In case you missed it, one of Martin Amis’s girlfriends from the 1970s has published an article about his womanising ways and the girls he loved and left. It has caused a minor storm because Amis is arguably our most famous living author — and certainly the most glamorous — and because Marty gave his approval for this kiss-and-tell.

There are plenty of people who would go to court not to have details of their private lives revealed in print. But Amis not only doesn’t care, he positively welcomed the exposure. This got me thinking: wouldn’t it be great to be so confident of your sexual history — so sure that your lovers numbered the smartest, most attractive people of your generation — that naming them could only make you look better? How rare must that be? Thanks to Amis, we now have a new definition of success: having a sexual history that you can afford to boast about, with no exceptions.

The importance of racking up a sexual history that you can be proud of is not something they teach you in school, but it has to be more useful in the long term than metalwork. Look around and the world is roughly divided into people whose SH has held them back and people who don’t need to lie in bed at night wondering if anyone is going to find out about the heroin dealer/sex pest/con artist/embarrassing loser they lived with for six months after college.

The truth is, nothing damages a girl’s respect factor faster than a dalliance with Calum Best (oh Lindsay, how could you?). And if you’re a bloke, it’s probably better to have had a three-month stint inside for pension fraud than a fling with the former Mrs Paul McCartney. Take Sienna Miller — lovely girl, but her SH is so dodgy, it has affected her karma and left her looking like a romantic liability. And George Clooney is a super guy but for one niggling detail: the line-up of strikingly unremarkable exes.

To score high in the sexual-history stakes, you don’t have to be the opposite of promiscuous, or even faithful — you merely need to demonstrate that you have good taste and the power to pull people worth pulling (it’s a bonus if, like Marty, you leave all your lovers “numb and shattered”, but at the very least, the experience needs to have been memorable). And a quality sexual history works for both parties. We don’t like to admit it, but how you rate the women in your man’s past (and who dumped who) directly affects your perception of them. If you admire the girls who came before you, then it’s okay to be tainted by association. But if your boyfriend’s exes are a pretty sad bunch who tend to be the ones to leave, and you definitely wouldn’t want to borrow their clothes, it can’t help but make you question if he’s worth it.

Maybe that’s the point in the end. I don’t particularly want to be able to say I’ve slept with Mick Jagger, but I wouldn’t mind being lumped in a category with the young Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Sophie Dahl, Carla Bruni... Best stop there on account of the lawyers.

Explore Celebrity

• People

Times recommends

• Live chat: Thrifty ways to update your winter wardrobe
• Is anybody out there really listening?
• Nutrition Q&A: Will eating late make me fat?