I'm 25, and I've have had sex with 26 (give or take? define "sex"?) people. Whoo doggie, right? But let's break that down.
-Most sluts are not as slutty as you think.
I'm 25. I lost my virginity at 15. So 26 partners is only two or three a year. It's hardly going home with a new guy every night. To break it down further, 6 of those partners were serious romantic relationships, and you can't call a girl slutty for sleeping with her own boyfriend, right? So now it's 20 casual partners over 10 years--a raging, wild, man-eating two per year. I'm so cock-crazy I need it every six months, baby.
I'm not trying to imply that 26 isn't so much but if your number is really high then that's a different situation, morally or socially. I'm only trying to demonstrate that a lot of numbers that seem stratospheric actually break down to very moderate indulgence.
Oh, and a woman in "my god, you can see her everything" clothing dancing on tables and flirting with every guy in the bar might be a virgin for all you know about her.
-Sluttiness doesn't damage anything.
Having sex isn't like smoking; it doesn't give you bad skin or a raspy voice or a propensity to call people "darlin'." Nor does having sex with multiple people have some magical deconstructive effect that having sex multiple times with one partner doesn't. Nor are STDs little angels of justice that start spontaneously generating and bypassing condoms once you reach some critical number.
It's not some slow destructive slide psychologically, either. I suppose if you're slutty for some really unhealthy reason and you hate it--or if you're constantly exposed to slut-hatred from the outside--it could bring you down, but then the sluttery itself isn't your real problem. I've had sex with 26 people and I think that love is real and sex is magical and there's nothing quite like that ineffable, unpredictable spark between two people. And fuck, I would know.
On the other hand, there's not some amazing positive effect either. I haven't become some kind of sex expert, nor met anyone who's fucked so many people that they've learned the secret moves. I'm just more convinced than most that everyone is really, really different in bed, and the only ways to learn are to ask and experiment.
By the way, my vagina's actually pretty tight. If it were loose--if vaginas were made of some kind of fragile inelastic material rather than tough and active muscle tissue--it would be permanently stuck at the diameter of Rowdy's hand, anyway. After that it doesn't matter how many cocks I've had; some were big and some were small, but none of them had knuckles.
-You can't tell a slut by looking.
Clothes are such a powerful symbol in media that you expect a slut to be dressed like a Bratz doll (and a pervert like either the Borg Queen or the biker from the Village People). I, and pretty much all the other high-number-holders that I know, don't have the fashion sense God gave a CS major. It's t-shirt and shorts or skirt in the summer, t-shirt and jeans and jacket in the winter. Whooooo baby.
I'm not super flirty either. I'm kind of shy and awkward, sometimes even prickly. It's just that when I open up to someone, well, I really open up to them.
-Being a slut doesn't mean you can't have relationships.
Rowdy and Sprite know about my past (and present). They like it. They're slutting it up pretty hard themselves. We're, like, Team Slut. We are also in an actual, serious, not-just-sex relationship(s) with cuddling and talking and shared experiences.
See, it turns out that when you take a slut out to dinner, she actually doesn't gnaw on the silverware or start humping the waiter's leg. Hell, she doesn't even hold up a sign saying "I AM A SLUT THIS GUY IS DATING A SLUT." Most sluts these days are thoroughly housebroken and may even have outside interests and personalities.
Are there guys who don't want to date sluts? Sure! And why the hell would I want to date them?
A conversation I had with Rowdy last night:
"You know, when I said I was bisexual on OkCupid it seemed to scare off guys, so I changed it to straight."
"I know you're bi. I'm not scared off."
"Yeah, but you're, like, open-minded."
"So it was important to you to keep a lot of closed-minded guys around?"
"Yep."
You're a slut.
ReplyDeleteBy pretty much every definition I've heard, you're a slut. A major one, even 26 total, plus so many instabnces of more-than-one-at-a-time, etc.
But as you said, you're not a slut for unhealthy reasons (that I can tell, anyway; I mean, there may be some weird self-loathing goat-related issues or something, but...). So it's really nothing but a positive.
Yay for another happy, positive blog post!
