First, a disclaimer: I am in no way a Ted Mosby apologist. I stopped watching How I Met Your Mother somewhere around the time that Marshall and Lily were trying to get pregnant and when Ted was trying to get back together with Robin for the umpteenth time because it all just got so dull. So I’m not exactly unbiased in my annoyance with a show I once watched weekly and therefore any cultural excitement about How I Met Your Mother I tired of long ago. But this particular topic seems even more forced. The noteworthiness of how many sexual partners a titular television show character living in New York City has had has already been trod over numerous times with Sex and the City. How I Met Your Mother merely joins the ranks of shows that have been the subject of much speculation over exactly how many people the characters have slept with.
The writers of Sex and the City almost predicted as much with the episode “Are We Sluts?” from Season 3, where Miranda gets chlamydia and has to make a list of all the men she’s had sex with. As Carrie remarks in one of her few actually wise moments during that episode, “men who have had a lot of sexual partners are not called sluts. They are called very good kissers.”
So perhaps we can take this video as a sign of ~*PROGRESS*~ that Ted Mosby is being called a slut here and he is a man. But as Vulture points out, it’s also a little “puritanical” and though very well edited and a nice recap of the show, makes every woman look, if not as stupid as Ted, even more faceless and unimportant than they felt on the show. We can give the Beast the benefit of the doubt in that the video is told from the perspective of Ted’s future wife, who is clearly flawed as all humans are and would probably realistically refer to the many women her husband had previously bedded as “random skanks” because that is, in fact, all they are to her.
Unfortunately it doesn’t capture the truth, which is that those “random skanks” were often the best part of How I Met Your Mother, which is now entering its final season. Ted’s girlfriends were far more interesting than Barney’s, who was the true and honest slut of the show. They were also the impetus behind the naming of concepts we didn’t even know needed names, like the introduction of Ted’s girlfriend forever known as BLAH BLAH. Without BLAH BLAH, Barney Stinson would never have described the Crazy Hot Scale to us, which is explained on the show through women but could apply to people of any gender. That’s a cultural contribution far funnier than the rest of Ted Mosby’s boring and yes, perhaps mildly slutty sexual exploits.