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“How many people have you slept with?” he asked me.
I will never forget that night. I was in college and had been exclusively dating a man I'd met a few weeks prior. That night, we'd been watching television and eating ice cream when the conversation had turned to our sexual history.
I don't remember how it came up, and the question made me feel a little apprehensive, though at the same time, it felt really exciting to violate that taboo and share so much of myself with someone else.
Six weeks prior, I'd been in my apartment – blogging naked, of course – when I'd heard a loud banging on the door. Livid at the disturbance, I'd flung my door open and demanded to know what the intruder wanted, only to find he was knocking on the door across the hall from me.
“What do you want?” I demanded, standing stark naked at my door.
“Uh...” he'd tried so hard to keep his eyes on my face. “I'm looking for Jennifer.”
“Well, she doesn't seem to be in, does she?” I asked, coldly. “I doubt knocking loudly is going to make her materialize.”
I closed the door.
Then it occurred to me that there was a gorgeous man in the hallway outside my door.
“Hey,” I said as I opened the door again. He was still standing there, facing my door like he'd been frozen in place.
“Would you like to come in?”
He had. We'd been joined at the hip since.
And now here we were, lounging and chain smoking and his cold blue eyes were on me.
“How many?” I asked rhetorically. I'd had a list in high school and remembered the number. I added the partners I could remember since then.
Then I told him.
He freaked out. Eventually, it would come out he'd only been with six women, and the first had been a sex worker with whom he'd only spent twenty minutes – his emphasis, not mine. I found that last bit fascinating: on the one hand, I had never heard a man confess he'd paid for sex, and on the other hand, I couldn't imagine a better way to lose one's virginity than to someone with experience who was there not to be pleased, but to ensure you got what you came for. It was a very pragmatic thing to do, very much like him.
Even so, that first hand was still a bit shocked. He was young and gorgeous and he'd paid for sex? And I was strange because I had slept with more people?
It was our first fight. In a way, he never let me forget it. There was something obviously wrong with me – I seemed to need sex. From that point on, sex was always held for ransom, to see how I would react, or to punish some perceived infraction.
The truth is that his reaction did make me feel a sense of shame. I didn't regret my experience, but I felt lesser somehow, like this experience made our relationship commonplace, just one more on a long list of others.
I decided something during that relationship: I would never, ever disclose the number of people I'd slept with again. To anyone.
WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?
Fast forward a decade or so. It's a typical day in the word mines, surfing the web for content for my site Sex and the 405, when I come across a piece on Psychology Today about research by Norman Brown, a psychologist at the University of Alberta who'd found a key difference between men and women when it came to reporting the number of sex partners they'd had.
Conventional wisdom on the matter was best illustrated by the movie American Pie: Men tend to increase the number of sexual partners and women tend to lower theirs. Brown's research supports this. He found that American men report an average of 18 partners while women report 5 – but he thinks it’s more than people lying. Psychology Today elaborates:
Women are more likely to “just know,” or to have a tally somewhere, a method psychologists call “notches on the bedpost.” Women are also more likely to use enumeration (“Let’s see, Dave, Tarik, that guy from the gym…”), which produces underestimates, since people forget instances.
Men are more likely to use rough approximation (“Jeez, I don’t know, like maybe 50?”) or rate-based estimates (“Let’s see, one a month for the last five years…”)—a method that produces overestimates.
I wrote a post about it.
“I’d be interested in seeing differences in calculation based on the semantics of the question
