Because one of the easiest ways to farm engagement on X is to gin up outrage among the masses, a discourse that refuses to die is that of “body count.” No, I’m not referring to the Clinton kill list (I kid, I kid), but rather the number of sexual partners people, but specifically women, have had.
Here is one example: an X rando with fewer than 7,000 followers puts out a post seen by more than half a million people that “if you have 10 years of dating around, hitting triple digits seems pretty reasonable but people act like this is a huge deal.” A Christian influencer uses this stranger’s tweet to proclaim that “guys trying to date right now are so COOKED.”
Young men and women alike who are trying to date right now actually are so “COOKED,” but not because people are having too much sex, but rather less of it.
About a third of both men and women between the ages of 22 and 34 reported having no sex in the last three months, a statistic that is inextricably linked to the demise of marriage among young people. But even across the population more broadly, X body count discourse is a lie.
In the 2022 General Social Survey, the majority of adults reported having just one sexual partner in the past five years. Nearly 1 in 5 had no sex partners, and another 1 in 5 had 10 or fewer sex partners. It’s up to the individual to decide whether a triple-digit body count is a “huge deal,” either ethically or from the perspective of sexual and mental health, but the fact is that fewer than one in 200 people had over 100 sexual partners in the previous five years, according to the GSS.
And while young women might have lower rates of sexlessness, all adult women have fewer partners, apparently. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the median woman from age 25 to 50 has had four sex partners across her adulthood, compared to sex partners for the median man.
The fact is that while a more secular society may no longer be waiting until marriage to have sex, the overwhelming majority of people continue to reserve sex for serious, long-term, monogamous relationships. The sexual liberation movement has finally reached its critically unsexy moment. Even before COVID-19, YouGov found that only 35% of all adults reported ever having a one-night stand, with a third of those respondents saying they had only done so once.
So, are men trying to meet a future missus indeed cooked on the basis of body count? It is true that a study by the more socially conservative Institute for Family Studies found that spouses with fewer or no past sexual partners reported higher marital satisfaction than those with a higher “body count,” but marriage rates themselves have less to do with the past and more to do with the present.
The same researcher found in a separate 2023 study of nearly 20 years of data that “recent sex partners reduce the odds of marriage, but the lifetime number of nonmarital sex partners does not.” In other words, your luck in finding lasting love won’t be hampered by youthful indiscretions, but it will absolutely be limited if you continue to sleep around.
The bigger crisis that does not generate as much outrage is the fact that Gen Z is increasingly refusing to date at all, and this is a phenomenon that is disproportionately plaguing young men. The 2023 Survey on American Life found that only 56% of Gen Z adults had a boyfriend or girlfriend during their formative teenage years, a figure that falls to 54% of Gen Z men.
WHY I TRUST EJ ANTONI TO IMPROVE BLS
The problem: an internet that has trained young men and women to assume the worst about each other. A quarter of single men say most or all women would ditch their partner if someone who was wealthier or more attractive came around, while a third of single women assume all or most men would take sexual advantage of a woman if given the chance.
If we really want young people to date and get married, a solid start would be to stop lying about the statistics and start trying to get young men and women to like each other again.