Who Cares About a Body Count... What if You're Spiritually Ran Thru?

Body count discourse, I believe, is childish, reductive, and rife with Protestant nonsense. I’ve never cared about, or placed any weight on the number of people my potential partner (or anyone, for that matter) has been intimate with. I do not have any interest in thinking about my current partner fornicating with others.

Yet many men will still ask their partner “What’s your body count?”, thereby voluntarily conjuring a mental image of another male, stark naked and fully erect, penetrating their beloved. I find this to be homo-erotic, cuckoldry-adjacent, and in the words of my older brother: miss me with that gay shit.

The logic behind this inappropriate and intrusive query is that the more sexual partners a person has had, the more tainted, deviant, and unworthy of monogamous love they become. There is, of course, a gendered and chauvinistic component to this wherein the typical Body Count enthusiasts performs some unknown phallic-based equation, adding up each sexual partner like spare change leading to her inevitable disqualification from love. This is, of course, preposterous.

What if a woman had sex with 100 inspiring men? I’m talking poets, activists, philanthropists? Does virtue transfer through intercourse? What if she fucked Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, Mr. Rodgers, and other similarly influential figures? Is she spiritually elevated by proximity to greatness, or does the number alone damn her?

Conversely, what about the woman with a low body count but that body count is filled with questionable and regrettable decisions? Imagine a woman who spent her entire life only having sex with Derek Chauvin. Is she more worthy of love simply because her body count is lower than the woman who had a train ran on her by our heroes? Does monogamous dedication to a man who murdered someone on camera somehow preserve her purity.

If we are to take body count logic seriously, we aren’t able to account for these qualitative variables. A woman who slept with thirty-seven Nobel laureates should, by any reasonable metric “outrank” a woman who slept with fifteen IDF soldiers. But this is not how the discourse operates. The discourse treats all penises as equally depleting, as if they are identical units of spiritual damage rather than wildly differentiated experiences with wildly differentiated men.

This is mathematically incoherent. It is philosophically bankrupt. And yet, it persists. This is, of course, due to the unspoken power imbalance that lies at the heart of every heterosexual relationship: The Pussy Gap.

The Pussy Gap is the structural monopoly wherein one party to a heterosexual relationship controls, in practical terms, 100% of the available pussy.

In the standard heterosexual romantic configuration, one party (typically designated “the woman”) possesses exclusive access to the primary sexual resource under negotiation, while the other party (typically designated “the man”) possesses none. Zero. Not even a fractional share. He can of course attempt to purchase the pussy, or a facsimile of the pussy (a fleshlight as some call it) but this is not the same.

So what does the man do? The man seeks to regain power through the only mechanism available to him: moral prescription. If he cannot control access to the pussy, he will attempt to control the narrative surrounding the pussy. The man will declare it tainted by previous use. He will treat it as a depreciating asset. He will construct elaborate taxonomies of purity and defilement, all designed to reframe his powerlessness as moral authority.

This is body count discourse. It is the final boss of male Cope.

Lately, however, many women have begun engaging in what can only be described as femcel behavior, inverting the body count discourse and applying it to men. Yes, dear reader, these women are asking men their body counts. And sometimes, these women will describe men as “ran thru” due to their sexual experience. I too have faced such allegations. I have been called “ran thru” by a woman on numerous occasions.

I believe this is the most unjust, most unconscionable aspersion one could cast upon a soul as gentle and unblemished and biracial as mine. Women may never comprehend the profound cruelty of being condemned for being cherished. To be vilified for cultivating meaningful connections. In the midst of a documented male loneliness epidemic, a civilizational crisis of isolation and despair, I have managed to forge bonds, to be chosen, to experience intimacy. And for this, I am to be cast as defiled? It defies reason. It violates every principle of justice.

But, I digress.

The essence of what the body count investigator seeks to know is how intimate their potential lover has been with other individuals before them. These people possess a near childlike obsession with being one’s first and therefore truest love. However, I theorize that one’s “body count” is not a reasonable indicator of one’s looseness in morals, nature to be faithful, or ability for connection with a singular soul.

