Photo Illustration by The Globe and Mail. Source: Ryan Plummer/Mubi via AP
Welcome to Parlance of our Times, a new biweekly pop-culture etymology column that unpacks a word or phrase that is suddenly everywhere. This week: ‘Body count’
Body count, n.
1. The number of enemy dead in a military operation.
2. The number of sexual partners a person has had.
When we count bodies, what exactly are we counting? The phrase “body count” first came into popular usage after then-U.S. defence secretary Robert McNamara identified it as the primary metric of success in Vietnam. In previous conflicts, the army could report on territory gained or objectives achieved, but in the extra-foggy fog of that undeclared war, all the Americans definitively knew was how many corpses were left on the battlefield.
Because what gets measured gets managed, enemy body count became the key performance indicator shared at press conferences. As Marine memoirist Philip Caputo wrote in A Rumor of War, “victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.” This fixation became known as the McNamara Fallacy, an obsession with hard numbers and a dismissal of anything that didn’t fit on a spreadsheet. The result was the Fall of Saigon.
If you want to doubt the existence of progress, fast forward a few decades to the emergence of the manosphere. In the 2010s, accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and similarly odious characters repurposed “body count” as shorthand for a woman’s sexual history, making it a flashy new metric for misogyny. As Tate said in 2022, “I think 99 per cent of the world’s problems would be solved if females walked through life with their body count on their forehead.” What gets measured gets maligned, most virally in the subgenre of street-interview guys asking women for their body count. (Naturally, men are held to the opposite standard.)
Anxious Google searches of the term have been climbing since 2019, with a new spike earlier this year as a suite of AI apps claimed to detect a woman’s number of partners based on a face scan. If we needed more evidence of an AI bubble, just consider this updated version of phrenology, that 19th century pseudo-science of reading a person’s character based on the shape of their skull. To use body count as a measure of dating success is to apply the McNamara Fallacy to your love life: You may eventually need a helicopter evacuation.
Nowhere do the two meanings of the term converge like a slasher film, where promiscuous teens increasing their body counts inevitably increase the killer’s body count. As the meta-horror movie Scream explained in 1996 and in many sequels since, the first rule for surviving these movies is to never have sex.
Quintessa Swindell, left, and Amanda Fix in a scene from Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.Ryan Plummer/The Associated Press
This summer’s cleverest confirmation of the trope is Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, an erotic horror meta mashup featuring Gillian Anderson as the original “final girl,” or chaste survivor, in a slasher franchise and Hannah Einbinder as the filmmaker looking to reboot the series. The Globe’s Barry Hertz called it “Sunset Boulevard filtered through the gore-slicked haze of a hundred cheapo slasher flicks.” To ask about this movie’s body count is to get a number that merges both definitions and is effectively meaningless. As it should be! What gets measured gets miasma’ed.
Benjamin Errett writes with and about words at GetWitQuick.com
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