‘What’s your number?’: Unpacking the ideas that program us about sex

One of the researchers behind this study later admitted to being surprised by “how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships – these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support”.

She also pointed to other research suggesting that men don’t think of promiscuous women as appropriate targets for long-term relationships, which further isolates these women.

Society has long punished women deemed sexually forward. Remember that in Hammurabi’s Code – one of the legal artefacts that codified patriarchy – women could be punished for adultery with drowning, while there was no death sentence for men. And if a woman sought a divorce and her husband refused, he could marry someone else and take his previous wife as a slave.

Research suggests we have more to fear about “our number” from our same-sex peers than from our potential partners.

While we don’t kill women for adultery now, or make them wear giant “As,” Hester Prynne–style, we continue to persecute women whom we deem “too easy to get”.

The idea of women as agents of sexuality, as subjects of their own desire, is disturbing. Our culture is more comfortable with women as sexual objects, static receptacles for male lust. First there were “pin-ups” and “sex kittens” like Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt and Brigitte Bardot, relegated to cubicle walls and army barracks. The objectification has become more explicit over the years: Playboy, Penthouse, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show (and catalogue), and, of course, internet porn. But it serves the same purpose: passive, fetishised women, displayed to ignite men’s nether regions.

When women started to behave in overtly sexual ways, people freaked out – or laughed. We started to see characters like the beloved Betty White’s Sue Ann Nivens, the lustful, outrageous nymphomaniac next door on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s who got great lines like, “I was lying in bed last night and I couldn’t sleep, and I came up with an idea. So I went right home and wrote it down.”

White also played the sweet, empty-headed Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls, in a friendship foursome with Rue McClanahan’s Blanche Devereaux, who got to be the group’s nympho. One of Blanche’s best zingers: “There is a fine line between having a good time and being a wanton slut. I know. My toe has been on that line.”

These roles were all a precursor, of course, to Sex and the City in the 1990s and early noughties, in which the person having the most sex in New York City was Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall. One of Samantha’s best lines included, “If I worried what every bitch in New York was saying about me, I’d never leave the house.”

Too many of us continue to abide within that opinion prison. These three women were in comedies, which gave us licence to laugh at their raunchiness.

Meanwhile, Madonna pushed all our cultural buttons and blew up the conversation around religion and sexuality, scandalising the world. First there was her televised performance of Like a Virgin at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, when her high heel slipped off and she had to retrieve it by writhing around the floor in her wedding dress (she also dry-humped the floor and flashed her underwear). While her agent and publicist were furious with her, fans loved it, inspiring her to go further. There was Open Your Heart, where she played an exotic dancer (while a young kid tried to get in to see her); the Like a Prayer video, for which Pepsi dumped her as a spokesperson (in it, she kissed a black saint – scandal!); Justify My Love, with its nudity; her Sex coffee table book; the Erotica album, and so on.

Throughout her career, Madonna was quick to lash out at critics for double standards. As she said during an interview on ABC in the early 1990s, “I think MTV should have their violence hour and I think they should have their degradation to women hour. If we’re going to have censorship, let’s not be hypocrites about it. Let’s not have double standards. We already have these videos that have violence and show degradation to women being shown 24 hours a day, yet they don’t want a video playing that deals with sex between two consenting adults.”

As she underlined, objectifying women was and always has been culturally acceptable; showing them as drivers of their own lust, less so.

Madonna seems almost quaint these days, though other women have picked up the torch: Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, Lana Del Rey, Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj … And who can forget the 2020 song WAP by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, which had the biggest opening week for a song ever?

Conservatives went nuts. James Bradley, a US Republican, wrote on Twitter that the song made him want to “pour holy water” in his ears and that “Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are what happens when children are raised without God and without a strong father figure”.

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People were quick to strike back at Bradley’s hypocrisy: after all, this man stood behind Donald Trump, despite Trump’s inclination to grab women “by the pussy”.

Somehow, two black women celebrating their own “wet-ass pussies” was worse. The culture – and music critics – celebrated this breakthrough, sex-positive hit. It’s bawdy as hell, but that’s the point.

It’s a reclamation of the way women have been objectified and described for millennia. Women, as sexual subjects, stating their lust feels foreign and shocking because it is. Too few of us know what it’s like to embody our own desire, and to do so with zero f—s given to what society thinks of us for it.