Hello, Dan--Good to hear from you again! The thing I miss most when in the middle of a hectic semester is not getting to 'talk' with you and others here as much, so it's a treat on a Sunday afternoon to finally get to respond. I do read the comments throughout the week which helps me think about how I wanna respond. I agree that 'shame' is one of the reasons why someone would ask this question and/or not want to answer the question. More to the point, the desire to prevent shame, or prevent embarrassment is relevant to both the asker and the answer-er. My initial draft of this thing was 20 minutes long! And talking about the shame--either shame for being 'too' experienced or shame for being inexperienced and therefore possibly inept--does seem to be a major factor. But as I condensed it, I started recognizing that all these miscellaneous reasons for asking this question seem to fall under the underlying 'values' question. A fella who values "not being made to feel embarrassed because he's inexperienced and possibly incompetent in the sack" may ask this question because he's trying to gauge whether the woman is so experienced that he's going to feel inept. But asking 'how many people have you slept with' isn't actually going to get him the information he's looking for. She could have slept with only 1 person, yet he ends up feeling inept with her. She could have slept with 100 person, yet she can make him feel like he's super good in the sack, that he can indeed keep up even tho he's relatively less experienced. So it all goes to the point I wrote in the summary: Asking this question is a way of trying to take a shortcut. In this example, the guy is trying to learn something that only time -- and repeated interactions, and repeated physical interactions -- will tell him. He has to learn the specifics of this woman, and learn how he and she do in the sack to learn whether or not he's going to end up feeling lousy because he's inept. He's trying to save himself from having to feel that way by using this question as a proxy measure, but this question is a very poor proxy measure. So...I'm beginning to think that no matter what the reason for asking this question is--even the legitimate-seeming reasons--there are more legitimate ways to learn what you're trying to learn than asking this question. Unfortunately, if people use this question to help them decide, they may eliminate people who would've been great if they'd only taken the time to learn what they needed to learn.

I'm just thinking, if you're trying to decide who to eat lasagna with, don't rule out the people who have brown hair. People with brown hair might be great for lasagna-making!;)