Do Body Counts Matter?

CULTURE

A Conversation Between Mother and Son

By Barry Weiss · July 15, 2026 · 6 min read

For the last decade, my mother has been trying to marry off my cousin Sarah. To dentists, attorneys, “professionals” of all sorts. An investment banker from Syosset that drove a Maserati but turned out to be five foot five. A guy “in real estate” who was actually a leasing agent. A widowed radiologist from the Valley still in love with his dead wife. A podiatrist, my mother saying the word podiatrist the way a real estate agent says “cozy,” with full knowledge that she’s reaching. She has been unrelenting, unyielding, untiring, and yet continues to fail to make the match happen.

That’s because there’s something going on here. Something men know about but don’t talk about. And something women don’t know about and definitely don’t want to talk about. That thing is the almighty, unbreakable, undeniable power of the Body Count.

I want to be clear: I love Sarah. We grew up together. She taught me to ride a bike in that driveway in Jericho. She was my co-conspirator at every brutally boring Passover seder for twenty-five years. I am not her enemy. I am the only person in her life willing to state what everyone else has agreed, through silence, to pretend isn’t true.

“Mom, you have to stop setting Sarah up.”

“What? Why? She’s almost forty.”

“She’s thirty-eight.”

“That’s almost forty. I am going to call Barbara Stern. Her nephew just moved to LA; he is a gastroenterologist.”

“He’s not going to marry her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Sarah… has a past.”

“Oh, come on. Everybody has a past. Your father had a past.”

“Dad’s ‘past’ was making out with some girl after his bar mitzvah and getting to second base on prom night. Sarah’s… she’s been with a lot of guys.”

“It’s normal for young women to date and have adventures.”

Okay, maybe true, but not “all women” spend four years at the University of Miami getting bottle service five nights a week, then moving to LA to be single for a decade straight. You don’t have to be an accountant to do the math and realize Sarah’s body count is well past triple digits.

What my mom either couldn’t or wouldn’t accept is that most eligible men have their own experiences with this type of woman. They met, wooed, banged, and ghosted girls just like Sarah. They’ve done unspeakable acts to women while thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe in half a decade this is going to be some poor schmuck’s housewife.” Now Mom can’t understand why they wouldn’t want to be that poor schmuck themselves. Men want a woman who is truly theirs; they don’t want to pick up where someone else left off.

“She does Pilates!” Mom yelled, as if Pilates is a panacea for over-penetration.

“What does that have to do with it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the number of men she’s been with is high.”

“How high?”

“Like triple-digits high.”

“Triple digits?”

“Over a hundred.”

Her face went somewhat pale at the thought that this could be true, which it almost certainly is. Still, she maintained that men don’t care about these kinds of things anymore, as though the thousands of years of carefully managed female sexuality that came before us were just a phase. But the undeniable fact is that it’s just as hard to put a ring on the finger of a woman who blew half of the ZBT pledge class in ’07 as it is to put one on an uppity whore in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the late 1860s.

A man takes his kid to Little League on a Saturday morning; he looks at the bleachers and thinks: Did the dad in the flat-brim Knicks hat bend my wife over in a bathroom at a house party in the Hollywood Hills? Did the father coaching third base bust an epic nut inside the woman I just bought a house with? Did the umpire do anal?

Barbara’s gastroenterologist nephew is going to know she’s closed more men than he’s seen patients… he is just going to sense it. He won’t know the number. He won’t need the number. Something in the way she flirts: too smooth, too calibrated, every move a thing she’s done one hundred times. And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s the version where he’s a gentleman about it and doesn’t call for a second date. In all likelihood, he knows someone who knew her at Miami, takes her out again, they sleep together, he goes radio silent, and now the number goes from 112 to 113. Every setup you arrange either ends on the first date or ends in bed. Either way, it ends.

I tried to explain the principle without being too graphic.

“This is what the brain does, Ma. It doesn’t stop. You can’t turn it off. It is running the numbers at the PTA meeting, at the pediatrician, at temple, for the rest of his life. A triple-digit population of psychic terrorists roaming the world around every corner!”

Mom’s face did something it rarely does. It softened. Not in defeat, but in something adjacent. Recognition, maybe. She was quiet for a few seconds. She looked at her coffee, then at me.

“That is a very sad way to see the world,” she said quietly.

“It’s the world. I didn’t design it.”

“She’s a wonderful girl.”

Mom’s not wrong. She is wonderful, smart, cute, funny, and spent seventeen years getting railed into oblivion at every opportunity. Fun in Coral Gables, fun in Santa Monica, fun at that bachelorette party in Barcelona, fun at Coachella, fun at someone’s timeshare in Cabo. And now, even though she finally wants what you want for her, that fun is coming due. The choices were made. No gastroenterologist from Plainview is going to un-make them.

I tried to change the subject, but she wanted, needed, to argue. She picked up her coffee, took a sip, swallowed slowly.

“You are wrong,” she said. “Barbara Stern’s nephew just started at UCLA Hospital. Very handsome. I’m calling Barbara tonight.”

She called Barbara that night. The gastroenterologist took Sarah to dinner in Westwood. They did not go on a second date. My mother blamed the restaurant.