

How many people have you indirectly had sex with? This tool can tell you

WARNING: You might not actually want to know

In case you weren't aware, this week is Sexual Health Week and if you needed any reminder at all that you should take STIs very very seriously, this test will shock the hell out of you.

Lloyds Pharmacy have created the greatest reminder to wear a condom EVER, with their 'Sex Degrees of Separation' calculator, which figures out how many people you've indirectly had sex with.

It basically works by looking at the average amount of sexual partners people have had by different ages and then asking you how many people you have slept with in different age brackets.

Click the link below to take the test
Lloyds Pharmacy

So, you may have slept with say two people aged 16-19 when you were around that age and those people may have slept with one or two other people. But by the time you're older, the people you're having sex with have probably also had sex with more people, who have also had sex with more people. Get it?

You can try the calculator out for yourself here.

Lloyds explain:

"Our Sex Degrees calculator is based on the theory of "Six Degrees of Separation" – which is the sociological idea that we are all connected to each other by only six connections.

Using this principle we take the number of partners you've had and what age they were when you last slept together, we multiply this by the number of partners they are statistically likely to have had, and by the partners of those partners, and the partners of those partners, (and so on) for six stages, or "degrees", to estimate how many indirect partners you could have been exposed to sexually."

As Lloyds point out, this calculator is just a "diagnostic tool" based on averages, but it's a pretty effective reminder that when you're sleeping with someone, you're also sleeping with everyone they've ever slept with.

Joey's 51 flings work out as 14,939,557 direct and indirect sexual connections

Plus, whether you're on the pill, have the coil or any other contraceptive method, only condoms protect against STIs. Even then, condoms don't protect against things like genital warts, herpes and pubic lice, which can be transferred by skin-to-skin contact, oral sex, and even sex toys.

Anyone else feel the need to rush out and by a bumper box of condoms right now? And take a shower? And an STI test? Especially when you consider the average Brit has had sex with nine people and so been sexually exposed to a whopping 3,917,918 people (the population of Uruguay).

Basically, have great sex, but have safe sex - because they're not mutually exclusive things.

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