Nobody Should Care About a Woman’s ‘Body Count’ (2024)

Ever since Elon Musk’s lackeys began fiddling with the algorithms of X (formerly Twitter), I have noticed a distinct shift in the content that is pushed onto users. My “For you” tab is now a nest of tradwives, shoplifting videos, and that guy who has strong opinions on trouser creases. It is also home to the kind of old-fashioned misogyny that I once thought was on the decline.

And that’s because X, a small social network beloved by journalists, is now providing a window into a much bigger part of the internet—one that is simultaneously absurdly popular and almost invisible to outsiders. It is the interlinking Venn diagram of Twitch streamers; mixed-martial-arts, wrestling, and boxing fandoms; manosphere influencers; and video-game commentators. The way that these guys turn up on one another’s podcasts, X feeds, and livestreams—and their habit of physically fighting one another for money—makes them seem like a younger, more ripped version of the Intellectual Dark Web.

One of the obsessions of the worst parts of this group—call them the Influential Jerk Web—is “body count” discourse, in which women (always women) are shamed for the number of sexual partners they’ve had. The phrase has gained popularity so quickly that Jason Derulo has just released a song about it. Now, Derulo is okay with a high body count—“all that ass, must be good at math,” he observes—but others are not. “A lot of the world’s problems could be fixed if women walked around with their body count on their foreheads,” the professional kickboxer turned sexist influencer Andrew Tate said in one viral clip. A bit rich, you might think, coming from a self-confessed former “pimp” who is currently awaiting trial on human-trafficking and rape charges. But Tate is only one of many influencers who talk like ayatollahs while adhering to the beauty standards of Ryan Gosling in Barbie.

These men provide Gen Z and younger Millennials with a very old template for masculinity filtered through the new visual grammar and vocabulary of YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. Take the mixed martial artist Dillon Danis, who is scheduled to fight the YouTuber turned pro wrestler Logan Paul in a boxing match in Manchester, England, on October 14. In the past five years, “influencer boxing” has become a lucrative content machine. Logan and his brother, Jake, who have more than 20 million YouTube followers each, have led the trend, alongside the British streamer JJ Olatunji, better known as KSI. Their venues are located across the world, in places such as Texas and Saudi Arabia, and the fights make thousands of dollars on pay-per-view. Influencer boxing is characterized by the kind of pre-match smacktalk familiar from professional wrestling but internetified. And that means, unfortunately, a torrent of sexually inflected misogyny.

Scroll down Danis’s X feed and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Over the past few weeks, he has relentlessly targeted Paul’s fiancée, Nina Agdal, posting photographs of her with her exes, digging out Instagram posts in which she is somewhat scantily dressed (she’s a model), claiming that he could put any prize money toward “HIV medication bills for Nina’s exes,” implying that she has dated everyone she has ever been photographed with, and calling her a “whor*.”

Helen Lewis: The internet loves an extremophile

This tsunami of slu*t-shaming nestles between other insults, such as mocking Paul’s failed NFT project, CryptoZoo. In return, Paul has taunted Danis about his dead father. Most fans will therefore see the cracks about Nina Agdal as professional-wrestling-style kayfabe—building up the hype for the fight so that Paul is trying to not just win the match but defend his honor. Pro wrestling is a highly choreographed sport; many fights are billed as “grudge matches,” and the Paul brothers’ internet-era innovation has been to bring its obsession with storylines to boxing. (In 2019, Logan Paul claimed at a press conference that KSI’s family didn’t love him. Four years on, the two men own the sports-drink company Prime together.)

But one person who apparently doesn’t find the posts funny is Agdal herself. On September 6, she filed for an injunction under New Jersey’s revenge-p*rn laws, accusing Danis of posting a “nonconsensual, sexually explicit photograph” of her, “displaying full frontal nudity, to millions of social media users in the course of a relentless, ongoing campaign of cyber harassment and bullying against her.” She was granted a temporary restraining order. Danis deleted that photo but falsely claimed that Agdal was trying to put him in jail. (She is seeking damages.) “This is actually wild,” he added in a post that, according to X, has been viewed 18 million times. Danis presented the lawsuit as his opponent’s camp trying to tank the October 14 fight, adding: “Logan Paul is a dead man walking.”

