The body count.
It’s such a popular topic with different kinds of people for many different reasons.
Just to be clear for the older people in the audience, when I say “body count,” I’m referring to the number of sexual partners one has had, not the number of people one has killed.
Jessica Valenti tells us that society is obsessed with women’s sexual purity.
It’s true. If a woman has a high body count, she’s going to be judged negatively, or even stoned to death if she’s not a virgin according to a stupid old book that a bunch of people follow.
At the same time, we straight men are given high praise if we end up sleeping with tons of women because patriarchy paints the feminine as a commodified object to be conquered and won, rather than giving any emphasis to its agency.
How does that affect us?
Growing up in Western society as a young boy, I always had the impression that my sense of self-worth should be determined by female approval since that would be a signal that I have “won” the feminine.
Not exactly the healthiest outlook.
If girls and women thought I was an undesirable loser, it meant that I was worthless and undeserving of love. If, however, girls and women thought I was cool and desirable, it meant that I won the game of life.
This feeling was only amplified by a similar pattern of validation from members of my own gender. If other boys or men saw that I was popular with the opposite sex, they envied and respected me.
I fell deep into the downward spiral of believing that life was all about women, about winning their approval.
And what greater sign of approval is there than a woman allowing you to physically enter her body, right? That was the idea, at least.
Take a moment to reflect on how you feel right now.
If this article were written by a woman, or if you assumed that I was a woman from reading the headline, what would be your emotional response? If you’ve actually read past the headline and realized that I am a man, what is your emotional response to knowing that I’ve slept with more than 100 women?
Some of you may need some work on your feelings of discrimination.
Some of you may need some work on some sexual hangups or sex-negativity that was baked into you by conservative influences while growing up.
And some of you might be awesome allies who already withhold judgment altogether. If that’s how you’ve always been, I have no idea how you managed to dodge all the social influences that cause the rest of us to learn more hateful attitudes that we have to work to unlearn, but I commend you for it.
Most reasonable and mature adults have done some reflection to get to that point of overcoming judgment, discrimination, and sex-negativity within themselves. If you haven’t started maturing in that way yet, I emphatically invite you to do so.
Still, what a lot of people feel is that a man with my body count has achieved something enviable because it’s a difficult feat. Men have been given the role of the pursuers of sex, while women have been given the role of the gatekeepers, after all.
I will admit that it was not an easy feat.
But it might not have been for the reasons you’re thinking. There are a lot of ways society is messed up, which makes it harder for men to connect with women.
I was strongly motivated by the unhealthy outlook of determining my self-worth based on female approval, and was met with the many challenges of the double standards in society born from patriarchy (see link in previous sentence).
I laid out all the uncensored truth of my journey in dating and seduction in my book.
There were times when all those negative influences almost broke me.
Though some of my motivations — as well as some of the steps I took in my journey of learning how to connect with women — were messed up, I believe the healthier motivations and steps I discovered along the way are 100% worth learning for every man looking to find loving women partners.
I wrote Never Lonely: The Uncensored Guide on How to Attract and Be Loved by Women in hopes of reaching the hearts of men, to awaken the love within them that can effortlessly attract the hearts of women without all the coercion and misogyny usually associated with other works in my industry/genre.
If you’re a man still wanting to sleep with 100 women like I did, it can guide you to do just that, but in a better way that helps you see women for the beautiful humans deserving of love that they really are.
And hopefully that will help you see that you’re deserving of love as well.
Do you care about your partner’s body count? Do you care about your own? Why or why not? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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