"How Many Bodies You Got?"
The Impossibility of Sex Positivity Under Patriarchy
Note: This article only operates out of a heterosexual lens. I’d imagine homosexual sex for all genders under patriarchy is also distorted, but I have no personal experience of that.
Are we living in a sex positive world? Some would say yes: virginity has been exposed as a social construction, casual, emotionless sex is culturally permissive, living with partners before marriage is more commonly practiced, STD testing and sex education are not taboo, female pleasure is a discussed topic, and LGBTQ+ rights have increased significantly in past years. But are we truly sex positive? Take 21 Savage’s line from the highly popular song “Spin Bout You,” released in 2022, as a reflection of the larger culture around sex: “How many bodies you got? / Pray it ain’t more than a few.” That is, it’s okay for his female partner to have had sex before, but not too much sex before. Contrast this with previous cultural norms in which virginity was the only acceptable state for a partner to be presented to men in. That has fallen away, replaced instead by “a few” being acceptable—but only a few. Isn’t this just a more relaxed form of purity culture?
Female Sexuality Under Patriarchy
The lasting effects of the sexual liberation mixed with the lingering presence of purity culture and the notion that only “sluts” give away their bodies creates a confusing combination in the cultural consciousness about heterosexual female sexuality. We are left somewhere halfway between shame and acceptance, and the result is a perplexing cultural norm: it’s okay for women to have sex with multiple partners, but not too many. Having an aversion to sex makes you a prude, but having too much sex makes you a slut. What are the boundaries? They are arbitrary, and not drawn up anywhere. What is the quantifiable “few” bodies1 that Savage considers acceptable? Three? Four? Ten?
This delicate balance between “prude” and “slut” is relevant to the female experience in today’s culture. For men, what we are often left with is our heads knowing the “correct” opinion: it’s okay for our female partners to have had sex in the past with other partners—anything else would be a puritanical, anti-woman take. Yet something is left in our gut from growing up in a culture that implicitly or explicitly emphasizes female “purity.” We may espouse sex positive positions, but have a bodily reaction to a partner mentioning a previous sexual experience. It’s important to remember that our culture is not neutral about women. Our patriarchal society has anti-woman rhetoric sprinkled in our institutions, media, advertising—virtually everywhere, seeping into our worldview whether we like it or not. Thus, without going in and doing the important work of actively challenging patriarchal ideas we find inside ourselves, sexism flourishes. Like a garden, the weeds of sexism spring up due to seeds planted without our intention. Misogyny (like racism or other forms of discrimination), is not natural, it’s taught—we hear these ideas from parents, from our bros in the locker room, from the myriad ways that society promotes sexist beliefs. But just because sexism crops up without intention doesn’t mean it’s excusable. If you were tasked with maintaining a garden and weeds crop up, you wouldn’t excuse yourself by claiming that you didn’t plant the weeds. Maintaining a garden means care, intention, and pulling up the things that shouldn’t be there—whether you planted them or not.
It’s no wonder that one book I read for my paper on male friendship referred to men as “recovering sexists.” We grow up in a culture that is anti-woman, and thus without even intending to be we are already sexist. Instead of claiming to be distant from sexist rhetoric, the best approach is to acknowledge that we are sexist as a product of patriarchy, and to actively confront it. We have both intentionally and unintentionally kept the patriarchy alive. This internal debate between sex positivity in the head but a purity reaction in the gut creates the conditions for a 21 Savage-esque bar: somewhere halfway, where sex for women is acceptable, but you don’t want to date a “slut.”
So what determines a slut? The lines are arbitrary, but men figure they can reasonably deduce a slut from a “body count”—exactly what 21 Savage was doing to by asking his partner “How many bodies you got?” and then praying “it ain’t more than a few,” because many would mean she is a slut. Hence, the obsession with asking random women their body counts seen all over TikTok and Instagram in the form of street interviews. Again, men asking strangers who they have never spoken to a highly personal detail. (Look at this one: A man asking strangers their body count and then multiplying it by two, to imply that women lowball their body count and are more “slutty” than they prefer to acknowledge. Yikes!) Women online have also joked about the tendency of men to ask them their body count minutes into meeting—I suspect they laugh, because otherwise, it’s just plain depressing.