There's so much to love about this post (as usual), but what REALLY struck me in that "yes, yes, a million times YES" way was the thing about vaginal tightness. I mean, it's common sense: The vagina (much like the penis) is essentially one big muscle; it's elastic enough to drop a few kids, but it always snaps back, dammit! I think the loose vagina myth is yet another scare tactic to sexually police women.
ReplyDeleteAnywho, kudos on another great post and happy 25th birthday!
Well, I'm 30... I've been single for most of that time (except for the approx 3 1/2 years in was in relationships), & I had sex with more than 2 new guys a year during that time, like maybe ~4... so, you can just imagine! (Some of those were just oral sex, though, as I pointed out to my boyfriend -- I still count them because "oral sex" has "sex" right in the title.)
ReplyDeleteI love this post. Most "slutty" high numbers don't even have anything to do with a woman's propensity to go wild; they're a function of her age, amount of time spent single (serial monogamists who jump from one relationship to the next have lower numbers), & getting married later in life. That last one is a growing demographic trend among men & women, & is actually a responsible and cautious thing to do. There's no "virtue" in having a low number because you married the first person who turned your crank. Not that there's anything wrong with just plain screwing lots of people, either.
The idea of a stretched-out vagina is one of the most puzzling aspects of this, because reasonably intelligent people seem to actually believe it. That's not how the body works! Your esophagus doesn't get stretched out every time you swallow a big bite of food!
If vaginas did work that way, we'd have an awful lot of mothers who were only ever gravida 1.
ReplyDeleteAnd what's wrong with calling people "darlin'"?
*goes back to the southwest, looking dejected*
It's odd to me that guys would avoid bisexual women. Given the prevalence of the MFF fantasy, I'd think they'd hit on bisexuals all the time and calling yourself straight would be a way to discourage some attention. Is this like Roissy's girl that likes anal but doesn't swear?
ReplyDeleteI wonder if maybe the bisexual thing scares guys off in a more literal "scare" sense? Like, "Her standards are probably too high for me?" Guys say it sounds great but when they see it they give up?
ReplyDeleteNote that many guys think guys can't be hot. Look at how the media presents hot guys (comedy) and hot girls (desirability). With a bisexual girl they might be afraid they can never measure up to the girls she's been with.
(claps for Holly)
ReplyDeleteI like to call myself a theoretical slut. I would be a slut, but this involves hard work and self-confidence and things. Also not stumbling into committed relationships by accident when you're trying to have a one-night-stand. So congrats on doing far better than I.
In Re STDs--risk is still stratified by number of lifetime sexual partners. That is, people who have a greater number of sexual partners (male or female) are more likely to have HPV and its sequelae than not. Yes, yes, condoms do have a protective effect, but they do break sometime.
ReplyDeleteStill, the lifetime number of sexual partners that puts one "at risk" is absurdly low, it's greater than three
Actually, regularly using one's vagina makes it tighter, not looser. It's a muscle, what muscle gets tighter with neglect?
ReplyDeleteOne point that I feel needs repeating is that a woman can have a lot of sex without being a slut.
ReplyDeleteMost of my sexual experiences in my adolescence happened with guys who I thought I was heading toward a relationship with, but it didn't work out. In fact I always made sure I only slept with guys who seemed like they'd stick around, because to do otherwise would make me (gasp!) a slut. Probably the guys sensed this and acted more lovey-dovey in order to trick me into giving it up. How is this my fault, exactly?
Then I went through a phase where I just wanted to have a bunch of new experiences with people; hopefully FWB and not one-nighters, but yeah, I was looking to sleep with lots of people. That's fine; I own that.
Now (well not now because I'm in a committed relationship, but...) my sexual patterns vary. With some guys, I feel like getting naked two hours after we've met; with others, I prefer to draw things out and let the chemistry really spark up before doing much. It depends on the guy and the situation.
So, yeah: a guy can't tell anything about a woman's sexual habits or history from the way she acts with him. A woman who sleeps with you on the first date doesn't necessarily do this with every guy, and a woman who keeps things light for the first month isn't necessarily a nice, proper little lady. Sorry, guys, but you may just have to take your interactions with women at face value instead of using them to pigeonhole her entire personality.
