Have You Had *Too Many* Sexual Partners?
By: Danika Bloom
Tags: Life Lessons, Sexuality, Culture, Feminism, Books

What would you think of a fictional female character who had four lovers in one year?

Take a second and think of the label you’d give her. Got it?

In the first manuscript I ever wrote, the female protagonist went on dates with 24 different men over the course of one year and had sex with four of them — but only after having had at least three dates with said men.

The man whom the protagonist was most interested in having a relationship with was someone she’d known for years. And although she never did sleep with him in the story, their relationship was central to the character’s growth arc.

I had an early draft of the manuscript read by a developmental editor — a woman who was quite progressive in her social beliefs — and she was unequivocal in her advice:

She: Do you want to try to sell this as a mainstream book?

Me: Yes.

She: Then reduce the number of men your protagonist dates from 24 to fewer than five and have her sleep with just one man — the one she knows at the beginning of the story and ends up with at The End.

Me: But this is not a romance. Certainly, it doesn’t have to follow the expectations of romance readers.

She: Shaking her head at the naïve writer questioning her good advice. No matter what genre you’re writing you need your readers to like your main character. Nobody will cheer for a promiscuous woman.

Me: Wait, what? Serial monogamy is promiscuous? And what you’re suggesting is an entirely different story to the one I’ve written.

She: Well, if you want to save it, make your protagonist the man. Readers don’t mind a guy who plays the field, looking for Ms. Right. But they’ll put the book down if your female protagonist gets action from more than one man.

And this is where you insert language that would make any raping, pillaging male Viking from a historical romance novel blush.

That conversation took place in 2006. Certainly, things are different in 2019, the ever-hopeful, but apparently, this still naïve writer thought…

Sadly, not at all. And worse, not just in novels, but in flesh-and-blood real life.

What would you think of me if I told you I’ve had ten lovers in my lifetime?

In my research for my current work-in-progress, I read some academic research published in December 2018 titled, The Sexual Double Standard in the Real World: Evaluations of Sexually Active Friends and Acquaintances.

What this study found is that the sexual double standard that readers accept in fiction is alive and well in the real world, too. It’s a world where

men are socially rewarded for engaging in sexual activity and women are socially denigrated for sleeping with the men who are reaping those rewards.

What does “socially denigrated” mean in real terms?

Well, if you were part of this study of 4,455 American men and women between the ages of 18 and 35, it means that if you have a male friend and a female friend who have both had, let’s say, ten sexual partners, you’d give your female friend lower scores for attributes related to her values, likability, success, and intelligence than your male friend.

Even though I was the one who read the study and wrote that line I need to pause and take that fact in. The fact that I’ve slept with ten men (in theory) means that my own friends will think I’m less intelligent than our mutual friend, John, who’s also had ten lovers.

Quoi le phoque?

This double standard has dangerous social implications

Imagine you’re on a jury in a case where a man has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman. It comes to light that the woman has had ten sexual partners in the last two years.

But wait! So has the man, so they’re equal in morality, trustworthiness, intelligence, making good decisions and so on, right?

You know the answer. This virtually invisible double standard allows us to judge the woman as less moral, with less a trust-worthy testimony, lower intelligence and more prone to have made a bad decision that landed her in this pickle.

Silly woman shouldn’t have led him on. What did she expect? Blah blah blah.

And this isn’t just opinions of people who self-identify as being conservative or part of the religious right — this is how friends label their own friends based on their sexual activity.

This is depressing and disappointing and generally makes me feel too sad to be as angry as I’d like to be.

In 1969, author E. B. White said,

“Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.”

But, how can writers inform and shape a new way of thinking about sexual norms and mores when the majority of readers (being regular people) are, apparently, not willing to cheer on women who challenge these sexual double standards?

Thank the goddess for the exceptions to the rule

This little bubble inside Medium is one of those places where hundreds of writers push the boundaries, sharing first-person stories about sexual activities that are generally not acceptable to engage in, let alone write about.

Photo by VINICIUS COSTA from Pexels

And thank goodness for them — writers like traceybyfire, Emma Austin, Darcy Reeder, Shannon Ashley, Zita Fontaine, James Finn, Joe Duncan and so many others.

These are just some of my Go To writers when I need to know the entire world is not as narrow-minded as mainstream fiction readers and the 4,455 Americans who were part of that depressing study.