What's your slut number?

If you read my column regularly, you’ll easily draw the conclusion that I’ve slept with more than one person in my lifetime.

And you’ll be right.

I’ve slept with more people than you can count on your one hand. Or two. Including both feet’s toes. In the numbers game of what makes a woman a slut, I’ve passed ‘Go’ a whole lotta times.

While this says nothing about whether I’m a good or kind person - or whether I’m actually GGG* (quality trumps quantity I always say) - it still seems to mean something in some archaic sub-level of the collective psyche.

I’d have liked to blame the South African milieu for this very narrow label, but when pop singer and wife to France's first lady, Carla Bruni, ‘came out’ saying she’d slept with 30 people, the press went ballistic.

In this here 21st century, women are still required by greater society to be sexually modest. It might not matter how many people you’ve slept with, just as long it’s not a lot (read: two).

Say what you will about feminism and the fight for equality being over, if any relationship finds itself asking the ‘how many’ question, it’s almost guaranteed that whatever number the fairer sex gives it will elicit a weighty pause at best.

Even if only to give Mr Man time enough to consider how he measures up against the other cocks.

You see, it’s more than just a numbers game. Double digits imply that a woman might actually enjoy sex enough to want to fuck for fun. Like the stereotypical man.

And sexually empowered or overt women are threatening. Not least of all to other women. So best we denigrate them by declaring them dirty, unhinged and emotionally desperate.

That’s not to say that some people – men and women – don’t have pathological tendencies when it comes to fucking rabidly. But there are those that shop, eat, exercise and work rabidly also.

And yet those aren’t matters for morality debates.

While knowing someone’s ‘slut number’ might not be any indication of what sort of lover you’re dealing with, I’d generally bank on the person that’s slept with more as opposed to less.

Apart from the fact that experience goes a long way to great sex, boys generally need to learn that mindless and indiscriminate rutting eventually becomes boring and girls generally need to learn that they don’t have to commit emotionally and forever to the first pimply bag of hormones to touch them. And vice versa.

And that waiting until marriage thing?

Ne’er a more ignorant, naive decision could be made. Even if it is the name of Allah, God, Yaweh – whatever ­- faith won’t make up for the kind of loneliness and alienation that comes from sexual incompatibility and miscommunication with your life-time partner.

If we’re going to black and white the world, I’d rather be a happy slut than a miserable prude.

* Good, giving, game – coined by the inimitable Dan Savage.

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So... what's your slut number? Share it with us in the box below...