Married at First Sight fans clutch their pearls as bisexual groom reveals his number of sexual partners
Liam Cooper is the first ever bisexual contestant on Australia’s version of Married At First Sight. (Instagram)
Married at First Sight Australia fans clutched their pearls Tuesday night (16 March) after the show’s first openly bisexual groom revealed how many sexual partners he’s had.
The Nine Network programme sees total strangers marry after being paired up by relationship experts.
And in the latest episode of the eighth season, Liam Cooper told new wife Georiga Fairwether he’d had more than 50 sexual partners.
Seemingly touching off a culture of biphobia that sees bi folk as “greedy”, the Daily Mail Australia rounded up viewer’s “shocked” reactions to Cooper’s, er, “confession”.
Married at First Sight fans stunned at bisexual man having, er, sex
Over drinks, Cooper and Fairweather asked one another intimate questions, such as what age they would consider having children.
“How man sexual partners have you had?” Cooper, 29, asked.
“Not many, maybe, like, five or six?” responded Fairweather, who then asked the same for the prison case manager.
“I hope you don’t judge me,” Cooper replied following a pause. “I’ve had about fifty plus.”
Some Married at First Sight viewers reacted with alarm, for whatever reason, at how many people Cooper has had sex with.
“Liam’s been a busy boy,” one Twitter user responded, the outlet reported, while another said the question was not “appropriate”.
“How do people have sooo many God DAMN previous sexual partners?” wondered a user. “Did I miss the memo on being totally relaxed on doing it as much as some of these people?”
The average number of sexual partners people have in their lifetime can be a difficult number to pin down. Findings can vastly vary from country to country, demographic to demographic, even poll to poll.
Overall, however, as much as queer men are often associated with promiscuity, the numbers tend to match up with their heterosexual counterparts most of the time or be lower.
Condom-maker Durex found that Australian heterosexual men hold the highest number of sex partners globally, with 29.3 sexual partners on average.
And one study of queer men found that the group have a median of 22 sexual partners in a lifetime.
Analysts and activists have often sought to stress that the perceived higher rate of promiscuity among queer men is, in part, because they are a smaller demographic.
This means that pollsters often rely on convenience surveys, which might see researchers sample men from Grindr or a queer bar – meaning that not all queer men are necessarily represented by the polls.
Larger, more representative sampling often shows that the difference is not so large at all.
