“I am dating a girl who I’m really into, but she has a (much) higher body count than me—and mine isn’t even all that low. Is it wrong that this bothers me?“
Dearly Beloved,
Sex is not about conquest. Sex is about convergence.
One we should never do. The other we should do prolifically, if we so please. For it is not pleasure in and of itself that is sinful; but rather pleasure that finds its power in conquest.
For the purposes of our exchange, I will refer to the person you are dating as a woman – not a girl. As you will see, the words we use to make sense of who we are and what we do matter at the deepest levels of conceptualization. Words come to us not as innocent, empty signifiers, but as historically dense – packed with judgements that exceed our immediate understanding. So, much of the work of learning to love ourselves and others is informed by learning how to interrogate and fine-tune our speech.
There is, indeed, something that should bother you here, but it’s not the perceived promiscuity of the woman you’re dating. The thing that should bother you is the (casual) language of violence we’ve all inherited to describe that perceived promiscuity: “body count.“
There’s a world wherein rejecting a language of violence to discuss sexual appetites may entirely shift how you understand the sexual expression of both the woman you’re dating and yourself.
‘Body count’ became institutionalized in the early 1960’s as an explicit 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. In his book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, investigative journalist Nick Turse notes that stacking deaths came with incentives for soldiers that “ranged from ‘R&R’ (rest and recreation) passes…to medals, badges, extra food, extra beer, permission to wear nonregulation gear, and light duty at base camp.”
Your question reveals something else, as well. Something that’s not at all structurally unrelated to body count as war lingo and, therefore, not unrelated to how you might be perceiving the sexual history of the woman you’re dating. That is, to the extent that you are bothered by the number of sexual partners she’s been with, you don’t seem necessarily bothered by the number of sexual partners you’ve been with. Nor should you – necessarily! That’s not really the point. The point is that you are bothered by her sexual appetite – suggesting that there’s something fundamentally different between you and her that warrants judgement about her past, but not yours. And what could that difference be besides her womanhood?
Vietnam’s body count game was, of course, a man’s game. Women did not serve in combat roles for the U.S. military at the time. So, by the 1990s and early 21st century—when the term body count migrated to the usage you’ve deployed—what had been framed as an achievement in the male-centric domain of geopolitical warfare held as a male-centric achievement in sexual conquest, also. One whereby men get social clout for the number of women they “take down,” but women are perceived as morally reprehensible, loose, whores for taking pride in their sexual prowess.
Don’t get me wrong, sex is not at all an uncomplicated arena of human engagement. In fact, a part of what so many of us enjoy about sex is its volatility. But that isn’t the same as violence.
An aspect of what makes sex enticing is the jungle of inwardness we bring to each encounter. Hunger, anger, happiness, fear, sadness, love, anxiety: all of these disparate emotional and physical states—together and separate—can inspire sexual desire, and propel or accentuate a sexual encounter. We can know, on some level, that we want, or are sexually attracted to, someone/some people and pursue that desire at the known level of attraction. But there’s also a random and mysterious something else that feeds that fire. Something that no one in the encounter can absolutely put their finger on. And that untraceable thing is precisely what we try to materialize in the act of sex. Sex gives life to that which lies dormant within us. Sex is the site where an invisible, pervasive emotional cacophony finds physical release and harmony (if even for a single, fleeting moment). This is the inherent volatility of sexual desire that doesn’t have to collapse into a language of violent judgement which sees that release as gendered-conquest rather than mutual convergence.
We are the kind of animals that need the sociality of sexual expression as a conversation partner to the emotional and psychic opacity that makes up much of who we are. This is a basic feature that cannot—and should not—be differently adjudicated based on gender or sex.
Given all the ways in which women have, for too long, been disciplined to question and repress their sexual desires, and given the sort of courage it takes to embrace sex as a complicated mystery in and of itself, the woman you’re dating seems to be offering you a gift rather than damaged goods. The gift she’s offering you is one of transparency, of trust. The gift she’s offering you is one of a reconstituted consciousness that respects a fully embodied ‘yes’ to sexual freedom and refuses sexual shame and violence.
To know her truth is to know her strength.
To know her strength is to know her capacity for love against all the historical odds.
Go in Peace and Pride,
Father Paul