Women are still being judged based on how many sexual partners they’ve had in 2023.
There’s a TikTok with more than 30,000 likes where Jake Maddock, a relationship expert, advises an anonymous man to break up with his partner after she revealed how many men she’d slept with.
It is essential to point out the video has 30,000 likes, not views, likes.
An anonymous man turned to Mr Maddock for advice and explained his girlfriend revealed, without him asking, that she’d slept with 62 men and she was only 25.
Perhaps this could have been used as a teaching moment, where Mr Maddock could have explained that any issues the man had with his girlfriend’s sexual past was a reflection of his own issues, insecurities and ingrained misogyny.
He could have calmly outlined that women shouldn’t be defined, judged or seen as differently based on their sexual experiences.
That wasn’t what happened.
Mr Maddock made a few of the standard quips about her “body count”, called the man’s girlfriend “busy” and said she’d had a “good time”.
Then he advised the anonymous man to cut ties with his girlfriend.
Mr Maddock said that he would be better off ending the relationship and “starting fresh” with someone else because she’d done “irreparable damage” by revealing how many men she’d previously slept with.
He told the man the information would always “plague” him if he stayed with her and joked that the boyfriend got to be the number 63.
The relationship expert did advise that no one should tell anyone how many people they’ve slept with before getting into a relationship.
The comments section, at least, wasn’t just men slamming women for daring to have sex lives before meeting their boyfriends …. But there was plenty of it.
“Would it be okay for a man to have a body count of 62?” one woman asked.
One man said he broke up with an ex when he found out she’d partaken in a threesome. Another said she’d had too many sexual partners, and one said that the amount of people she slept with meant she had “little standards.”
There’s an argument to be made that TikTok is niche and therefore doesn’t fairly reflect how men still feel about women’s “body counts”, but you only have to look at influencer Tammy Hembrow’s Instagram comment section to realise that this kind of rhetoric isn’t happening in a vacuum, it’s everywhere.
Hembrow, 29, has three children; she shares her two eldest kids with her ex, Reece Hawkins and her youngest child, Posy, born in 2022 with her ex, Matt Poole.
In September 2023, she went public with reality star Matt Zukowski; she’s also slowly started posting him on social media, and some of the comments are gross.
Sure, plenty of people are excited about the new romance, but there’s also so much shaming of Tammy, with people furious she’s daring to have a dating life.
See? We don’t like it when women move on from men and if they do it, well, everyone has something to say about it.
“Wow, move on quick,” someone said.
“I can’t keep track of all the guys,” one commenter claimed.
“The number of men you go through is a red flag of the century,” another wrote.
“Just an endless line of guys having a go,” one said.
It is pretty easy to see the theme here – women are still judged for the amount of men they sleep with or have relationships with.
They become defined by it, ridiculed for it and somehow labelled as lesser. For what? Having fun or continually giving love a crack?
Tammy’s a world-famous influencer with 17 million followers on Instagram and almost two million on TikTok.
She’s mighty, privileged and successful, but if she can’t escape this kind of misogyny and scrutiny, what chance does the anonymous man’s girlfriend have? In fact, what chance, do any of us have?