In feminist circles, Danis’s behavior would be classified as “DARVO”: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. The sympathetic character in his version of the story is himself, a man threatened with jail for engaging merely in some lighthearted badinage—shh, don’t mention that it was at the expense of a woman who never asked to be involved with this circus. When Agdal understandably complained about becoming the focus of his fans’ aggression, Danis called upon 2020’s favorite misogynist trope: “Nina Agdal will be called Karen Agdal till further notice.”

Read: The mythology of Karen

I can’t be the only one who thought we had left overt, unapologetic sexism like this behind. What is most striking about Danis’s feed is how masculine his world seems—life is a competition between men, and women are just the prizes (or the liabilities). Tate, whose public comments give little indication that he enjoys spending time with women, shows the same attitude. Maybe these guys are obsessed with “body counts” because they treat life as one giant scoreboard.

Whether or not Danis sees his posts as kayfabe is irrelevant. At least some portion of his audience won’t, because he is tapping into well-established anti-feminist talking points. In this worldview, the most humiliating thing that could happen to a man is failing to control his woman, an attitude that puts men into a torturous position of constant precarity. Other humans are by definition uncontrollable, no matter how much you intimidate them or patrol their behavior. But tell that to the late-Millennial and Gen Z influencers trying to shame women so that they will “behave”—and not embarrass the men who are deemed to be in charge of them.

Misogyny occupies a sweet spot in our culture—it is frowned upon enough to make young men trading off it feel edgy, but it’s typically taken less seriously than racism. Its post-#MeToo resurgence has led to members of the Influential Jerk Web coming out with phrases you might have thought died out with 19th-century laws on acceptable forms of wife beating. In 2021, the livestreamer Sneako notoriously confessed that he had watched his girlfriend have sex with another man at a party, and told the Peer to Peer podcast: “It felt like somebody was taking something from me, like someone was violating my property.” He was at pains to note that wanting to watch another man have sex in no way suggested that he was bisexual, which suggests a brittle borderline hom*ophobia is also part of the deal.

Two other things are worth noting about the body-count discourse. The first is that some people on the edges of the Influential Jerk Web have consciously rejected its exhausting sexual monitoring of women. The left-wing streamer Destiny, for example, was raised Catholic but is now in an open relationship. His partner Melina Goransson regularly mocks Danis and other bro streamers, and recently retweeted a post by another user that read: “Quickly now! Do some push ups!! That’s how we change the world!! Now go home and call women whor*s for not acknowledging your existence and making their own money!!”

Read: How should feminists have sex now?

The second thing is that, in accordance with Rule 34 of the internet, the straight male anxiety that Danis and Tate are tapping into has been translated into p*rnography. One of those joining the pushback against Dillon Danis was the influencer Adam Grandmaison, better known as Adam22. He has a podcast with his wife, Lena Nersesian, or Lena the Plug, where they interview a female p*rn actor and then sleep with her. Last month, though, Nersesian slept with another man instead. Amid all the mockery about Lena’s body count and how Adam was a cuck, the video went viral—so viral that he bought her a $400,000 Lamborghini to celebrate its success. Tate criticized them, telling the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “this is what the Matrix wants from you as a man. They want the woman in charge, and the man below, with no backbone … I would argue, in nearly any household where the female is dominant, everyone is vaccinated.” Unfazed, the couple went on a podcast with Tate and invited him to take part in a threesome. (Tate declined.)

The intense interest in Grandmaison and Nersesian’s relationship makes sense: If the worst thing you can say to a man is that his partner is a “whor*,” then there’s money on the table for whoever will admit to reveling in his wife’s high body count. And that’s the real lesson here. The internet has smashed all kinds of taboos, but without taboos, how can people feel the thrill of breaking them? The Influential Jerk Web has brought back sexual shame not just to control women but to extract pleasure from doing so.