In this episode, Simone and Malcolm talk about sex, poop, and why you should have a body count. Simone is a sex educator and sex educator, and Malcolm is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. They talk about their experiences with sex and sex ed, and how they came up with the idea for this episode.
00:00:15.860If somebody cheated on me, I would a thousand times prefer they're like, well, I cheated on you because I had a strong emotional connection with him.
00:00:46.560Or to our subject today, what is your body count?
00:00:49.820And I, that's one of my favorite ones that she, she lines people up about because you really see a very interesting logarithmic scale when people line up.
00:01:00.740So it's like zero, like a couple of ones, and then it's two to five, like vast majority of people.
00:01:07.720And then it's like 50, 112, 250, like it's crazy.
00:01:14.700And I'm always at one end of these, obviously the really high end of the scale.
00:01:18.940You're always the really low end of the scale because we're exact opposites in that, you know, you being a virgin when we first met and me being just ridiculously high body count.
00:01:29.020And I remember recently I learned something new at these events because it wasn't something I had thought about before.
00:01:33.600I was at one end and usually at the really high end, it's, it's almost all male guys.
00:01:38.260And one of the guys was like, wait, because previously they hadn't done this at the previous one.
00:01:42.960They had one on how heterosexual are you?
00:01:45.040And I was like, it went the extremity of heterosexual.
00:01:46.880No, I think it was, was how many different dicks have you had in your mouth?
00:02:16.960So, so yeah, I was even probably more extreme than I had considered within these contexts.
00:02:21.000But this is really interesting because for me, when I met you, I think it would be really disingenuous for me to pretend that you having an incredibly low body count wasn't a huge bonus to me.
00:02:36.640And when I went out and would sleep with people, I specialized both in people with low body counts, virgins mostly, because that was just the pathway and the tactics that I was using in the sexuality video that we're not able to post here.
00:02:50.340But also because I personally found it really gross when I learned that a woman had a high body count.
00:02:57.300And I think one of the big problems in our society, when people talk about do body counts actually matter, it, it breaks down on a few fronts.
00:03:08.240So conservatives often will use arguments like a key that opens any lock, you know, or a lock that can be opened by any key, you know, and, or you wouldn't want to use a shoe that a bunch of other people had used.
00:03:19.500Oh, yeah. And I think Mormons use a chewed gum analogy.
00:03:23.720Yeah. And all of these analogies, I don't really think sell the message.
00:03:29.680Like if I was a young girl and somebody told me one of these analogies, you know, what I would think is, well, times have changed and you're just an old person and you don't know how it is for my generation.
00:03:39.800Or that's, you know, an older mindset or that's not convincing.
00:03:44.320To me, if I was a woman and somebody was like, well, you wouldn't want a shoe that a bunch of people had worn.
00:03:50.200Like, screw you. I buy like all of my shoes on Poshmark and I rent half of my shoes on Rent the Runway.
00:03:56.320And I'd also be like, but why doesn't this apply to guys?
00:04:00.380And then people would be like, because the guy is the one going in the thing.
00:04:04.540It's the, it's the sword, not the sheath.
00:04:32.660And so I think we need to have an honest conversation about where the actual costs are involved in this.
00:04:39.680The effects it has on women and, you know, just for our daughters or women listeners, so they can really contextualize this.
00:04:46.580Because I think the average woman in our society today dramatically underestimates how much partner count matters to guys.
00:04:56.220A great one, you know, speaking of Ayla polls that you had mentioned to me before was one where it was like, would you rather sleep with a hundred women or have your wife sleep with one other person?
00:05:09.420And 90% or something said they'd rather their wife not sleep with one other person if it meant they could sleep with a hundred women.
00:05:15.360Yeah. It was something along those lines.
00:05:16.300Basically, you know, would you prefer to have a ton of partners and like your wife also slept with a decent number of people or not?
00:05:23.580And yeah, apparently men care more about having a committed female partner who does not have a lot of, who does not have a high body count than they care about body count.
