish can attest). Nor does it mean that a relatively inexperienced partner doesn’t know how to “work the middle”. But, in my experience it’s easier to get a woman to throw down if she’s been in the ring before. It’s like knitting or macramé. Practice makes perfect.

Now, assuming that she is in the habit of practicing safe sex, I can see very little wrong with falling for or falling into bed with a woman who’s scored more than Pele (for all you number crunching fiends, that would be 1 087 goals between 1956 and 1974). In fact, the only real issue that I can pinpoint has nothing to do with the actual number per se, so much as the context of the numbers.

To illustrate, a friend of a friend was dating a girl who had only slept with six men before him. Well, the proverbial shit hit the fan when he found out that she had once worked at

…a local rub and tug

…several days a week

…for half a year.

Then there is that famous scene in the film Clerks where Dante finds out that his girlfriend, who had only slept with three guys before him, had conveniently forgotten to mention that she’d also given head to 36 guys – not including him.

These are the kinds of issues you potentially run into when you put too much emphasis on numbers.

Sex isn’t baseball, people. The stats don’t matter all that much. Many of us have grown up hearing the axiom “numbers don’t lie”, but what is also equally valid is that numbers don’t tell the truth either. They don’t make moral or ethical judgments. They may tell a story, but they certainly don’t tell the whole story.

Bookmark It