When she teaches sex education in schools or to younger audiences, O’Shea often receives questions about the physical aspects of having multiple sexual partners. “I come across questions like ‘Does the vagina get looser the more sex you have?’,” she says. “And ‘Do the labia hang lower the more partners you have?’ These are really harmful myths about women’s bodies that are in no way based in truth. There’s still so much misunderstanding about basic anatomy.”

Sex education has been seriously lacking in most cultures for generations, and in the absence of robust scientifically accurate information about our own bodies, harmful myths that perpetuate patriarchal stereotypes have been allowed to flourish. Take the framing of virginity as something that young women protect and young men take. This mainstream and widespread trope disempowers girls, teaching them that their first experience of sex will likely be painful, setting them up for bad or even dangerous sex.

If we are to have truly modern and genuinely open conversations about sex, they will need to start in our education systems, says Alexander. “We need to have better conversations about consent and healthy relationships in general in order to foster healthy sexual decision-making in a person’s life.”

“Gen Z is pretty savvy as well as being more inclusive and diverse in general and that’s really promising,” says Orchard, adding: “Misogyny is not going anywhere until patriarchy is disassembled.”

That, she says, is obviously a huge project and one that requires vigilance. Just when you think we have made major progress with the #MeToo movement, the so-called King of Toxic Masculinity Andrew Tate pops up on social media, indoctrinating a new generation of boys and men in vile misogyny (before, thankfully, being booted off the platforms).

“We need more people involved in the [destruction of patriarchy],’ Orchard says. “We need men to stand up because they are often silent. Young men, yes, but also older men.”

O’Shea agrees: “What we really need is a lot more empathy on both sides, to the point where men can speak really honestly and vulnerably about the challenges of being a boy or being a man. And for them not to be shut down and told, ‘Well, you’re a man, you have privilege, you don’t get to talk about this.’ We need to support young men in finding much healthier ways to explore what it means to be masculine. And to embody whatever it means to be masculine in a way that doesn’t rely on being dominant, violent and aggressive.”

There is a long, tired history of women being shamed for having sex, and if we are to truly disassemble the power structures at play in that, we will need to have genuinely open and difficult conversations. It’s not as simple as asking a stranger, “What’s your body count?” In fact, ceasing to ask that question would be a good place to start.

When did tracking a woman’s ‘body count’ become such a thing?