When Adele conducted an Instagram Live to promote her new album last October, encouraging fans to ask her about her life and work, she was baffled by one question in particular. “What’s my body count? What does that mean?” she wondered aloud when presented with the enquiry, before swiftly moving on without answering. Adele perhaps does not spend much time in certain corners of TikTok, where talk of ‘body counts’ is commonplace, with #BodyCount having accumulated more than 530 million views.

In case, like Adele, you need a quick explainer, it’s very simple. In internet slang, body count means the number of sexual partners you’ve had – so if you have slept with 10 people, your body count is 10. On social media, and on TikTok in particular, it has become a sort of prank. “What’s your body count?” zoomers ask each other on the street, dissolving into faux-embarrassed giggles. The person asking the question and the person answering the question are often strangers to each other – and while some are happy to answer directly, there is often a suggestion that they are lying. It’s become such a major TikTok trend that there is now a proliferation of variations, with young TikTokers asking their grandparents their body counts, for example, and others performing satirical takedowns of the whole notion.

Body count videos might have started as a silly prank – but with millions of people watching the videos, they have, perhaps inevitably, prompted a more serious discussion.

“What is interesting about this trend,” Apryl Alexander, an associate professor in public health at the University of North Carolina, points out, “is that this was historically a conversation among friends and romantic partners, but now people are answering it openly.” Now, it has become the kind of question you might fire at one of the most successful musicians in the world. It’s just a joke… it’s just an innocent question… except, of course, it’s not… When people engage in body count chat online, more often than not, they are reinforcing existing sexist ideas about how much sex is too much sex.