The idea behind the so-called "Rule of Three" is that if you want to know how many people a woman has slept with, you take the number she tells you and multiply by three, but if you want to know how many people a guy has slept with, you divide the number he tells you by three. You may remember it from American Pie 2. It's a "rule" — that women always round their sex number down — that I spent my early 20s proving wrong.
I didn't lie about my sexual history, really. I didn't invent false liaisons, and when people asked me how many guys I'd hooked up with, my usual response was to awkwardly avoid the question. I just didn't correct people when they made assumptions. I was cute (or cute enough, anyway). I was outgoing and had an active social life. I was liberal and a self-declared feminist. Being semi-involuntarily celibate didn't fit that picture, so for the most part, it didn't occur to anyone to consider that I might be.
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My embarrassment over my (lack of) sex life wasn't just about the fact that it didn't look like it had been lifted from the pages of Cosmo. It was a reflection of a much bigger story we tell ourselves about sex. That what we do between the sheets matters, and that in the details of our sex lives, we will find the truth about everything from our desirability, to our morals and political beliefs, to our value as women and as human beings.
We live in a culture that treats sex acts as identities, and which gives what we do and what we desire when it comes to sex what American anthropologist Gayle Rubin calls a "cosmic" significance. Have sex with too many people, and you're a slut. Do it with no one at all, and you're a loser or a prude. Feel a flutter of desire for someone of the same sex (or someone of the opposite sex if you're gay) and find yourself forced to call everything you thought you knew about your sexuality into question. Have lots of sex and your relationship is a roaring success. Drop below a certain weekly threshold and it's time to stage an intervention.
So it's no surprise then that many of us take what transpires in our sex lives very personally. "I had this great fear when I was about 21 that I was missing out on all these great dicks by staying with one man," jokes Greta, a 25-year-old fashion blogger who has been dating the same guy since she was 18. She's gotten over that fear now, but she still doesn't feel like her sex life entirely matches her progressive politics. "It always comes as a bit of a shock to people when they find out I only have one notch on my bedpost." Yusuf, an impressively muscled 24-year-old gay man, nurses similar concerns. "Sometimes, when I feel like I've been rejected, I'll think of a guy who is really good looking and think, 'That would never happen to him.'"
The belief that "we are what we do" when it comes to sex doesn't just leave us feeling anxious when our sex lives don't match up to whatever we perceive as the ideal. It also plays an important role in shaping our sexual decisions.
For me, the belief that my value lay in my sex life was paralyzing. If my sexual choices were a window into who I really was, that meant I needed to make them carefully, which meant saying no to any sex I wasn't 100 percent sure of. But saying no to sex I didn't wholeheartedly desire meant having a lot less sex than I would have ideally had, which left me feeling an uncomfortable disconnect between my "sex self" and the person I was in the rest of my life.
For other people I interviewed, it meant entering into relationships and encounters they didn't really want. Meghan, a TV-pretty Republican with a dry, sardonic sense of humor, told me how she'd lost her virginity in her first semester of college, to a guy she quickly realized was an asshole. She felt so bad about it that she stayed with him for three years. "I felt like I might as well just stay with him because you don't want to just accumulate mistakes like that," she says. Courtney, a 22-year-old body positive activist, had sex for the first time with someone she wasn't attracted to, "just to prove that I was attractive enough and brave enough to have sex."
But what if we looked at sex differently? Not as a magical force that can strip us of our virtue or transform us into modern, empowered women, but as an experience to be had or not had, and be pursued not because we have to or because we're not allowed to, but if and when it brings us pleasure. Such a transformation in our approach to sex would free us up to make the sexual choices that are right for us at any given moment, without being burdened by the fear that they make us impure, abnormal — or like me, a "secret sexual loser." (Quotes my own.)
The truth is that while sex is an important part of the way that most of us find pleasure and intimacy with other people, it doesn't tell the whole story of our pleasures and intimacy. And it certainly doesn't tell the whole story about who we are or how we are valued by other people. As a commentator on Jezebel once put it: "getting laid is mostly a matter of luck, opportunity and sex drive, not desirability."
I'm a lot less hung up about sex than I was back in the days when I was inverting the Rule of Three. Partly because my sex life looks a little more like my ideal now than it did then. But also because I've learned to shake off the idea that our sexual choices define us.
Almost all of us will go through periods when our sex lives don't feel like they're up to scratch. That doesn't mean you're gross or inept or that your relationship is falling apart; it's just the ebb and flow of life. Your value is not defined by your sex life. And neither, I finally know now, was mine.
*Some names and identifying details have been changed.
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