Questionable trends and dynamics spread like wildfire on TikTok. The platform has already caused discussions in the past with harmful and questionable challenges such as the “Blackout Challenge”. Another trend is now making the rounds: With the help of the so-called “Body Counts”, young TikTok users compare the number of their sexual partners with each other – and evaluate which body count to aim for up to a certain age limit.
While male users in particular push each other to increase their body count in challenges, the value of women is severely judged. Women with a small number of sex partners are considered to be particularly attractive, and there is also a discussion about how many games a woman can still be considered “justifiable”.
The hashtag on the topic, which has been circulating on the platform since 2020, has an enormous reach with almost 930 million hits. In addition to videos of men and women who reveal their body count in a sober, almost factual manner, short clips of public street surveys in particular are very popular. In these, strangers are asked in public about their body count – or are supposed to rate the body count of other people (mostly read as female) based on their appearance alone. A superficial joke that can have profound psychological consequences.
In addition to comparison processes and sexual pressure, the discussion about the “right” body count promotes above all a disturbed view of the relationship between men and women. A step backwards in the perception of gender roles and (sexual) equality between the sexes can be the result. Because while men are celebrated and recognized for a particularly high body count, women are condemned and rejected for living out their sexuality freely. “A woman’s market value decreases with the number of her body counts,” says one TikTok video, for example, “more than two sexual partners are not possible for a woman” in another.
The current discussions on TikTok are reminiscent of the debates on the phenomenon of “slutshaming”, which received a great deal of attention in 2011 as part of the so-called “slutwalks”. After the words of a Canadian police officer that “women should not dress like sluts in order to be better protected against sexual crimes”, there were worldwide protests against the so-called perpetrator-victim reversal and for women’s right to sexual self-determination.
Slutshaming refers to the devaluation of a usually sexually active woman who is supposed to feel punished and marginalized by the term “slut” for her unpleasant behavior. The term refers not only to a person’s sexual behavior, but also to their outward appearance, with “sexually provocative” clothing favoring a person to be classified as sexually active. That’s the theory. As Marina Thomas, media and social psychologist with a focus on sexuality at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the University of Vienna, explains, slutshaming in general and body count in particular is not a new phenomenon, but has grown historically.
“Women were and are punished if they have many sexual partners – especially often changing ones,” explains the expert to the star. At that time, a woman’s sex life was usually still a public issue and the “monitoring of female sexuality” was a substitute for the paternity test. If a woman had several sexual partners, this was publicly punished. “For example, a mother would not receive support for her child if several men testified that they had sex with her,” says Thomas. TikTok now shows the conservative social norm of that time, which is revived through the anonymous, unfiltered exchange on the platform – even though we have come a long way in terms of equality since the Equal Rights Act came into force in 1958.
So is social media like TikTok now pushing us back into old patterns of behavior and encouraging a societal regression guided by stereotypes in which men are free to express their sexuality while women are encouraged to behave in a “decent” manner? “Of course, TikTok is not the cause of these thought patterns, but it is helping to bring them back to the public,” Thomas replies to the question.
The psychologist sees the real problem in the increasing insecurity of young people with regard to their own identity and standard-compliant behavior. “It is indeed social progress that we are letting go of rigid role models, but it also brings with it insecurities on an individual level, whereas in the past one could orientate oneself on rigid gender roles.” In TikTok challenges such as Body Count, young adults are now finding their supposedly lost orientation again, but they lose sight of the fact that conservative thought patterns based on the motto “Men are hunters and women are passive objects” are also gaining ground again.
“I find the most problematic street polls in which men are supposed to guess the number of sexual partners of girls and women,” says the expert. The principle of such surveys is based on pop culture phenomena such as the “hot-crazy scale” from shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and Co. and reduces women to numbers.
However, guessing the body count is much more invasive than the superficial assessment of a woman’s attractiveness. “You should judge foreign women based on their external characteristics, how ‘easy to get’ they are. That goes in the direction of: ‘Anyone who wears a short skirt and artificial fingernails just wants to be gotten around’,” Thomas points out.
Thomas alludes here to the perpetrator-victim reversal, whereby the perpetrator’s guilt for a crime is shifted onto the victim. “Judging how much women defend themselves against sex and sexualized violence based on external characteristics alone is extremely dangerous and obscures the relationship between victims and perpetrators,” emphasizes the expert. The problem is closely related to what is known as “victim blaming”, in which the victim of a criminal offense – for example rape or sexual coercion – is accused of having caused the crime in question with provocative clothing or suggestive behavior. This can result in depression, trauma and trauma disorders.
To take the meaning of the body count in a different direction, Thomas recommends that young girls and women who want to join the trend and provide an answer only list the number of sexual partners with whom they have also had an orgasm. “That would not only reduce the number (to correspond to the conservative norm), but also reinterpret the trend somewhat. Because: the number is not everything, quantity is not the same as quality.” You can already see that on dating platforms such as Bumble, Tinder and Co. The number of sexual partners has no meaning whatsoever about the value of a person, nor about their ability to form relationships or have a family. As long as sex is consensual and does not endanger one’s own health, each person’s sex life is a private matter.
By the way: The body count appears even more macabre with regard to the origin of the term: In the military environment, the body count actually refers to the number of bodies that were killed by the opposing party in the context of a war.
