Body Count Tribunal

Cool boys still run the numbers. Your past is evidence. His is character. The double standard never retired, it just got better lighting and a dating app profile.

I clocked it again last week. Group chat, someone new, and within three messages the question lands sideways. Not “does he treat you well?” Just the quiet maths. How many before. Whether she is “experienced” in a way that still counts as fun or whether the number has tipped into something they can use later. They never say the word body count out loud. They do not need to. The tribunal sits in the pause, the raised eyebrow, the way the story gets retold without the part where he had the same number and no one flinched.

The Arithmetic They Keep Private

His number is a story about freedom. He was single, he was young, he was figuring it out. The higher it goes the more it becomes proof he knows what he is doing. Experience. Range. A man who has options. Your number is a file. It gets opened when he is insecure, when the relationship hits a boring Tuesday, when he wants an exit that looks like principle. Suddenly the same acts that made him interesting make you complicated. He had fun. You had a past.

This is not new. Basildon taught it early. The girl who went with more than one lad got talked about in the corridor. The lad who went with more than one girl got a shrug and a free pint. Estate rules, school rules, then the internet scaled it. Now the tribunal has screenshots. It has soft-launch photos that get reverse-engineered for timelines. It has the friend who “just thought you should know” what someone said in another chat. Cool boys do not need a formal hearing. They just keep the score and wait for the moment it is useful.

Dating Apps Made the Court Public

Hinge and the rest turned private arithmetic into a public performance. You can see the pattern if you watch long enough. A man with a high number is “not looking for anything serious right now” and that is treated as honest. A woman with the same number is “not relationship material” before she has finished her drink. The profiles do not say it. The conversations do. He asks early, casually, like it is banter. You learn to answer with a joke or a deflection or the truth that then becomes the thing he tells his mates.

I have watched it happen to friends who are louder than me about it. One of them stopped answering the question altogether. She started saying “more than you and less than I wanted” and watched them short-circuit. The ones who laughed stayed. The ones who went quiet usually deleted the chat. That is the tribunal in action. They are not asking because they care about your history. They are checking whether your history will make them look foolish later, or whether it gives them an excuse to keep things casual while still getting the sex.

His Character, Your Evidence

When his number is high it is framed as growth. He learned what he likes. He knows how to treat a woman because he has had practice. The same sentence flipped for you becomes a warning. Too much practice means you might compare him. Too much practice means you might not need him. The logic only runs one way. He gets to be the expert. You get to be the case study.

Cool boys are especially good at this because they have learned the language. They will say they do not care, then later use the number in an argument about something else entirely. Trust. Attention. Why you were on your phone. The past becomes a permanent character witness against you while his past remains a private archive he controls. He can edit it. You are expected to defend yours or apologise for it or pretend it was smaller than it was.

This is where the feminist bit is not abstract. It is the everyday policing of who is allowed to have had sex without it becoming a referendum on their value. Liberal feminism said women could want sex and still be whole. The tribunal still treats the wanting as something that requires explanation. Men who want the same thing get the explanation for free.

The Quiet Rules That Never Got Written Down

Nobody posts the rulebook. You just absorb it. Under a certain number and you are inexperienced, which some men treat as a project and others treat as a risk. Over a certain number and you are “that girl,” which is never a compliment when they say it. The threshold moves depending on how much they like you and how much they want to keep the upper hand. It is not about morality. It is about leverage.

I have sat in rooms where men compared notes and the women in the room were expected to laugh or stay quiet. The ones who pushed back got called bitter. The ones who agreed got called pick-me later by the same men when it suited them. The double standard does not need consistency. It just needs enough people to keep running the numbers so that the next woman learns to keep hers smaller in public than it is in private.

What Changes When You Stop Playing

Some of us stopped answering. Some of us started asking them first and watching the discomfort. Some of us decided the number is not evidence of anything except that we had sex with people we wanted to have sex with at the time. That is not a defence. It is just a refusal to treat our own history as a problem they get to solve.

The cool boys do not like that version. They prefer the one where your past is a story they can retell and his past is a set of skills he brought to the table. The tribunal keeps running because enough people still show up to it. It keeps running because the consequences are uneven. He loses a chat. You lose the assumption of good character until you prove otherwise.

It never fully retired. It just moved from the corridor to the group chat to the dating app to the quiet moment after sex when he asks something that sounds curious and is not. Your past remains evidence. His remains character. The maths still only works one way, and most of them know it. They just prefer the version where you do the explaining.