00:05:31.860Which is insane because the assumption, of course, is that men, no matter what, like sort of like number one priority is high body count.
00:05:39.340But no, it seems to be more like high body count, but with low body count women, I guess.
00:05:47.240Yeah, high body count with low body count women is what you're, well, so, yeah.
00:05:52.760For one night stands, I don't think they care.
00:05:54.340I think that it's totally fine to have a one night stand if you have no commitment with a woman who has a higher body count.
00:05:59.980I want to get to the point here because I think that this is just the larger point if you're a woman and you're going to switch this off.
00:06:05.440The important thing to note is that many heterosexual men, biologically, it is hard-coded into their sexuality.
00:06:13.540And I think this is what is missed by people.
00:06:17.700If I could choose to not care that a woman had a high body count, it is not that it's an acculturation thing.
00:06:23.880It is the motivation for this being biologically hard-coded in me is there.
00:06:27.980And I think I'm the type of guy who has enough self-knowledge to be able to internalize when I'm doing something because it's been socialized into me.
00:06:38.540People should probably notice with me, I really don't, I try to go against the grain of society almost as much as possible when I can.
00:06:47.640And so if this wasn't biologically hard-coded in me, I don't think I would feel it so strongly.
00:06:52.360And here's where I'm saying, so if women are trying to get, okay, a guy right now who I feel is pretty honest with me on this show, he's telling me how much it matters.
00:07:02.540I'll try to give you a curve of how much it matters because there's a few things that I think women miss with body count as well.
00:07:09.340They think that any guy that they sleep with adds to their body count in the same way.
00:07:18.260If you, if I was a girl and I know that she has been in multiple long-term monogamous relationships with guys, like, yes, she slept with like maybe four different guys, but she dated all of them for two or three years.
00:07:40.660Let's say somebody who slept with two people.
00:07:41.940Virgin's are like a whole other tier of attractiveness when you're talking about guys who are sensitive to this.
00:07:46.780But if you go down from that, just one tier, there really isn't that much different between two and five when you're dealing with these sorts of women.
00:07:53.440When a woman has slept with a guy who I look down on, that is-
00:08:22.060Like if a guy is attractive, but he's, you know, kind of a player.
00:08:27.160I would say that almost immediately for me, for women who are trying to get a feel of how much this matters for guys.
00:08:32.520I would find them so unattractive, I would be unable to sleep with them.
00:08:37.220I would certainly be unable to date them.
00:08:39.860And I think that women don't understand the damage they take, even with a low body count, if it is with a hookup they had at a bar or otherwise disreputable men.
00:08:51.440That women should be really, really sensitive to that.
00:08:55.620And that once they enter that scene, often it's only that kind of guy that they can really date and guys that have, for whatever reason, no biological sensitivity to body count.
00:09:07.680And I haven't seen studies done on this, but anecdotally from like me talking around men, my read is about 60 to 70% of men have a fairly high body count sensitivity.
00:09:20.300And about 30 to 40% have very little to no body count sensitivity.
00:09:25.580Okay, so this isn't as big of a deal then, because like actually quite a few men don't.
00:09:30.020Yeah, well, and then there's guys like me that have such a high body count sensitivity that I cannot even masturbate to porn with real people in it.
00:09:38.160Because I know that they have slept with lots of people and I find that disgusting.
00:09:41.020So I guess it's a lot like pretty much any arousal or aversion pathway for like what we've seen in the research that both other people have done and that you've done in writing The Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, that there is quite some variation.
00:09:55.020That some people are like super, super turned on by something.
00:09:58.480Some people don't really care at all, et cetera.
00:10:00.240Well, and then it has a normal distribution within it.
00:10:03.880So there was some studies done, and the weird thing is it's like they've been wiped from Google.
00:10:08.700Somebody pointed out recently, they're like, I've heard this before, and I went and I tried to find it, and I wasn't able to find it.
00:10:14.220And then I went and I tried to find it, and I tried to find it with AI.
