(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Does the number of sexual partners that a person has had change the way that you see them? 

If you answered ‘no’ to that question, were you really being honest with yourself?

Despite living in an age where sex isn’t just for married people, where as long as you’re careful about consent and contraception, you should be able to enjoy sex as much as you want to, research from Superdrug Online Doctor, suggests that that message just doesn’t seem to have permeated quite yet.

Superdrug’s researchers showed just over 1,000 people from Europe and the US pictures of models, alongside information about how many people the models had slept with, and then measured how their ‘body count’ changed the way that they were perceived.

The respondents were asked to judge the models based on their confidence, sexual inhibition, attractiveness and intelligence. And the results were pretty telling.

Models who had slept with just one person were regarded at honest, kind and trustworthy by 32% of men and 34% of women. However, when the number of sexual partners went up to 18, only 6% of men said that the model seemed trustworthy, compared to 15% of women.

So men are less stigmatized by having lots of sex. Shocker.

sex toys competition
(Picture: Ella Byworth/metro.co.uk)

Our concept of promiscuity is also explored in this research, pointing to a disappointing though not entirely surprising double standard.

31% of men thought that a woman who had more than 8 sexual partners was promiscuous, compared to just 9% of women.

As the numbers go up, however, the judgement equalizes, with 50% of men deeming women who’ve had more than 18 sexual partners to be promiscuous, and 45% of women judging in the same way.

So, what can we learn from this research?

Well, the respondents had no other information about the models other than what they look like and how many sexual partners they have, and yet they were happy to make judgement. Which is pretty, well, judgmental when you think about it.

For the avoidance of doubt, how many people someone has slept with is not a great indicator of whether they’re nice or nasty, reliable or trustworthy, or anything else. It’s just an indication of how sexually attractive they are to other people, and how often then choose to have sex.

Judging people on how much sex they’ve had seems a little pointless. Best to revert to more fail safe methods, like judging people who wear Crocs or really like Radiohead.

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