The concept was invented to control women. It has always been a control mechanism dressed up as morality. I’m calling it.
Nobody asks men what their number is with the same weight. The question is gendered on purpose. High numbers lower a woman’s perceived value, but whose value system is that? Who decided? And why did we agree to be judged by a metric that was always designed to fail us?
The Math Was Always Rigged
In purity culture, having any number at all makes you damaged. In secular culture, the acceptable number shifts depending on who you ask. There is no number that satisfies everyone. That’s not a bug in the system. it’s the system working exactly as designed. The goal is never for you to get the number right. The goal is for you to be anxious about it forever.
Your history belongs to you. The people in it were real, the experiences were real. No one gets to assign a moral value to a number that represents your actual life.
Whoever taught you to count taught you to feel bad about yourself. That was the lesson. The number was never the point.