00:10:16.780And I talked to other sexuality researchers I know, and I was like, do you remember these studies used to exist?
00:10:21.820And they're like, yeah, studies used to exist.
00:10:23.340And then we went and we looked and we couldn't find it.
00:10:26.100It might be that they didn't fit the progressive ideal, and then somehow they got deleted from history, which sometimes happens if you're talking about like more obscure research that wasn't backed up in a lot of places.
00:10:34.800But specifically what they showed was that as women sleep with more men, the amount of oxytocin that they produce while having sex decreases, which is important.
00:10:46.800And it also showed the effects of this.
00:10:48.580It showed that women who slept with more men felt less of an illogical, forced attraction to the man they're sleeping with.
00:10:58.260And so this is a really important thing to note for like young girls or girls who are thinking about this decision, is the way that your body reacts to sex changes when you have lots of partners.
00:11:09.900And we've talked about this on other shows.
00:11:11.780We suspect that this is actually a polymorphic behavioral change.
00:11:16.600So polymorphic changes, like genetic polymorphism, this is when you have something like a locus, right?
00:11:22.780So a locus and a grasshopper are genetically the same thing.
00:11:26.060But if you rub the back of a grasshopper's leg with a Q-tip, it actually begins to express its genes differently and transform its shape and its behavior patterns.
00:11:35.760But you see these in, you know, mammals as well.
00:11:38.640So like baboons at larger troop sizes, they change from like a matriarchal, I think it's like a matriarchal was like one social structure to patriarchal was like another social structure.
00:11:49.820But basically their entire social structure changes above certain populations or when they're in areas that have unusually high amounts of resources.
00:11:58.880And we should expect that we likely have some similar sorts of like weird things within humanity.
00:12:04.260Well, we know from anthropology that humans can organize themselves into either polygynous groups, that's one man, many women, or monogamous groups.
00:12:13.440Those are the two primary types of groups.
00:12:17.320All monogamous groups are polygynous when you're talking about the wealthiest men in a culture.
00:12:20.440As we say, the most monogamous culture today, when people think, well, what's like a tradcast?
00:12:27.040What's the height of the tradcast empire, Louis XIV, right?
00:12:30.360You know, so yeah, and he had a lot, a lot of women.
00:12:33.580So it's important to note that it's always a slider, but, you know, it's mostly monogamous.
00:12:37.860So this would allow for female biology to automatically adapt to her environment, even if she grew up in a monogamous tribe.
00:12:45.800But that tribe was like raided and she was captured by a tribe that now used her as like a, you know, let's not get this demonetized.
00:12:53.540So what it does is it prevents a woman from without her own willingness or without any sort of externality falling in love to somebody they're sleeping with.
00:13:05.540But women, and I've seen this, I've slept with a lot of virgins, they automatically begin to form a really strong sort of love connection or love reaction to the first guy they sleep with.
00:13:14.580And that this turns off as they sleep with more gods.
00:13:19.180Now this can have a few negative effects.
00:13:21.060One of the biggest negative effects happens when women want their later relationships to have the same spark as early relationships.
00:13:28.480So when they get ready to get married, they will discount new partners they've met because they don't have that same love connection that they felt with their original partners.
00:13:39.240And they assume that that's not because these partners are, you know, that they've had more partners, but it's because that partner is not good, as good as the first one.
00:13:48.340So they keep looking when instead they may have found a really great partner.
00:13:53.500But also keep in mind that, and this is important, that it can be good for a woman.
00:13:58.100If a woman doesn't want to be illogically brainwashed by her biology into liking whoever she happens to randomly be sleeping with, this is actually really useful.
00:14:06.880It's really useful for a woman who's sleeping around a lot, that this system turns off.
00:14:11.140I mean, she'll be less, she's less likely to be manipulated or exploited by the people that she's sleeping with because they will have less emotional control over her.
00:14:55.420And a lot of women, you know, anecdotally, when I've mentioned this before, they've been like, yeah, that did happen to me was my first partner.
00:15:00.740Or my first two partners or something like that.
