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What’s your number, baby? Not the cell, the other one — how many people have you slept with?
In the new film “What’s Your Number?” based on a 2006 chick-lit book by Karyn Bosnak, Anna Faris plays Delilah Darling, a 29-year-old lapsed Catholic and thoroughly modern NYC gal who panics when she realizes she’s shagged exactly 20 men. Terrified that going over the seemingly arbitrary number of 20 would make her, well, a tramp (in her words), she goes on a mission to find love by recycling her exes.
“I think she starts to feel some pressure from society,” Faris, who is also an executive producer on the film, tells The Post. “I guess she thinks she’s been overly sexually adventurous, which is something I don’t really agree with, but I do think it’s a discussion that girls have. I do think a lot of women maybe think too much about their number and somehow pass moral judgment on themselves.”
Well, sure — and here’s a whole movie based on it.
RAUNCH CODE: ‘NUMBER’ PICKS UP WHERE ‘BRIDESMAIDS’ LEFT OFF
The male-dominated movie studios were initially uncomfortable with her character’s number, Farris says. “I think when the movie was with another studio, before I was attached to it, the studio wanted to lessen the number to 16. They just thought 20 was way too high. And now it feels like 20 is kind of low. But what was driving those questions was, ‘Is this going to put an audience off?’ ”
Maybe. But it’s not the number itself, rather the concept of being obsessed with it that New York women say doesn’t add up. They find it insulting that the idea that real adult ladies like the one Faris portrays in the movie still worry about such a notion.
Numbers-nervosa is “unrealistic and antiquated,” says Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth. When asked if she could envision a movie being made about a guy, she says, “I could see a movie about being the exact opposite, like about a guy thinking he hasn’t slept with enough women, or needing to sleep with a certain amount by a certain time.”
Personally, the 32-year-old says, “I don’t know any of my friends’ numbers. It’s never come up in conversation. It’s not something that we talk about. It think [the idea is] very old-fashioned. It’s the ‘He’s a stud, she’s a slut’ double standard.”
Despite public reaction against the film’s premise, Hollywood is promoting “What’s Your Number?” as a feminist triumph.
“I’m sure the movie is just trying to be a fun-loving, mainstream romantic comedy that’s just trying to be cute and playing off a sexist trope,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, author of “Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life.”
And while she admits it’s just a popcorn flick, the 33-year-old Brooklynite still finds it “indicative of a larger message sent to women that if they have sex with too many people, they are undesirable at a certain age.”
“Any dating book will tell you, if you want to get into a serious relationship, you need to batten down the hatches,” she says. Her book rejects the idea that men and women should resign themselves to being total opposites who will never understand each other and must resort to subterfuge and game-playing to snag a mate. “There’s this idea that because women are having so much sex it’s ruined their love lives. But how is a woman being sexually active in her twenties an indicator of her ability to be in a committed relationship? [Sex] happens.”
“I don’t know any grown people over the age of 30 who think that way [about numbers],” says Simone Grant, the pseudonym of a 41-year-old Manhattanite and active dater who writes a dating blog called Sex, Lies & Dating. “It’s just such a juvenile way of thinking about sexuality.”
“Twenty is not an outrageous number” given the character’s age, she adds. “Although it’s an entirely plausible number for an insecure woman to get freaked out about.”
Grant was recently both horrified and amused by a video posted this summer on relationship website YourTango.com, where two dating experts said that if women were forced by a love interest to give a number, they should always lie and say eight. She posted it to her blog, where it was roundly mocked by readers. “We had a nice little laugh,” she says.
Then there’s the fact that most women consider it rude for a man to even ask or pry about her number. “If a guy asked me for a specific number and explanation about it, that would probably be a dealbreaker,” says Megan Carpentier, a single 33-year-old living in Queens. “I think that indicates a level of insecurity or judgement in a person that I wouldn’t be comfortable dating them.” That said, “I can’t say I’ve had a ‘numbers’ conversation in more than 10 years.” And what about sympathetic men, who say your number isn’t anything but, well, a number? One extreme — yet heartening — example comes from Mike Edison, a Manhattan author and editor who will only describe himself as “40something,” yet isn’t afraid to say that he had been with a woman who said she’d been with hundreds of men.
“It wasn’t that she told me she had slept with 200 men . . . that was eye-opening,” he says. “It was that one of them was Keith Richards.”
Then there’s the question of basic math. “Think about it,” says Edison, who has also authored a book on the social history of pornography called “Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” “Three dates, maybe a month of dating, rinse and repeat three times a year. . . Throw in a couple flings here and there, and it adds up.”
That said, both women’s and men’s anxiety over “numbers” is probably a mask for our society’s anxiety about sexual mores. “I think a lot of people genuinely fear sex,” Edison says. “I know at least one guy who married the first girl who went on the third date with him, and I am sure he is no anomaly.”
With additional reporting by Sara Stewart.