Male Sexuality Under Patriarchy
While rooted in misogyny and absolutely unacceptable, I would argue that the male obsession with the female body count is exasperated given the pressures that patriarchy put on male sexuality. Patriarchy hurts everyone’s sexuality. For women, we have already established the impossible task of balancing “prude” and “slut.” For men, however, there are different pressures. To be a “real man” sexually, one must have more sex, typically with multiple partners—not just that, but you have to be good at stimulating your partner, maintain an erection, last long in bed, and have an above average penis. If word gets out that you didn’t perform well? Consider your masculinity gone. Men obsess about penis size when in reality, only 5% of men have a penis larger than 6.3 inches, and 0.1% have what would be considered a “micropenis.” In other words, almost all men have roughly the same size penis—that doesn’t stop them from constant comparison, insecurity, and trying to grow their penis (26.7% of millennials have reportedly researched ways to enlarge their size2). Why? Because penis size, in the cultural consciousness, is associated with degree of masculinity.
Additionally, men cannot just have sex with any woman to prove masculinity. Sex under patriarchy for men has become a hunt of sorts, in which men attempt to “score” with the most impressive candidate. It wouldn’t be complete unless the experience results in showing it off to other men to accumulate masculine capital, in the same way that men take pictures of big fish or bucks they’ve hunted and upload it to social media. It can’t just be any woman—to accumulate the maximum masculine capital, it has to be a flashy catch. There are three caveats:
The sex must be with an attractive girl
She has to be good at sex, or its lame, and you can’t brag about that to your boys.
However, she can’t be a “slut”—that isn’t impressive
Compare this to what makes a flashy hunting picture:
Size matters. Anybody can catch a small sunfish, but it takes a real man to reel in a massive catch.
The picture is better if there was some kind of story to go along with it: “I got it on opening day!” “We were waiting all day and almost gave up!” “We had to chase it!” “I shot it in the eye!” The more gory details, the better.
It has to be an impressive animal, such as a buck
So the masculine task of sex to accumulate “masculine capital” in a sexual context becomes finding a hookup with a girl who is attractive enough to be a win, experienced enough to be good, but not “easy” or a “slut,” any guy can do that, and then the sexual conquest isn’t impressive. The sexual experience becomes less about intimacy, connection, and vulnerability, and instead becomes what Ornstein calls “a referendum on masculinity.” It becomes more about performance than connection. And in a society where men are pressured to be make a lot of money, maintain a good reputation, and constantly prove masculinity, sex becomes yet another arena where we need to perform instead of just be.
Suppose a man seeking to prove his masculinity to himself and other men has sex with an attractive woman. Afterwards, feeling smug that he has scored, he brags to a group of fellow men about it, expecting to feel that rush of affirmed masculinity. But wait. It turns out the woman in question has already had sex with a couple other men in the group. Now, she moves from viable sexual candidate to the “slut” category, and thus the hookup was invalid in terms of gaining masculine capital. It may have even hurt the man’s masculinity in the eyes of the group. Or, suppose that the man has sex with a woman that he finds attractive, but the group of men considers to be “mid,” and rather than affirming his masculinity, they laugh at him. The three caveats have no objective measure, and all three must be checked off for the sex to be worthy. Will the hookup lead to affirmed masculinity? Will it lose the man masculine capital?
Towards a Culture of Genuine Sex Positivity
We live in a confusing culture of partial sex positivity. What makes a woman a slut? What helps a man gain masculine capital? Who is to say what women are attractive enough to give men clout? All of these are up to interpretation. True sex positivity, I would argue, is about emphasizing communication, connection, intimacy, and vulnerability in a sexual context. It is about consent, emotional development, and trust. What I’m trying to do here is not to make an ethical case about hookup culture or casual sex. Rather, it is to point out the ironies of the current “sex positive” culture that leaves women taken advantage of and even men, the supposed winners, trapped in the fear of performance rather than the joy of intimacy. What would it look like to be truly sex positive? To honor its sacredness and to not view it as either shameful or a performance, and to connect with another in its seriousness? In a patriarchal society, no amount of legitimizing casual sex or reducing stigma will ever genuinely solve the problem. Domination will always be part of the equation, distorting our views of the act. Genuine sex positivity can never be achieved under patriarchy.
For those not in the know, a “body” is a term for someone you’ve slept with. A “body count” refers to how many individuals one has slept with
https://onlinedoctor.superdrug.com/the-state-of-erections/index.html