WHAT IS SEX?

SEX :

Last night I rented the movie “What’s Your Number”, which was pretty hilarious. Anna Faris plays a girl named Ally who realizes after reading a magazine article about sex partners that the number of men she’s slept with is pretty high up there, with the number being nineteen. She had also read that women, who have slept with more than twenty men, have a harder time getting married. The question, “How many people have you slept with?” seems to be one often asked when a relationship starts to get serious. The truth of the matter is, does it really matter? And, how many is too many? According to sociological studies, many women are still counting- and so are the men. Of course, the stereotype that men have more sex partners than women does hold true. Recent CDC data shows that men aged 25-44 reported having sex with a median of six women, while women reported only 4 sex partners. However, more than 27% of men that were between 25 and 44 have slept with more than 15 women, while only 10% of their female counterparts had slept with 15 men. Women have always been known to want to keep their numbers low, while men seem to want to rack them up. However, we need to start thinking about the day and age we live in, where people are getting married later, such as in their late 20s and early 30s. Therefore, the sexually active period is much longer while trying to find the perfect mate, thus making people’s numbers higher than past years. While women seem to be concerned with their numbers getting too high, they are also concerned with them being too low. After all, who wants to be considered a prude? In the movie, Ally (Anna Faris) is in her early 30’s and lost her virginity in her teens. If I’ve done the math correctly, she’s had an average of 1.4 partners a year. That is certainly way out of “slut” territory in my book. Seeing as women are staying single longer than perhaps our parents (and maybe even grandparents), it is only natural to expect that we’d be sexually active for longer, and our “numbers” will naturally rise in the process. Quite frankly, it shouldn’t matter what your number is; they become less and less relevant as we get older.