How many lovers have you had?

Continuing her series looking at socially unacceptable questions, Christine Manby asks whether there’s a double standard when it comes our magic numbers

(Tom Ford)

Over a few glasses of wine one evening, my friend Jenn asked all the people around the table: “If the answer is six, then what is the question?”

“Six?” someone echoed.

Jenn nodded. “Yes. What’s the question?”

The rest of us racked our brains.

“What’s eight minus two?”

“No.”

“How many eggs in a half-dozen?”

“Nope.”

“What’s the meaning of life?”

Of course it wasn’t that. Everyone knows, thanks to Douglas Adams, that the answer to that particular question is 42.

We were stumped. A sly smile spread across Jenn’s face. “The question is, ‘how many lovers have you had?’ Assuming that the person being questioned is a woman.”

Jenn went on to explain that it’s not an absolute number but a maximum. Any number under six is perfectly acceptable. Any number above… cue outrage. She suggested that every woman at the table knew exactly what she was talking about and wouldn’t disagree. She was right. Though since the friendships at that table went back some three decades, we all knew that six wasn’t just a magic number – believing it was an example of magical thinking.

You don’t need me to tell you that when it comes to our sex lives, a double standard still exists. Young men are still lauded for the notches on their bed posts. Young women, not so much.

There would seem to be a scientific basis for the bias. Sperm are cheap. Eggs are not. Pregnancy has a much higher physical cost for the one who actually has to carry the baby, so making sure you’re not wasting that egg on a mate who isn’t going to stick around is important.

On the flip side, while if you’ve carried a baby for nine months, you can be pretty damn sure it’s yours, the sperm donor in the equation has no such assurances. Hence, if you’re a man who wishes to become a father, it seems like a great idea to come up with a whole host of social constructs that might go some way to making certain you’re not wasting your time and resources raising someone else’s child.

However, in this age of contraception and DNA tests, the bias persists. It’s a rare woman who cops to any number bigger than six in print. Unlike the chaps.

In 2012, the then 69-year-old Tony Blackburn boasted of having slept with more than 500 women over the course of his career. “I was single in the Sixties,” was his excuse. Recent history’s other most unlikely Lothario is Bill Roache, Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow, and possibly Britain’s most well known druid, who clocked up a total of 1000 lovers.

It’s impressive but it’s not quite Jack Nicholson. Nicholson is alleged to have managed twice Roache’s number without the assistance of sacred mistletoe.

Last year, the world lost one of the last great playboys. Maurizio Zanfanti’s reputation was such that he made the obituary columns in several serious broadsheets. Zanfanti was born a poor farmer’s son in postwar Italy. When the package tour boom came to nearby Rimini, Zanfanti took advantage, taking a position as a buttandetro, encouraging tourists into the town’s nightclubs. He became a fixture on the scene.

During his lifetime, Zanfanti claimed to have played the Italian Stallion to more than 6,000 women, earning himself the nickname la Zanza – “the mosquito” – after that other well known pest. Still, his conquests didn’t seem too unhappy to be another notch on a bedpost so whittled it’s a wonder Zanfanti wasn’t sleeping on the floor. Several of the women became friends with each other and formed a sort of fan club, which even arranged group trips to see the old Lothario in his extremely busy dotage. He died in flagrante, in the back of a jeep with a lover four decades his junior. More than 1,500 people signed an online petition to name a street in Rimini in honour of his unique and selfless contribution to the Italian Riviera’s tourist industry.

To call a man a “Casanova” or even a “Don Juan” is not usually an insult. It implies a certain charisma and the envy of other would-be lovers. There is no female equivalent. Women alleged to have taken several men to bed are treated with altogether less awe-filled respect.

Take Catherine the Great, empress of Russia. She was the country’s longest-serving female leader, spending 34 years at the helm. She oversaw a transformation of Russia’s fortunes in what was considered Russia’s Golden Age. And yet, whenever Catherine the Great is mentioned, it’s not her contribution to the Russian Enlightenment or the fact that it was under her rule that the Smolny Institute, Europe’s first state-financed higher-education institute for women, came into being, which are remembered. It’s gossip about her various lovers. Legend has it that Catherine the Great was insatiable.

(Tom Ford (Tom Ford)

In fact, Catherine the Great had a mere 22 partners over the course of her life. And not one of them was a horse. Neither did she commission a suite of bedroom furniture decorated with enormous carved penises. More’s the pity.

Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll, who is to be the subject of a television series, made headlines in all the wrong ways when a list of 80 men purported to have been her lovers was made public in 1963. Producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who is to bring the Duchess’s story to the small screen, told the Radio Times that the scandal made her the first woman to be publicly “slut shamed”.

As recently as 2010, journalist Lynn Barber managed to cause a stir by claiming that prior to her marriage she’d had 50 lovers. That’s fewer than Warren Beatty’s alleged bi-monthly tally. Beatty lost his virginity at 20 and went on to average around a lover a day for the next 35 years. In an unauthorised biography, released the same year as Barber’s modest revelation, Peter Biskind estimated Beatty’s total number of lovers at 12,775.

The double standard is alive and kicking but it seems at last that the tide may be turning and that boasting about “conquests” is no longer acceptable for anyone.

Since he plumped for 500 in 2012, Blackburn, who once said “my life’s work has been about talking nonsense” has somewhat revised his tally of lovers. Most recently, he told The Sun that he had slept with a mere 300 and claimed that it wasn’t such a huge number when you considered that sometimes he would go to bed with four women in one week. Though never more than one at a time, of course. In any case, these days, 76-year-old Blackburn is a devoted and faithful husband to his second wife.

Meanwhile Warren Beatty has publicly refuted the extraordinary total Biskind came up with in 2010, telling AARP The Magazine: “Think about it, sleeping with 12,775 people. That would mean not just that there were multiple people a day, but that there was no repetition.”

Even Russell Brand, who at one point boasted that he went on 90 “dates” a month and said: “When I was at my most promiscuous, I was like a charging locomotive,” is now a reformed character and a happily married man. The Casanova cliche has come off the tracks. Maybe it won’t be long before six is the magic number for everyone.

Incidentally, according to his memoirs, Casanova’s bedpost actually had a mere 122 notches.