Last week, Ayda Oztoprak, a 28-year-old graphic designer, got a strange text from a friend. It was a screenshot of her Instagram handle listed on a website titled “Body Count Checker.” The website had declared that her body count, as in the number of people she had allegedly slept with, was 19. Her friend joked that she was a prude. 

Oztoprak was concerned. “It was weird. I felt self conscious about it,” she said. “I thought about the people that follow me. I was like, ‘is my online presence not up to a certain standard that it should be?'”

Oztoprak wasn’t alone in feeling awkward and violated by what is ostensibly an AI tool. Since launching last Thursday, the Body Count Checker website has been shared thousands of times and countless women have had their information input into the site, many without their consent. The initial tweet about the tool amassed over 6.1 million views. 

 “Suspicious that your girl has 10+ body count? Now you don’t have to guess. You paste her ig URL, and the app brutally estimates her body count by checking her followers, posts and stories,” an engineer who goes by the name Kohei posted on X announcing the app. 

The website quickly went viral. Dom Lucre, a far right conspiracy theorist, promoted the tool to his 1.6 million followers. “Now, the time of feminist girl is over:)” a user replied. The tool swiftly spread across the internet and was amplified by meme pages. “Now they’re gonna cry misogyny 😂” one user commented on a post about the app, receiving hundreds of likes. 

Kohei has built several other inflammatory products seemingly created to generate attention. The homepage of his website reads “virality is everything.” He previously built a prison simulator, and projects listed under his development page read, “Spread AIDS to win” and “Sell Dr*gs on the blockchain.” All of his projects have ties to cryptocurrency. 

Kohei did not respond to requests for comment. 

The homepage of Body Count Checker is a blatant rip off of developer Alex Lock’s “DESTROY MY STARTUP” project, which allows users to share the URL to a startup and get a free assessment of claims made on the startup’s landing page. The Destroy My Startup project went viral just days before Body Count Checker. 

But the reaction to the Body Count Checker was overwhelming. Thousands of X users posted about it. Men began posting the scores of OnlyFans models and girls who they follow. Women responded by dragging the creator. “Man larps as zuck and fails,” one woman posted. 

After it was discovered that Kohei had stolen the landing page and worried users began raising concerns about AI and data privacy, developers on X started pulling apart the product. They quickly realized by analyzing the website’s code that it didn’t seem to harvest any actual data or perform any sort of AI analysis like it claimed. 

Instead, Body Count Checker was just a random number generator that would cache a number for each Instagram handle as it was entered into the site, these developers claim—making it effectively meaningless. Kohei’s tweet was slapped with a community note calling this out, but by then it was too late. The website had gone viral.

Nick, a 39-year-old accountant in Los Angeles, who asked to be referred to by his first name only due to privacy concerns, said that he’d seen the Body Count Checker after it was shared between some of his friends. “Personally, I don’t think it’s my responsibility to know a woman’s body count,” he said. “It’s nobody’s business. If you want to share it, you can.” 

He added, however, that he has noticed an increasing number of women and men cataloging who they’ve been intimate with. He said that he’s seen girls keeping track in their Notes app, and he said that he saw the quest to catalog and document body counts as part of broader trends towards self optimization and digitally cataloging activities. 

“There’s such a firehose of information that people are tracking these days,” he said. “The body count thing is maybe the new Yelp, where you have to track every restaurant you go to, or you have to rate every movie you see. Now, you have to track every sexual experience you have.”

The language used to describe this tracking, though, might point to something darker. The concept of a “body count” first entered the cultural lexicon in the 1960s in a much more morbid sense: as a metric of success during the Vietnam War. “Amid a political and public-relations crisis over how to justify the United States’ presence in Vietnam, the quantifiability of enemy combatant deaths—including civilians—became not only a selling point, but an intra-military competition,” Reverend Paul Anthony Daniels previously wrote in Playboy. Soldiers with high body counts received rewards like extra rations.

In subsequent decades, however, the term evolved in its meaning. While obtaining a high body count is still often perceived as a positive thing among straight cisgender men, (it serves as evidence of patriarchal conquest), the measurement is frequently used to shame women. 

Ria Ireland Drane, a therapist and social worker in Atlanta, GA, said that she’s been hearing about the concept of body counts from clients, especially her younger clients, since she got into the field about five years ago. 

The concept of a body count is particularly popular in far right reactionary spaces, where a woman’s piety and purity are valued. In December, then 19-year-old looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular said that, he has a bodycount of 150, but his girl must have “0 bodies” aka be a virgin, for him to date her. Far right male-supremacist influencer Andrew Tate said that he’d never be intimate with a woman with a body count higher than three, and has said women should have to have their body count written publicly on their forehead.

Both Drane and Andréa Becker, a professor of sociology at Hunter College studying gender, sexuality and health, said that the obsession with body count was tied to a broader uptick in misogynistic, reactionary ideology. “This is just another instance of gender based sexual shaming and what [feminist writer and activist] Jessica Valenti calls purity culture,” Becker said. 

Carolyn Lipka, a 33-year-old television writer in Los Angeles, said that she was appalled by the Body Count Checker website when she saw it. “It’s so disheartening,” she said. “It’s all part of this push for purity culture, tradwives, the divine feminine, old money, clean girl culture. It’s all these euphemisms for being pure, untouched, Christian. Incels are deadass creating the world they are afraid of.”

Though the website isn’t functional, Becker said that the fact that young tech entrepreneurs are building products like this, even as a stunt, is a bad sign. “Every single new technology ends up being leveraged to surveil and punish women,” she said. 

She also said that reinforcing these sexist views of women leads to real harm. “We know that sexual shame and stigma and self objectification is correlated with lower sexual pleasure, lower orgasms, more sexual dysfunction,” she said. “The proliferation of this sort of ideology can actually end up causing real harm in the sexual lives of women.”

In response to the Body Count Checker, Becker said that she would love for someone to “develop an AI generated device to calculate the number of orgasms these men have achieved for women.”

“They can call it Orgasm Counter,” she said.