Seriously, once you're out of high school/college and not so ridiculously insecure and worried about what these mythological "other people" think, the idea that the ideal dating/marriage partner is someone close to or at virgin state, is ludicrous. I expect my sex partners to have developed some experience and some skillz at this point...I'm not into the whole teaching and being patient with Sex 101 stuff...I want to rock it with someone who can keep up. :P
ReplyDeleteI had sex with 10 guys in 3 years, married the 10th one and have been happily monogamous for decades since, so I really agree that the psychological slide is bogus. Not that there's anything wrong with being non-monogamous. :-)
ReplyDeleteGuys who only want virgins are probably awful in bed and don't want their partner to have any basis for comparison.
ReplyDeleteAnon - Guys who only want virgins probably have no concept that a man could be good or bad in bed or why a woman would care.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous at 11/11, 10:07 AM:
ReplyDeleteI still wonder what the added risk of having safer(!) sex with "many" partners is, compared to sports or even everyday activities like, say, using a car.
I was recently looking into the average number of sexual partners for an unrelated reason. Here's the Kinsey Institute:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.iub.edu/~kinsey/resources/FAQ.html#number
* Males 30-44 report an average of 6-8 female sexual partners in their lifetime (Mosher, Chandra, & Jones, 2005).
* Females 30-44 report an average of 4 male sexual partners in their lifetime (Mosher, Chandra, & Jones, 2005).
* 3% of men have had zero sexual partners since the age of 18, 20% have had 1 partner, 21% have had 2-4 partners, 23% have had 5-10 partners, 16% have had 11-20 partners, and 17% have had 21 or more partners (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, Michaels, 1994).
* 3% of women have had zero sexual partners since the age of 18, 31% have had 1 partner, 36% have had 2-4 partners, 20% have had 5-10 partners, 6% have had 11-20 partners, and 3% have had 21 or more partners (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, Michaels, 1994).
Clarisse - Those averages are impossible. Someone's lying, and I just wish I knew who and how much.
ReplyDelete@Holly - Anon would be right for me. Having lost my virginity well after the age when most people have had plenty of experience (27), any woman with a normal amount of sexual experience is kind of scary precisely because I do know a man can be good or bad in bed, a woman could care, and I'm afraid I'll leave her horribly disappointed.
ReplyDeleteYou can disappoint a virgin too, believe me. (And it'll do more damage when you do.) You've got a year or so where you'll be playing catch-up and you will kinda suck in bed, and the best thing you can do is sleep with experienced but patient women who have a lot to teach you. After that it's really up to you and not your length of experience.
ReplyDeleteAwesome post!
ReplyDeleteAnon at 9.47: Actually, the penis is not muscle, it's mainly erectile tissue. :-)
Holly - I was mainly making a point that insecurity, rather than religion or ignorance might drive someone's preference for less experienced women. I was probably being overly sensitive there.
ReplyDeleteYour advice makes perfect sense, but insecurity, at least mine, isn't driven by sense. If it was, that time my cramp aleviation-turned-all-over-non-vaginal-stimulation had a heretofor unwilling to have sex on a perood partner yelling at me to "just fucking put it in already" would have clued me in that I will probably be fine, yet somehow it didn't.
Holly -- They seemed low to me, too, at least based on comparison to me and my friends (even my more average friends), but I'm not convinced that they're impossible. I think it's entirely possible that among the populations we're familiar with, we're just way higher than the general American population. I'd like to see it broken down by demographic.
ReplyDeleteIf vaginas did work that way, we'd have an awful lot of mothers who were only ever gravida 1.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that was *my* thought. Mind, it took a while for the damn thing to recover, but it did, eventually, which was good for me because I couldn't actually get my major fetish button pushed during the recovery period.
Of course, I have no idea how long it took for it to resettle, because the whole baby thing made it a lot harder to find time to fuck anyway. :P
I don't see where those averages are impossible; the last category is "21 or more partners," which could hide great variety in actual numbers. And the first set are only for a narrow band of ages.
