I am currently taking a human sexuality class, the most registered for class at the University of Maryland and a class I’ve been dying to get into since I learned about it freshman year. Recently in my class, my professor divided the room by gender and we were allowed to ask the opposite gender anything we wanted; no topic was off limits.      

People asked questions ranging from one-night stands and booty calls to some more out-there topics that garnered a few giggles and blushed cheeks. Finally, one young lady brought up the “number” issue. How important is the number of people a girl or guy has slept with?   Some male students said, “Ignorance is bliss,” and that they wouldn’t ask because, “You don’t want to know mine and I don’t want to know yours.”   

Others said that it doesn’t matter as long as you are being safe and using protection. Others said it did matter to them and they would want to know. Then, feeling my feminist side coming out, I asked, “So what would be your ideal number?” To this, a young male student responded, “If I’m trying to date you, single digits.”

Safe to say my feminist side came out in full force and was annoyed. Earlier in the class, the topic of having sex without emotion came up. A female student asked why guys feel the need to lie about their feelings in order to have sex with some girls because they think women can’t separate emotion from sex. Many women raised their hands and stated that they could separate these two things and guys shouldn’t think that women are all emotional, hormonal crazy people who instantly fall in love with any guy they sleep with.   

So my question was, “So you want us to be able to have sex without emotion but we can’t sleep with more than nine people?” According to the Kinsey Institute and California State University the national average age a woman loses her virginity is 17.4 years. The national average for men is 16.9 years. However, what if a woman doesn’t seriously date someone until she is 22, 23, 24 or 25?   

That is five to eight years of being sexually active, yet some men expect women to only sleep with nine men? That’s an average of about 1-2 men per year, something any single sexually active person can easily surpass, and surpassing this number does not make a woman a slut.    

In some men’s eyes, women need to be innocent – not having a lot of sexual partners – yet they need to be good and experienced in bed. However, on the other hand, the more women a man sleeps with the cooler he is.   

Sounds like a pretty big double standard to me.   

Tracey Cox, a nationally renowned sex expert conducted a study a few years ago where she asked three women around the age of 30 how many sexual partners they had. Woman 1 had slept with 26 men, woman 2 had slept with eight and woman 3 had slept with four.   

However, each had her own story; the woman who had 26 partners averaged around two a year since she was 17 and been mainly single.  

The woman who had eight slept with four during a weekend vacation, while her then-husband stayed home and looked after the kids.   

The woman who had four had a threesome in an alley with two guys she met in a club; she was 18.   

Does your opinion change now?   

There is no way to know the story behind the number of men women have slept with, whether it be two or 22, so isn’t it about time that we stop judging women for their number and measuring their worth in their amount (or lack thereof) of sexual partners? The next time a guy asks you for your number, simply tell him you don’t kiss and tell.