Say what you like about Ray J, but the rapper has relentless brand discipline.
The 45-year-old has long been defined by his infamous sex tape with Kim Kardashian, and now, rather than pivot away from that legacy, he appears to have fully committed.
His latest claim — that he’s slept with 12,500 people — is certainly an escalation, but by no means a creative departure, for a guy who clearly gave up on escaping the shadow of his own penis long ago.
The singer made the revelation on Cam Newton’s Funky Friday podcast, a truly mind-expanding conversation that asked the question: ‘Does Ray J know how to count?’ and then, secondarily, ‘Does Ray J know what sex is? Does he have it confused with shaking hands?’
Newton then foolishly attempted to apply basic maths to the situation, which is where things became… philosophical. What even is a number, really?
First, Ray J attempted to explain that when he surpassed the 10,000 mark – his original goal – he celebrated with a ‘booby trap’ party attended by 400 to 500 of his sex partners.
‘You’re talking about different partners?’ Newton then asked.
‘These are 10,000 different people,’ Ray J clarified.
‘You said 11,’ Newton, in a moment of hard-hitting journalism, replied, referencing a statement Ray J had made prior to the podcast.
‘It’s at, like, 12,500 now, but I wanted to get to 11,’ Ray J explained, seemingly unconcerned with 12,500 being a larger number than 11,000.
‘I was guaranteed 10. I didn’t want to be at 9,000, and I wanted to be at 11. Then… we went to 10. Just wanted to make sure I was over.’
This is when the careful listener began to realise that it’s not that none of this is making sense, it’s just that Ray J – ever a visionary – has his very own version of math, one in which 2,500 is a reasonable margin of error when it comes to the over-under of a goal number of sexual partners.
Newton then asked the singer about his ‘average,’ a concept that – it quickly became clear – does not exist in Ray J-nomics.
The former NFL star tried to explain the idea: ‘You’re 45 now… so that’s sleeping with a little over one and a half women a day for 30 years.’
Finally, the singer admitted his own brilliance: ‘Yeah, the math is different.’ We knew it!
He continued: ‘Because when we’re on tour, we’re thinking five to 10 a day.’
Now, unlike Ray J, I am not a mathematician, but I am someone who has, at various points, delayed arguably urgent appointments out of a sheer unwillingness to look at my own calendar. So I feel confident in saying this raises logistical questions.
Time management, for one. General scheduling. Friction burns. Are there spreadsheets involved? Is there a rota? A booking system? A waiting list? Who are these women?
If you’ve ever tried to organise a board game night, you’ll know it’s borderline impossible to get five close friends to agree on a time, let alone the rules of Monopoly.
So the mind genuinely starts to short-circuit when asked to believe that Ray J has managed to coordinate 12,500, erm, participants in his, erm, project. And even if 12,500 in Ray J’s number system equals a totally different amount in the one you and I use, it’s still clearly a LOT of women.
Which leaves me with one working theory. And – like most things in the world when you really think about it – it loops back to the Kim Kardashian sex tape.
Maybe what Ray J is offering these participants isn’t a 3-minute fumble on a tour bus bunk bed, but an immersive experience spun off a hit piece of cinema.
Think of those pop-up experiences that take over empty retail units in your city, the ones promising to drop you into the world of your favourite film or show. You queue, you pay too much for a Squid Game-themed cocktail, and then you’re ushered through a set of doors into a carefully constructed ‘universe’.
Take Jurassic World: The Experience, which you probably saw ads for on public transit. Guests are invited to ‘step through the iconic gates and embark on an unforgettable journey through multiple immersive zones’.
Instead of walking through the gates to see enormous animatronic dinosaurs, 12,500 people entered an ever-expanding cinematic universe based entirely on Ray J’s sex tape.
So not only is Ray J one of the great thinkers of our time, a man who has completely reconceptualised the way we quantify the world around us, he is also a generous creative.
And yet, even the most daring acts of performance art must come to an end.
Animatronic dinosaurs must one day find themselves perpetually motionless in the forgotten tomb of some bankrupt company’s storage unit, and Ray J must one day spend an entire evening with his trousers on.
At the end of the podcast, with almost pitiable defeat in his voice, Ray J admitted to Newton that he won’t be reaching Wilt Chamberlain’s number of sexual partners (25,000 women).
In fact, he plans to be practically celibate the rest of his life, and only have sex with…1000 more people.
‘I can only f— a thousand more,’ he told Newton, with an air of heavy defeat akin to Frodo telling Sam halfway up Mount Doom that he just can’t make it.
‘I can’t do anymore.’
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