On 24 October, in the year of Our Lord 2023, online manfluencer and alleged sex offender Andrew Tate wrote on X/Twitter: “I reject women who have slept with more than 3 men. Vile.”
Heterosexual and boy-curious girls, memorise the date, for it was with that tweet and from that moment that at least two millennia of cultural slutshaming came to an official end. Andrew Tate is a nasty misogynist, a vacuous braggart and facing charges of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. It is now in the interests of your health and safety to add at least four penis-shaped notches to your bedpost to ward him off – although you really should bang however many lads that take your fancy in order to be perfectly sure.
Sadly, it’s not just Tate of whom you need to be wary. A terrifying study from January discovered the unhappy news that a third of Australian teen boys – across all sectors of Australia’s class-polarised school system – were taking behavioural cues towards women and sexuality from the “relatable” Tate.
This survey result tells us two things. One, all the queer, lesbian and bisexual girls should count their blessings that they’re not swimming in a sea where a full third of the consumption items on offer are poisonous fish. Two, that those bound to the heterosexual instinct (despite our best efforts sometimes, alas) might wish to consider reimagining the world not as a sea but instead as a vast and delightfully pointy trampoline and then bouncing your soft bits across the decent two-thirds of it with vigour and enthusiasm.
A consistent set of recent studies observing that younger people are losing their appetite for sex has been attributed to “technology, heavy academic schedules and an overall slower-motion process of growing up”. As someone who disguises as an angry dickhead to spy on the “manosphere” online world that’s inhabited by Tatish minions – for both research purposes and, frankly, relentless affirmation of my own functional superiority – I read “technology” as a euphemism for the horrifying sexual misogyny that technology has shoved in front of the digital native generation.
It’s not just communities of anonymous boys insisting that women should come to them as sexually-ignorant virgins and then submit to their every coercive sexual diktat. It’s a proliferation of woman-hating porn also consumed by these boys that makes sex for women look universally ugly and painful. One glance at some of that stuff and you’d rather stay at home eating toast, getting cuddles from the cat and pointedly ignoring your vagina for the rest of your life.
I am of that lucky generation that came after “sexual liberation” but before mass internet, where formative sexual experiences were more informed by the bodies present than a head full of whatever grifting internet garbage was targeting adolescent male sexual frustration for dollars and clicks. Were they not, I may have been tempted to forgo it myself. What a loss that would have been – not merely in terms of the adventure and pleasure – but in what I learned about adult relationships, other people and myself.
Beloved younger women and girls; the lesson offered by broader experience is that every sexual relationship – whether a casual few hours or years – is what Michel Foucault described as a “heterotopia”. This doesn’t denote a cordoned-off room for one slice of the sexual spectrum, but rather a discursive space created to exist as an “other” to external social experiences: a world beyond the world, whose language and behaviours are a unique, intimate contract determined through the conversation of its participants.
Simply, you bring a different version of yourself to every sexual partnership you have. What is instinctive sexual behaviour in one relationship can be – sometimes, inexplicably – an intolerable form of contact in another. There are ever-changing dynamics to intimacy and they inspire individual development and growth, which is why traditional conservative insistence on no sex before monogamous marriage is so fraught. We shouldn’t have to commit to one sexual partner forever without any knowledge of the broader sexual self.
When the online manboys obsess over learning a woman’s “bodycount” – the violence of the language reveals much – they betray a truly pitiable lack of sexual knowledge as well as a screaming admission of insecurity and immaturity. Anyone distracted from the physical act by conceiving themselves competing in some kind of mental men’s Olympic swimming event belongs in a pool, not someone else’s pants.
Carve those sigils on the bedpost for your own private decoration; anyone worth sleeping with won’t ever ask about them, because they respect your privacies as much they value their own.
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is oft-cited as the Gen-X anthem, but maybe George Michael imparts a greater intergenerational wisdom. “Sex is natural, sex is good,” he sang, “Not everybody does it, but everybody should”. If it keeps the vile Andrew Tate fans away from you, girls, do it with all that you’ve got.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
