What is body count and how is it used against women?

In high school, girls used to share their crush stories, the people they had kissed, and how many people had attempted to kiss them. You with 2, me with 4, and you? They counted on their fingers, distinguishing between peck and French kiss, quality, and duration. They read about it in teenage magazines on how to perfect the technique, how to win over their peers. Not for judgment or competition - at least not explicitly - more to keep track, to understand and be understood, to have the illusion of keeping count. At what age did you stop doing it? Hopefully before 25. Now, directly from the incel ideology and the mouths of podcasters - especially those men who, following the example of Andrew Tate, talk into a microphone about the condition of modern men and the new balance between the sexes according to them - the term body count enters the mainstream, being discussed on social media at regular intervals. What does body count mean? Simply the number of people one has slept with. Nothing wrong with it, except that this number and concept are wielded against women, to measure their worth.

Body count: meaning and implications

The idea that, for women, having many partners is a reason for loss of value is not new. Since the sacralization of virginity, girls have been accustomed to giving a high meaning to sexual relationships, much more than boys. The first time must be important, thoughtful, fundamental for our growth. Perfect, otherwise, we chose the wrong person, and it's our fault, and this thing will have ruined our lives. No pressure, right? Not too soon, not too late. With precise parameters, decided for us by the forces of Catholic morality, the patriarchy, and misogyny. For boys, it's not like that, it never has been. For them, conquest is a pride, something to flaunt, and the more one can conquer, the better. From this mentality, still tragically widespread, comes the parallelism between keys and locks, where the man is the key that opens all doors and the woman, in a brutal way, is the one who allows everyone to enter. From here, from this crude and popular metaphor, comes everything else.

Slut-shaming is renewed: implications and consequences

Now, as we try to overcome these ideas with difficulty, as we raise issues to the public's attention, as we finally and once and for all try to emancipate ourselves, their underground revival threatens today's teenagers. To traditional slut-shaming, these angry young podcasters on social media and listening platforms add a kind of judgment criterion for all of us, to rank our (in their view, objective) ability to be future wives, mothers, and companions. What else should we want to be, after all? The problems with the use of this expression are many, and they do not lie in the expression itself but in what is behind it. A distorted and wrong conception of women's bodies and women in general as objects, usable, to look for new flames, like cars. The idea full of flaws that sex is - if done by women, but with whom do these women do it? - something to be ashamed of, that takes away value from a human being, and not an act of mutual trust and chemistry, a choice to be made together in that moment. The idea that a perfect life partner must have a very low body count, going a step further, could justify adult men seeking younger and younger partners because (in their eyes) they are purer and much more.

Leave behind numbers and measurements

The issue is very serious. Younger and more vulnerable teenagers are being indoctrinated by these web personalities, and the consequences are not only for their peers but also for them. Hate isolates, makes people angry and violent, unleashes instincts that would be better to learn to control. What can we do for these boys? As usual, there is no single or simple solution, a pill to be taken twice a day after meals. With effort and without giving up, we must start with education, ban certain characters from public discourse. Talk about sex honestly, without any kind of numbers or quantitative measurement, without competition or shame. Teach girls to be sexually liberated but also to protect themselves from these people, recognize the signs of these harmful and limiting thought currents. For a relationship between boys and girls to be as serene as possible.