How Many is Too Many?
My friend messaged me the other day in a desperate state! She had watched that movie where a woman sleeps with 19 guys and decides 20 is the one she should marry or something like that. I can’t remember the name or the details but I do remember how upset my friend was after watching it. So my friend decides to make a list of all the men she’s slept with and then becomes upset over it. I’m furious! Not that she has slept with many men but that she’s upset about it. (And no “ my friend” is not a code for myself, I’m proud of everyone I slept with, well nearly everyone, lol)
Being a sexologist, at times we are required to take a sex history. It is very useful in putting the pieces of someone sex life together. But on another level I am against people themselves adding up the amount of fun they have had beneath the sheets and the amount of people they have had it with.
It all has to do with numbers and after all it’s just a number. Does is matter if you have slept with 1 guy or 25 guys? What matters is that you had fun whilst doing it, was safe and it was consensual. There is no such thing as a magical number that will destroy women for all other men. Sometimes I think the more sexual experience a woman has had the better her sex life will be in the long term. She has had time to experiment with what she wants and experience different things from different people. I’m not suggesting you run out and sleep with as many people as possible. But if you have had many sexual partners it is not necessarily a bad thing.
Women tend to get hung up on that number! They hear someone talk about another person in disgust over the amount of men a woman has had sex with and maybe called her a slut or some other derogatory name that really when you deconstruct it makes not sense. (How do you define the word slut after all?). That’s all it can take for the shame and guilt to kick in. We are so worried about what every else thinks about us and our sex lives, it’s enough to send us crazy!
So what we really need to change is not the number of people women sleep with but how they feel about their sexuality.
Should my friend be depressed or feel guilty that she has slept with what she thinks is a large about of men, certainly not! Let me also point out that what one person thinks is a lot of men another person might think differently. There really is no such thing as normal when it comes to sex, only average. Do we really want to do what everyone else is doing or what we really want to be doing?
Movies like the one my friend became obsessed with (chick flick that makes us feel bad about our sexuality and that we should all settle down and get married because it’s the right thing to do) these should come with their own classification system for women. “ED” – warning this movie can be emotionally damaging to women.
Have sex with as many people as you want to, as long as it is what you truly want.
Happy making love and not number counting,
Dr NikkiG
