The Making of a Double Standard

A man’s history is experience. A woman’s history is evidence.

Growing up, I watched a pattern play out over and over again.

A boy would sleep with a girl and then broadcast the experience to his friends like a badge of honour. Within days, everyone would know. In the conservative environment I was raised in, the girl would become a cautionary tale. Parents warned their daughters not to associate with her. Boys treated her as a conquest waiting to happen. Her name became a whisper.

The boy?

He was congratulated.

Many girls carried that shame silently into adulthood. No conversations. No support. Just a quiet, distorted relationship with sex, intimacy, and self-worth. And as I got older and spoke to women from different countries and cultures, I realised this wasn’t unique to where I grew up. It was global.

The details change.

The judgement does not.

Recently, I was reminded of this when a young Ghanaian TV presenter lost her job after posting provocative images online. During an interview, she disclosed that some of those posts happened during a manic episode linked to bipolar disorder. Instead of compassion, she was met with mockery. Mental illness became entertainment.

Days later, she released a list of men she had slept with — some of them well-known, some married. And suddenly the internet had a new villain.

Everyone was outraged by her “body count.”

No one was outraged by the men on the list.

Where was the same moral energy for the married men who had vows to uphold?

Why was she the only one carrying the weight of the conversation?

We still live in a world where:

a man’s sexual history is experience

a woman’s sexual history is evidence

Evidence of what, exactly? Being human?

I once watched an episode of Iyanla Vanzant where a wife discovered her husband had slept with hundreds of women. She thought it had been sixteen. When asked whether sixteen would have been acceptable, she had no answer.

That moment stayed with me.

Not because of the number — but because of what it revealed:

we don’t actually have a moral framework around sex.

We have a gendered one.

Men are given range.

Women are given limits.

Let me be clear: publishing a list of people you’ve slept with is not something I would advise. Privacy matters. Consent matters. Dignity matters.

But what disturbed me was not her decision.

It was the avalanche of slut-shaming that followed.

The same society that applauds men for sexual conquest suddenly becomes the guardian of morality when a woman expresses sexual agency.

And then there are the wives who direct their anger solely at the other woman, as if their husbands were passive participants. As if grown men are helpless in the presence of female sexuality.

Accountability seems to have a gender too.

I once heard a man say that the longer he stays single, the higher the “body count” of his future wife will be — as though women exist in suspended animation, waiting to preserve themselves for male approval.

This is not humour.

This is conditioning.

It reduces women to commodities whose value depreciates with use — language we would never tolerate if applied to men.

Sex is an intimate act between consenting adults. It is not a public performance scorecard. A person’s character is not determined by how many partners they have had, but by how they treat others, how they honour consent, and how they carry integrity in their relationships.

If a man is deeply concerned about a woman’s sexual past while benefiting from his own, the issue is not morality — it is control.

And to the women who police other women’s sexuality while excusing men’s behaviour: we cannot dismantle a system we continue to enforce.

Five years after I first posted on this same issue, we are still asking the same question:

Why is a woman’s worth measured by her sexual history?

Until we apply the same moral standard to everyone — or better yet, stop using sexual history as a measure of human value at all — we will keep raising generations of women who associate desire with shame and men who associate desire with entitlement.

We deserve better than that.

Thank you for continuing to share your stories with me. These conversations matter because silence is what keeps these double standards alive.