It’s sex day at Feministe!
I wanted to clarify my earlier comments on the “numbers talk” a bit, and flesh out some ideas/questions that came up in comments.
First, the clarification: when I’m talking about a “numbers talk,” I’m talking about the sort of conversation that arises when people have attitudes like this:
One 24-year-old Washington reporter agreed that “redos” of previous partners can keep your number below the slut threshold, defined by two of her male friends as “less than 20.” She thinks she is “chaste’’ with a number of six, but admits she sometimes subtracts one or two when telling a guy her romantic history. She said she kept dating Mr. Six after she’d lost interest simply because she didn’t want to up the number to Mr. Seven.
One 25-year-old writer in D.C. said his ideal girl’s number is one or two fewer than his. When he had “the numbers talk’’ with one date, she gave him an answer that he found both satisfactory and sexy: “Enough to know what I’m doing.”
Hugo had a post about this last year, in which one of his students had a similar problem:
I heard from a former student the other day wanting a bit of advice. Her boyfriend recently left her, ending a two-year relationship. The reason? He couldn’t “handle” her sexual past. When they started dating, he was a virgin, while she had had a modest number of sexual partners (she didn’t specify a number to me.) Their relationship had been going along swimmingly until that fateful day when he chose to ask her “So, how many men have you slept with?” She chose to answer truthfully, and things were never the same. For the remaining months of their relationship, he alternated between pestering her for details of her past, and calling her a “slut”. (Why she put up with such demeaning and inappropriate behavior is another topic altogether.) Finally, unable to cope with the truth of the disparity in their experiences, he dumped her. She was devastated.
Even people who make their living writing about sex shy away from giving out their numbers:
My number’s higher than 20, but that’s all I’ll say, because even I’m not immune to the potential judgment around this issue. I don’t want the future parent of my children, or even my next fuck buddy, to discount me off the bat because of my lurid past. For Bosnak, who explores in her novel various reasons a girl might take a tumble, there’s no room for regrets. “[My sexual partners] make me who I am; I’ve learned lessons from all of them. Rather than thinking of all the reasons I shouldn’t have slept with them or wishing I hadn’t, I look back and say, ‘You know why I did? He was the best dancer or I was on this guy’s motorcycle and it was so fun, I just went for it.’ “
But earlier, Bussel notes that Bosnak declined to quantify her own number of sexual partners.
Now, I was mostly focused on the “slut” number for women and the reasons why women shouldn’t answer numbers questions, but in comments, both FoolishOwl and Linnaeus (as well as StacyM in another thread) pointed out that men who have low numbers are under pressure to lie, inflate, exaggerate or what have you lest they be thought of as less than manly, or — an even bigger sin in some quarters — gay. So chalk one more bit of damage up for the patriarchy.
I still maintain that a contextless demand to know the number of sexual partners one has had in the past is beyond the pale and doesn’t merit an answer because it’s really nobody’s business. One may certainly volunteer that information, or it may be an organic part of a conversation about sexual histories, though the person divulging the information should always retain the ability to decline further answer. But if someone’s asking you so that they can be assured that you’re not a slut (or that you are), or that you aren’t as experienced as they are, or that you’re more experienced, then you may want to consider that a red flag.
Several people noted that they figured out from piecing together information over time that they knew, at least roughly, how many sexual partners their SOs or spouses had in the past. That’s not exactly a “numbers talk.” That’s an unfolding of trust over time, and that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Still, several people said that their spouses hadn’t disclosed everything, even years later. That before there was a “we,” there was a “me” and a “you,” and that “we” don’t necessarily need to know all the details of “you” and/or “me.”
Let me say this: I think that there are very few mandatory disclosures in sexual ethics, and those mostly revolve around disease status or prior sexual violence (giving, not receiving). One is always, always entitled to break it off or decline sex with anyone at all for any reason at all, but one just doesn’t have the right to demand answers about anything but disease status or criminal record relating to sexual violence.
There was a case raised in the thread below of a woman who contracted HIV from her husband, and who successfully sued her husband for lying about his prior homosexual history. While I certainly think that people who go so far as to get married ought, as a matter of full disclosure, ‘fess up about potential disease vectors, I also think that any particular kind of sex isn’t more worthy of disclosure than others. So, since homosexual sex isn’t a guaranteed path to seropositivity, nor is hetero sex a guaranteed bulwark against it, I think the husband had no particular duty to disclose his gay past. However, I do think he did have a duty, assuming he had unprotected sex prior to meeting his wife (or afterwards), to find out his HIV status prior to having unprotected sex with his wife.
But, again, that’s an issue of disease status, not sheer numbers of partners. And you can have one partner (or even, in the case of some diseases, no PIV or PIA partners) and still have an STD that needs to be disclosed. I still can’t conceive of a reason why anyone could demand of me to know, without context, how many sexual partners I’ve had, and I can’t conceive of a reason why I might demand the same. Even in the case of an STD, what difference does it make short of shaming the other partner?
I also want to stress, strongly, that while I do not think that any person has the right to demand information from a potential partner, I do think that, should that partner choose to disclose information — particularly sensitive information — that that disclosure should be looked upon as a gift, something not to be abused. So if your female partner voluntarily discloses that she has had a more-extensive sexual past than you perhaps feel is consistent with non-sluttitude, you have an obligation not to use that information against her later on. Or if your male partner discloses that he’s had a *less* extensive sexual past than might be considered “manly,” you have an obligation to focus on what he brings to the table *now,* not what he might have brought in the past.