Because of AIDS, it is now almost mandatory to ask someone how many sexual partners they have had before you sleep with them. What's even more frightening is that is mandatory to tell all of your sexual partners how many people you have slept with, too. It's a kind of numbers game, and I think that women and men are not being judged equally still.

I talked to my friend (whose identity I will keep a mystery for his own protection) about the numbers game. At the time, he was pushing forty, wanted a younger wife with child-bearing hips, and would not dream of considering a 30-year with more than ten sexual partners. His rationale was simple; if she became sexually active at twenty, she was basically allowed to have had one sexual partner a year for the last ten years. It didn't matter to him if she had had sex numerous times with one partner, he just wanted a low number and I don't think it had to do with the possibility of him getting a sexually transmitted disease, he just didn't want a "slut", to use his word.

I called bullshit on him for a number of reasons. First, this is penalizing the girls who, for whatever reason, are not serial monogamists. Do a few more short-term relationships over a ten year period really make someone into a slut? And if it does, why on earth would it possibly matter how many people someone had slept with in the past? Did he really think that someone who had slept with 12 people over ten years or who had started early than 20 (the average age for girls to lose their virginity is now 15) would really have a higher risk of being unfaithful?

The whole conversation reminded me of the movie "Clerks" in which the convenience store clerk is shocked to learn that his girlfriend had given 37 different men blow jobs. It wasn't the mental image of the blow jobs that got him so much as the relatively high number of 37.

I wonder what kind of number would be shocking for a woman to hear about her new boyfriend. 50? 100? more? Would it depend on the age of the man or just his reputation as a good man to date? For some reason, despite the fact that it is 2009 and we live in a supposed equal time for women and men, I don't get the feeling that there is gender equality when the talk turns to the number of sexual partners. I know girls younger than me that are turning down offers for sex because they want to "keep their numbers low". WTF? I'm not saying that they should turn around an