ReplyDeleteBut I am math-impaired and may have missed what you meant, Holly.
flightless
Clarisse and flightless - Those numbers aren't "unlikely," they're literally impossible. Since every instance of a man having sex with a woman is also a woman having sex with a man, both genders have to have the same average number of partners. Men can't be fucking women way more often than women are fucking men.
ReplyDelete(It's theoretically possible they'd have different medians, but very unlikely there would be a huge difference there over a large sample size.)
I'm 25 and my number is probably in the 60's. I lost count around 30, and that was years ago. I've never fucked someone the first night I met them, and I've never had a one night stand. I've fucked only a handful of people only one time.
ReplyDeleteDoes that make me a slut? Sure, I guess. But I'm slutty in a way that I'm comfortable with and feel good about. I hate having to justify my number to people, because that makes me feel like I'm somehow ashamed of it. And I usually don't tell partners my number because if they care, they're not someone I want to be sleeping with anyway. It's really none of their business.
There are a number of explanations for those numbers that don't involve those surveyed to be lying.
ReplyDelete1) It's a survey, so it's sampling procedure for the population could be off and missing either a) women with a lot of sex partners, or b) men with almost no sex partners. Given the tendency for society to shame men who don't get any, and women who get 'too much', I could see people who fit into either category just not taking the survey.
2) The age range is limited to 30-44. It's entirely possible and likely that both men and women within that age number are sleeping with people outside that age number. I wouldn't be shocked if those numbers were disproportional.
3) We don't know the sample sizes. There could be different numbers of men and women surveyed. In a closed community of say 100 heterosexuals of 40 men and 60 women, if every woman has only one sexual partner, at least 1 guy is going to have to have more than one, throwing the average off. Or, if every woman had an average of 4 partners, the men would have an average of 6.
4) The people surveyed aren't given clear definitions. A shocking number of people don't consider oral sex to be sex, for instance. In this case, you could see men reporting more and women reporting less without actually lying.
We've all heard the phrase Mark Twain attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.' All these are reasons why it's easy to lie with statistics, and why I'm sceptical anyone trots out numbers from a 'study' they did. It's way too easy either to screw up and get non-representative results, or to deliberately manipulate it to get the numbers you want, even with a large sample size.
When you say, "Someone's lying", assuming it's true, my money would be on those doing the study.
Great post and I too am a slut and at the age of 38 my number is higher than yours and I was married for 18 years....opps...LOL....anyway, the one point I wanted to add is be careful about the STD's. To my absolute horror you can catch Clamydia through oral sex....so the lesson from that seems to be fuck fuck fuck away just watch out what you suck and what sucks you....LOL
ReplyDeleteMollyxxx
I'm in my late thirties...and I stopped counting. I was married for many years. Then I dated post divorce. I discovered I really had to police myself. It was too easy to be a slut. (I'm the classic lady in the streets, freak in the sheets, btw.) And I love sex. I prefer to have it with someone, rather than alone, but I'd rather it being meaningful if I'm sharing it. (Says the woman exploring swinging and threesomes in her current LTR...) ;)
ReplyDeleteSince every instance of a man having sex with a woman is also a woman having sex with a man, both genders have to have the same average number of partners. Men can't be fucking women way more often than women are fucking men.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I understand that, but if one category is "21 and up" partners, then there can be people in there who've had 21 partners, and people who've had 2199 partners.
"sluttiness" isn't really about numbers... it's about women who like sex, who are purposeful when they choose to have sex, women who look at a man and wonder what kind of lover he would be.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school, there were girls that behaved like proverbial sluts or nymphos, but I realize now that they were damaged people, probably coming from childhood sexual abuse... they were flinging themselves like moths against the cruelty of the light.
I'm a slut..
ReplyDelete10 boys in two years, but no one'd call me one cause I can keep my mouth shut and people think I live in the library or something.
I think the word slut is a hugely sexist term that people just shouldn't use.
or maybe women should do an ownership thing like with the word bitch... make is positive?