What I have come to learn, through observation and no small amount of personal suffering, is that while many people may not be physically ran through, they are emotionally and spiritually ran through. Their bodies remain intact, perhaps even pristine by the metrics of body count purists. And yet their minds, their souls, have been rummaged, ransacked, and gang-banged by an endless procession of unresolved traumas and parasocial attachments.

They have been penetrated not by bodies, but by concepts. By influencers. By think pieces. By unrequited love. By desperate connections to be felt or be seen. By the existential dread of being alone. By the algorithmic churn of dopamine-optimized content designed to fragment attention and obliterate coherence. For those who are spiritually ran thru, their mind is now glazed over, shellacked with the bukkake of endless mental loads. Each one brief, meaningless, and yet somehow still present, lingering like a stain that will not wash out.

You may consider yourself chaste. Your body count may be zero, or one, or low enough to satisfy even the most conservative of conservatives… But I ask you this: How many people have hit your back walls, mentally?

Have the cheeks of your mind been clapped by a parade of baristas, coworkers, and situationships that went nowhere? How many times have you been emotionally penetrated, psychologically unraveled, spiritually depleted by people who were never worthy of such access?

Think of every defunct Spotify Blended playlist, still archived in your library. Every personality quiz you took at their request. “What kind of bread are you?” “Which Succession character matches your trauma?” Every person who knows exactly how many times your father has made you cry. Every confidant who became a stranger but still carries your secrets. Has the desperation to have your spiritual hole filled resulted in your being spiritually ran thru?

At university, I had a friend named David who once explained to me that the “least gay way to watch porn” was not to search for specific female performers, but to follow the career of one singular male performer thereby minimizing one’s exposure to what he called “random cocks.”

“You’ve probably seen like a hundred dicks,” he said. “Maybe even two thousand. Because you’re obsessed with Riley Reid.”

I was not obsessed with Riley Reid. I had mentioned her once to him after he asked me repeatedly who I liked.

“But me?” he continued. “I’ve only seen one dick. Shane Diesel’s. One. Maybe two others if he has his friends with him. But because of that, I don’t have the mental images of other men’s dicks in my mind the way you do, bro. You’ve got hella cocks on your brain, bro.”

It pained me to admit that David’s methodology was logical and mathematically sound despite it raising numerous follow-up questions… most pressingly, why he wouldn’t simply watch lesbian pornography if he was so concerned about penile exposure.

Homophobic paranoia aside however, buried within David’s convoluted scheme to avoid too much “cock exposure” is a lesson worth exploring: you must control what enters your mind.

The Stoics teach us that freedom is internal, not external. You are not free because you have money, status, or access to the pussy. You are free because you have mastered your own mind. Everything else, including wealth, reputation, romantic success, even life itself, is an indifferent. It can be taken from you at any moment. Your character, your rationality, your virtue, however, are the things that cannot be taken unless you surrender them.

The Stoics also remind us of our mortality. You are going to die. Everyone you love is going to die. Everything you build will eventually crumble. To those who have been spiritually ran through, this may sound depressing. Perhaps that is why they seek to know so much about their partner. The fear of making a mistake or fear of pouring into someone who may not share the novelty of love they romanticize. But for the mentally chaste, for those who have guarded their inner citadel, the truth of our mortality is incredibly liberating.

If you truly understood that your time is finite, would you waste it worrying about your partner’s body count? Would you let a defunct Spotify playlist occupy both your psyche and phone storage space for months and years? Forever taking up 47 MB (mental bodies) you could be using for literally anything else? Would you, in your desperate quest to be understood, tolerate the dry, half-hearted texts from someone who is clearly not into you, simply because receiving any attention feels better than receiving none?

Memento Mori… “Remember you will die” is the principle Marcus Aurelius lived his life by. But how are you choosing to live yours?

Are you living as a sovereign being, master of your own mind, selective about who enters your inner world? Or are you living as a public crevasse, your mind fully gaped open and spread for the world to use in a 300 person, no mental loads refused trauma dump session?

Are you the master of your ship, standing at the helm with calm hands and clear eyes, charting your course by the stars? Or are you below-deck knee deep in a fifteen-person orgy of distractions and existentialism

Is your spirit intact, or have you allowed yourself to be mind-fucked in the truest sense of the phrase?

The choice, as the Stoics remind us, has always been yours.