00:15:03.440And so this is something that you're actually losing when you sleep with a lot of people.
00:15:07.280And it's something that males, it's just not a system that seems to exist in males.
00:15:11.120Males do not like automatically fall in love with people they're sleeping with.
00:15:23.820I mean, both in terms of men, in terms of how they're rating their partners, and in terms of women.
00:15:27.280But, you know, to decide as a woman growing up in our society, I'm just not going to sleep with anyone because of how it hurts my market value.
00:15:34.460When we say market value, you know, what we mean by this is the quality of man that she can get with the understanding that market value changes based on individuals.
00:16:27.340I mean, I think it's still doable, but it's difficult.
00:16:29.960And another thing that women really have to worry about is guys signaling that they're interested in a longer term relationship than they actually are because they want to date, because they want sex.
00:16:40.500And this is really a difficult thing to navigate as a girl.
00:16:44.640I think that the best strategy around it, because, you know, women, as we say, the sex marketplace and the marriage marketplace are two very different things.
00:16:53.520And women are always more valued on the sex marketplace than the marriage marketplace.
00:16:56.540And so they can begin to conflate their value on the sex marketplace with their value on the marriage marketplace, where it's much lower.
00:17:05.000They're more valued on the marriage marketplace than on the sex marketplace.
00:17:07.680And so guys can benefit by pretending like they're interested in marriage or longer term relationships than they actually are.
00:17:13.000And through that, get higher quality sexual partners than they would otherwise be able to get.
00:17:17.400And it is very difficult for women in our current society to filter here.
00:17:21.320The core ways to filter is, you know, Facebook official public signaling of your relationship before you engage with someone sexually.
00:17:28.360This is if you're not just going to wait until marriage, which is very difficult, I think, to do if you're unless you're only dating was in like really religious communities.
00:17:37.600And then the second strategy, and I think this is really important, is to note, does the guy seem to be really vetting you as a long term partner?
00:17:46.580So if weirdly the guy has all the same beliefs about the world that you have, he's probably just mirroring your beliefs.
00:17:56.280Like, if the guy disagrees with you in areas and is willing to sort of debate those open and honestly and looks, that's a sign that he's probably not just using you for sex.
00:18:07.020Yeah, genuine disagreements or, hey, I want kids and I know you don't want kids.
00:18:11.280That kind of stuff showing up is probably a good sign in terms of genuine interest and commitment.
00:18:15.840Well, this is a big problem with searching for partners in sort of like feminist, white nighty ecosystems.
00:18:21.260Is that men in these ecosystems are usually just signaling.
00:18:24.520I mean, most of them don't want to marry anyway, you know, because they're on the progressive side.
00:18:27.920And they're usually just signaling aligned ideology for sex, which means that if you are on the conservative side of things, because women are less on the conservative side of things, regardless, it's going to be really hard to find women.
00:18:44.700So by that, what I mean is if you're in a hard religious community, women typically outnumber men, where if you're in like the conservative secular community, usually men just dramatically outnumber women.
00:19:14.780If you if you take men and you have women choose between a man with a wedding ring and a man without a wedding ring, they'll choose the man with the wedding ring.
00:19:31.120But just generally what you see is women will go after men who appear to already be in relationships over men who appear to not be in relationships, which to me signals the exact inverse of what you're talking about.
00:19:44.540Whereas with men, you would very rarely see this outside of a few fetishes or paraphilias, you know, which Trump seemed to have one of those from stories about him where he would try to get his friends' wives to sleep with him.
00:20:32.280And I can also say as somebody who has been out there over the course of the time that I was trying to get women to sleep with me, as my body count rose,
00:20:40.880it got easier to get women to sleep with me, not harder.
00:20:44.880And I guess you were never, you never hid the fact that you had a high body count.
00:21:05.160And I suspect that part of it could even be hormonal, like just knowledge of, I don't know.
00:21:11.340So it could be that I'm giving something off because I have a high body count, because like my brain thinks, oh, you're alpha of this area.
