I’ve had 7,419,564 sexual partners in my life! And you thought your number was high? OK, so more accurately, that’s how many direct and indirect partners I’ve had. After I read in the Telegraph that the average British person has had indirect sex with 2.8 million people, I was dying to know how many people I’d tangentially banged. So, I went to this website,
“Sex Degrees of Sexual Partners,” which has a calculator developed by Lloyds Pharmacy to totally mess with your friggin’ head! Oh, I mean it’s meant to help you understand the risk you’re taking by having unprotected sex. Deep breaths. [Telegraph]Sexually transmitted diseases rose by half a percent last year in Britain, so Lloyds did a survey of 6,000 (apparently kinda chaste) people and proved that we are less than six steps away from having had sex with millions of possibly gross (or possibly famous?) people. Once you’ve input the number of people whom you’ve done the dirty with, you’ll have to remember how old they were at the time. Thankfully you won’t have to remember names. The head of sexual health at the pharmacy was kind enough to remind us that, “When we have sex with someone, we are, in effect, not only sleeping with them, but also their previous partners and their partners’ previous partners, and so on. It’s important that people understand how exposed they are to sexually transmitted diseases and take appropriate precautions including using condoms and having checks when necessary.”
Apparently in the U.K., men have had an average of nine sex partners while women have had 6.3. In the U.S., men have had an average of seven partners, while women have had four. I never trust these kinds of stats, because the men’s numbers are always so much higher than the women they’re theoretically sleeping with. But still, thinking about the millions of people I’ve sort-of slept with is making me queasy. Now that you’re effectively terrified, go use the calculator and help me feel like less of a hussy, please? And before you go scouring your privates and sinking into a deep depression, go get tested!