The Notches On Your Bedpost Don't Mean Shit

My Chemical Romance, a band who split up this week, once tried to breed with me. We were at a rock festival at one of the small islands off Venice, when a hurricane brought the main stage crashing down, injuring a load of teenage fans. There was screaming, terror, panic, with air ambulances trying to get through and failing. I was there as a journalist, in the relative safety of a portakabin dressing room with The Killers and MCR. But we were all pretty scared – apart from Gerard Way. “Well,” he said, looking around him, “as the only woman here, in the event of an apocalypse we may be forced to take you into that closet and repopulate the earth.” I looked around me at eight shaken rock stars, all dressed in black, all wondering if they’d make it out of here alive, and I thought – I could get used to this.

A woman wrote into the health advice column in the Times this week, asking if it was normal to be 29 and have slept with 25 people. She had been long-term single while her friends were in long-term relationships, so, over the years, she had gone out and had some casual sex. You know, like human beings who don’t live in Yemen do, because skin is designed to warm other skin, and it’s better than sitting at home wanking into a cup of your own tears. Anyway, having now got an actual boyfriend, this woman was feeling a bit anxious and wondering what to tell him. The health columnist – a wise, reassuring sage, paid to allay the fears of a nation – replied with: “I don’t wish to alarm you but that is more than four times the national average for a woman of your age!”

Well, would you look at that. Firstly, these stats – did they poll anyone who has ever been to Kavos? Surely you could hang out at some bunga bunga parties on that beach and get through 25 dudes in a month and still have time to chill on Sundays like Craig David did? Secondly, when my friend who loves Grindr said he hadn’t had sex for ages, he turned out to mean two weeks, and when our straight friend agreed that she too hadn’t had sex for ages, she turned out to mean two years. Averages – I shit ‘em.

Thirdly, you’ve both missed the point. If your new boyfriend is worried about this stuff, it’s not because he thinks you’re a slag. It’s because he’s worried that those 25 men (or women) have shown you a display of erotic acrobatics that will douse his own attempts with a major case of penile sadface. And so, he too has missed the point, which is that, you don’t get sexually experienced by shagging a different person every night. You get sexually experienced by shagging one person every night and finding out more and more about how to do it right. Some sex with a lot of people is never going to teach you as much as a lot of sex with some people will. In essence, casual sex is rubbish, and 25 partners might teach you nothing.

Alright, so this isn’t always the case, but I read that woman’s letter and got a strong sense of what could have been going on all these years. I bet she’d lain there drunk, sobering up, coming round, wondering why this was happening, again. I read that letter and imagined all her 25 lovers one by one.

There was Number Three, whom she got off with beside the smoke machine beside a dancefloor. He ruined it when he whispered in her ear “Can I finger you?”, but his stubble was actually quite nice against her cheeks – in fact it felt like when she used to rub her face with a scientific calculator at school. She developed a doglike commitment to the idea of going home with him, even though all sexual desire had already been rinsed, and the more she looked at his head, the more it resembled a fireguard.

There was Number Six, who was called Deepak. She went out with Deepak for three months, if you can call it going out. If you can call him Deepak. He wasn’t Indian but he said his parents were hippies and that he’d grown up in a wildly experimental ashram, which was why he didn’t believe in tying himself down to one person and frustrating the flow of cosmic love that rides bareback through all of us. He was probably called Dave.

Numbers 9 to 11 were that night in the youth hostel in Barcelona that didn’t have enough beds.

Then there was number 13, Graham from work, who was indiscriminate in his sexual affections and just wanted everyone to like him. Sometimes his tactic actually worked, as ultimately everyone is just a tangle of limbs looking for their magnets. She slept with Graham every night for a week before realising she could never do it again. The next two years were spent smiling at him in passing but never quite catching his eye, like hovercrafts where there used to be submarines.

She smartened up her act, and then there was number 15. Laszlo was beautiful, and had started getting work as a model. She kept saying that she didn’t care about him seeing other girls, too. She tried to toss her hair back over her own shoulder as she said it, imagining that they were as cool together as the cowboy and the chewing gum girl. Her stomach was a little locked box as she spoke.

Numbers 16 to 18 were the one that had a dog, the one that looked like a dog, and the one that could have have been vastly improved by the full participation of a dog.

There was number 20, who would text her at 11PM and ask her to come over, which probably meant he didn’t have the courage to ask her until he’d had a few drinks, which was quite sweet. The third time she went down on him she asked him why he never returned the favour. “Just don’t fancy you enough, I guess,” he said.

Number 21 was Gary. They went to bed in Wales for a whole summer. When they woke up it was still raining.

Number 24 liked her so much that she dumped him after three weeks, because he kept telling her that she looked great when she knew she looked shit, and that everyone at the party liked her when she wasn’t sure that everyone at the party really did like her, and that she was probably going to be successful in anything she chose to do in life. He kept paying for her cabs and remembering little things that she’d said. It was uniquely irritating.

And so on, until she arrived at the new guy. Number 26, if you’re interested in numbers, which I’m not. And what she wants now is a bit of reassurance that notches on bedposts don’t rub off on your skin. That in this world of billions, living in crowded cities where you can pass a thousand people on your way to work before you’ve even had a coffee, that 25 of them might just have touched you inside your clothes by the time the decade is out. That England is a cold country and when somebody touches you, you feel warmer. That we are animals, and this is what we do, the cold calling of one body to another. Sometimes you just need somebody’s arm to catch on the small of your back, to brush against your neck, to run across your breasts and linger on them a while.

So, dear anxious lady, you tell your boyfriend whatever you like. All he really needs to know is that you are a whole person, made of flesh and bone and invisible histories. Remember, when your past calls, you can let it go to voicemail anyway. Sometimes it hasn’t got anything new to say.