It’s 2025, and yet somehow, conversations about women’s sexual histories feel like they were copy-pasted from a 1950s etiquette manual. You would think that after decades of feminism, sexual liberation, and an entire internet full of too much information, we would have retired the idea that a woman’s worth is tied to her “body count”. But alas, men are still out here acting like they’ve personally been wronged if a woman had sex before meeting them. Regardless of the century or decade, they [men] always manage to resurrect the outrage that a woman’s past — sexual, romantic, or otherwise — “reduces” her value.

For a world that seems to be turning towards sexual  positivity, it’s wild how deeply ingrained the Madonna-whore complex remains. Women have always been trapped in a paradox of being desired for experience but punished for having it. This paradox fuels a bizarre double standard: men can rack up sexual experiences, but women who do the same are somehow “tainted.” According to Dazed, it “goes hand in hand with slut-shaming of women and gendered double standards, routinely hinged on male entitlement and biologically deterministic fallacies that posit men have higher sex drives than women.” Let’s also talk about the sheer delusion behind this mindset. These men want women who have experience but no past. They want women who know how to please them but have never been pleased before. They want women who are beautiful, desirable, and sexually appealing, but who have somehow never been desired by anyone else.

As feminism moved mainstream, so did the backlash. A 2023 Pew Research study found that Gen Z men are becoming more conservative about gender roles, and a growing number believe women’s increased freedoms have come “at men’s expense.” It’s a reactionary response: when women gain autonomy, certain men panic and try to reassert control. And what easier way to do that than by policing women’s bodies?

A lot of men can’t stand the idea that a woman has experienced pleasure outside of them, that she has made choices for herself, and that she — brace yourself — might not even care about their opinion. Hence, red pill influencers and their content are on the rise with young men repackaging age-old anxieties about women’s sexuality under the guise of “high-value” men discourse. This is the same energy that fuels the ridiculous conversations some Nigerian men have online when they throw around their new favourite slur “OS” (short for Olosho, a misogynistic Yoruba slang for sex worker) to shame women for existing outside their puritanical, hypocritical, and deeply unserious standards.

Female sexuality has long been regulated, punished, and treated as a public concern, while male sexuality remains unquestioned and even celebrated. A woman’s sexuality is not hers to own; it belongs to the men around her. Her father controls it, her husband controls it, and if she deviates from the rigid expectations placed upon her, the state itself has the authority to punish her. Men move through the world free of this burden. They do not have their entire worth weighed against the number of people they’ve been with. In fact the ones who obsess over a woman’s past partners almost never hold themselves to the same standard. As a man who has had several sexual encounters with women, do you feel tainted? It begs the question: If sex is something that devalues a woman but not a man, then doesn’t that mean the issue isn’t sex, but men?

At the end of the day, the question of “Does it still count if I wasn’t first?” has one simple answer: No. It does not matter. At all. Women are not collectibles. The idea that a woman who has had sex is somehow diminished is not just wildly insecure, it’s annoying, and of course, it’s deeply misogynistic and dangerous. It reduces women to objects and sexist symbols — fruits that rot, cars that depreciate, milk that spoils, locks that shouldn’t have too many keys — that exist for male consumption. It suggests that a woman’s worth is tied to how much of her has been “used” by men, as if her body exists solely for their pleasure in the first place. It’s dehumanizing, it’s sexist, and frankly, it’s embarrassing that some men still think this way in 2025.

Women don’t lose value because they had lives before you. They don’t need to be “untouched” to be worthy of love, respect, or a stable relationship. If a man is still preoccupied with whether he’s the first, that’s a personal issue, one that therapy, not policing women’s pasts, needs to fix.