00:21:18.240Yeah, that is offsetting whatever logical thing these women have in their head that makes them think that they don't like men with high body counts.
00:21:32.540But another thing to note about this as a man, if you're going out there and you're having a high body count,
00:21:37.120this also means that, remember I said not all men damage your body count the same way with other guys?
00:21:43.100A guy like me probably damaged women's body counts in the perception of other guys uniquely highly because I was able to sleep around so much.
00:21:55.120Most of these were when I was younger, you know, progressive, college girl type people, stuff like that.
00:21:59.920But I'd also say that the type of relationship I had with the girls, and this might also be the case for other guys,
00:22:05.340is with the ones who I liked, I did have longer relationships with.
00:22:08.880And I think me as an outsider, that would damage my perception of that stack on her body count more.
00:22:14.740Just any period of sexual experimentation, I think, would really highly damage my, well, that's what they call it, finding themselves, whatever you want to call it.
00:22:38.780But I think it really depends on their personalities.
00:22:40.860You know, if we finally have a daughter with a high sex drive, like, it's a really dumb thing to be like, yeah, probably shouldn't have sex.
00:22:48.120We should be really clear about what we believe the tradeoffs to be, given the evidence that we've been exposed to.
00:22:53.940Well, here's a question, because I think this is interesting to me.
00:22:56.740Would I consider it a high, like, in addition to a woman's body count, if she had used her sexuality to make money off of men without having sex with them?
00:23:05.400Think OnlyFans or something like that, right?
00:23:07.620Otherwise, they're a virgin, but they've used OnlyFans.
00:23:19.680Yeah, I suppose only if they were also really popular.
00:23:24.000If they were an unsuccessful OnlyFans.
00:23:26.100If they had done it unsuccessfully, then I would think, well, you were judged by the community to be pointless.
00:23:32.540But if they were judged successfully, and they were widely desired, but had never slept with anyone, I'd consider that probably about the same as being a virgin.
00:23:40.640Not exactly the same, but probably about the same.
00:23:42.620But if they had 5 body count or, like, 10 body count, like a medium level body count, but they also did that, I'd consider it probably...
00:23:50.640I don't know, it just wouldn't matter that much.
00:23:52.440It matters a little, like, it would matter more to me then, but it's certainly not the same as racking up an IRL body count.
00:23:59.500However, I guess I would take a woman who said that she had, like, a 5 or 10 body count, but also used OnlyFans as probably lying, and she probably has a much higher body count than that.
00:24:09.780It's just sort of a signal when the woman isn't otherwise, like, known as being chased, that the body count, the real body count, is likely higher than they're telling you.
00:26:23.120I mean, it makes sense because also what you're looking at is I think it's a very instinctual dislike of the idea of finding yourself raising and using your resources on a child that is not biologically yours.
00:26:38.300And the scenarios you're describing in which it's not really a problem are not scenarios in which a woman would be impregnated by another guy.
00:26:49.120The one counterexample to this would be trans women, which for whatever reason my body just instinctually recognizes as being the sexual equivalent of a woman who has slept with a really, really, really large number of guys.
00:27:03.340Almost sort of a maxed out body count in terms of the instinctual response I get to them.
00:27:08.900And obviously this, if other guys have this same reaction, it would partially explain why dating is so much harder for trans women.
00:27:16.160But then this actually brings a point when women are like, yeah, I slept with him, but I didn't have an emotional connection with him.
00:27:24.380That's, yeah, that almost means you're more likely as the male partner to be raising a child that is not yours because apparently they just do not care.
00:27:33.360If somebody cheated on me, I would a thousand times prefer they're like, well, I cheated on you because I had a strong emotional connection with him.
00:27:40.520Not, I cheated on you, but I didn't have an emotional connection with him.
00:27:44.040I'd be like, that is so much worse than the alternative.
00:27:58.980And they can decide whether or not to, you know what, actually, we'll just send it to their friends and then their friends will tell them because they don't want to hear it from us.