Young people love to collect and review data about their hobbies and habits – now, they’re tracking their sexual history
Keeping a detailed log of your sexual history is something that always intrigued me. I began keeping a diary about my sex life as soon as I had more than three sexual partners. It started out as an innocent list with their name, age and the date of our encounter, but soon enough, I had fallen down the rabbit hole. Before I knew it, I was dealing with an Excel spreadsheet crammed with trivia about all my old flames, such as what subject they studied at university, their political orientation and their zodiac sign. Some would say it got out of control and that it was unhealthy for me to track my sex life like this, but to me it was just a fun little way to learn more about my sexual identity and track patterns I might have missed.
Plus, I’m not alone. Reddit is full of users who openly admit to keeping track of their body count, while Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 was arguably one of the most evocative works to come out of the late 20th century. 25-year-old Patrick* is a self-professed “data geek”, and he also has an Excel spreadsheet where he logs information about people he goes on dates with, like how they met and the current status of their relationship. Patrick admits that it was actually an online trend that first got him to keep track of his love life. “It started in December of 2021, when I saw the Tinder Wrapped trend on TikTok, which I found very funny,” he says.
Bea, a 23-year-old high school teacher, tracks her previous partners in the Notes app. “I have a note on my phone with the ABCs. After each letter there is a number of how many people I had sex with whose name starts with that letter. So let’s say I’ve been with an Anthony, an Adam and an Alex – after A there would be a 3,” she says. She explains that she keeps her list cryptic to protect her privacy and that of those on the list. “If I unlock my phone and have it open, no one is able to tell what it is,” she explains.
Evidently, tracking our sex lives isn’t uncommon. But why do we do it? “The reasons why people choose to keep these lists will be “manifold, complex and multi-causal,” explains Maya Oppenheim, Women’s Correspondent at The Independent and author of The Pocket Guide to the Patriarchy. “I’d hazard a guess that some people wouldn’t even be able to articulate why they are choosing to do this.”
While some might keep track of their sexual partners just for fun, others keep a close eye on their ‘body count’. Bea, for instance, says she has always regarded her body count as a “self-esteem boost”. “Realising that I was desired in many ways by many people made me think ‘OK, maybe I am cool’,” she says.
@junahealth I was definitely in my maneater era 💅🏻#relationships #dating #girlmemes #intimacy ♬ original sound - $
Oppenheim says “there are deeply gendered unjust double standards when it comes to sex” and with this in mind, it’s especially easy for women to read into the number of people they’ve slept with. Years of social conditioning have led us to believe that we’re simultaneously ‘slutty’ if we have lots of sex but ‘undesirable’ if we don’t, causing some women – like Bea – to view sex as a form of validation. So it’s little wonder so many women are keen to keep tabs on their sexual history. “[There are] many women out there whose own internalised misogyny is infringing and quashing their sexual desire and overall sex life,” Oppenheim says. “Not that I would ever want to blame them for their own sexual neuroses or repression.”
The pressure to keep track of one’s body count – and, in some cases, to keep it low – can be intense for women. According to Oppenheim, this discourse and anxiety surrounding women’s sexual history are now reaching fever pitch thanks to the virality of misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate and others of his ilk. “Take the grim tweet that Tate fired off where he said: ‘I reject all women who have slept with more than 3 men. Vile’. Tate has also argued it is ‘disgusting’ and ‘revolting’ for women to have lots of sexual partners,” Oppenheim says. “But of course, Tate isn’t the only person out there with a misogynistic attitude towards sex – there are many men who have one rule for themselves when it comes to sex and a whole different rulebook for the women in their lives”. Although Tate’s brand of misogyny is especially alarming, it’s worth reiterating that shaming women over their sexual history is nothing new: memorably, Lindsay Lohan was widely shamed when her handwritten list of 36 former hook-ups was leaked.
Of course, there are some more benign, practical reasons why a person might keep a sex list. “Our memory betrays us a lot,” Patrick says, explaining why he records details about his love life in this way. “It’s normal to think things happened exactly as we remember them, but the truth is we are constantly in a mental process of erasing certain details and reconstructing narratives about our own lives.” We can easily forget certain experiences or partners we have been with – personally, I may or may not have seen a guy in public only to later realise we had slept together in the past.
“There are deeply gendered, unjust double standards when it comes to sex” – Maya Oppenheim
Bea also points out that “if you test positive for an STD, you can just open it and see who you’ve been with in the past year or months and let them know”. It’s definitely a way to protect your sexual health: by knowing who you’ve been with and when, it’s easier to keep track of who you might have endangered and who the source of any positive test might be.
But while sex lists are a very fun way of analysing your behaviour, finding out patterns and quirks about yourself, and even of making sure you’re safekeeping your sexual health, aren’t we logging so much stuff about ourselves already? “If this is something you do so obsessively, and the process of doing so causes you stress or shame then that is definitely unhealthy,” Oppenheim says. Patrick adds that he is “sensitive to the argument that we already document too much about our lives and that the exercise of documentation becomes a semiotic game that conditions the very action we want to document”. Ultimately, though, sex lists can still be fun – it was one of the most amusing things I’ve done in recent years – as long as you’re mindful of your reasons for tracking your body count.
*Names have been changed