‘Why body count?’ by Guest Contributor Efua

I woke up one day and men and women had begun asking questions that had the underlying expression ‘body count’. Apparently, the virgin question didn’t matter anymore. What mattered recently was how many bodies you had encountered sexually. I know lol, the sound of ‘bodies’ sound super morbid but interestingly enough, I lack a better way of putting it other than in this manner.

How many bodies have you encountered since you got sexually active? Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, a hundred, three hundred?! More than that? You probably deserve a permanent employee badge in the red light district!

It was funny and interesting at the same time to hear a friend say that a body count beneath eight for women was okay but once they hit the big giant ten, the halo had to be ripped off their kinky heads for obvious reasons. Wait, rewind. Since when did wearing a proud number ten and above tee shirt become synonymous to being a devil? Is this the case also for men? At what number does a man become a hoe? (Yes male hoes do exist!)

Another remark I giggled upon hearing recently is not to accept a given number provided in response to the body count question. This baffles me. So why ask if you likely expect to get lied to? What’s the percentage of lies vs truths? Where’s the research, do we have the facts?

So much like a tourist on the hot streets of Accra trying desperately to not get ripped off by a sly cab driver, you must do some math whenever the number in question is given you. In the case of the wide eyed tourist, some division must be made. However, in the touchy case of the recipient of the body count figure, the latter must be prepared to do some addition. He must put on the doubting Thomas hat, add some subjectivity and dutifully add a number or two to the specific figure for good measure (in some cases, they may need to multiply!). The fact (or likelihood) is that the person asked the body count question will likely cut the number down in order not to get judged. Speaking of judgement, I raise eyebrows when I hear the fact that men and women are judged differently when it comes to this issue. How less of a person is a woman whose count is higher than a man’s? Do our impressions of a person change after we discover their count? Is this question important in relationships and when do you prefer to find out? – before or after getting in deep? Would you lose it when you discover you have been lied to? In any case, a French lexical debate which arose surrounding the sexual act itself is a healthy distraction in the event of the stream of questions. So in French, saying a man ‘takes’ a woman, ( Il prend la femme) has a sexual connotation. This expression ruffled the feathers of some feminists and triggered a response that directly retorted the perception that men literally ‘take’ women in the sexual act. The feminists maintained that men rather get ‘taken’ just by virtue of the design of the organs involved in this activity…need I explain further? The one that goes in gets ‘taken’. Get it? Excelente! In that light, the assertion is that women rather ‘take’ men during the act; placing women in a superior position so that if a woman’s body count is up there, it doesn’t mean she’s been used and ‘taken’ but rather that she has used/ ‘taken’ others. I digress though, but lightly touching on this issue, some men have a problem with the body count of certain women because society has led minds to believe that a woman’s value decreases with how often or how much she’s been ‘taken’. Much like the wax print analogy that speculates losing shine the more you get washed. The perception that she becomes bigger is biologically wrong. Reminder that this organ is the bomb that can bring life into the world and regain its shape and elasticity. If we think lady parts lose their size/elasticity the more they get taken, then we might as well assume that the grand pestle also shortens or loses its cutting edge efficacy the more it gets ‘taken’. After all doesn’t a pencil get shorter the more we sharpen it and doesn’t a knife lose its precision the more it cuts? I’ll leave you to ruminate on that.

If you ask me, the body count expression or references to it or future coined terms making reference to this same notion have come to stay. Now the real issue is that whether a person’s (emphasis on person, regardless of gender) body count is as high as going to an undiscovered planet in the universe and back, or as low as one of the lowest points on earth, I feel like one of the main issues that deserve stress and headache, spittle and nerves, clenched fists and exaggerated hand gestures, debate after debate, sleepless nights and more Google consultation than necessary is the issue of STDs!

Ebola upped and disappeared, it doesn’t mean AIDS and its little sisters did as well.

Let’s continue this body count debate shall we?