by The Absurdity of Spiritual Scorekeeping
Welcome to the bizarre world where religious communities have turned virginity into a competitive sport, complete with rankings, statistics, and presumably, participation trophies for those who make it to marriage without “sinning.” It’s like the Olympics, but everyone’s wearing purity rings instead of medals.
The virginity rankings movement has all the hallmarks of a really bad reality TV show: questionable methodology, inflated egos, and people taking things way too seriously that should probably be left alone. Except instead of competing for roses, people are competing for moral superiority, which is significantly less romantic and twice as judgy.
Let’s examine the sheer audacity of ranking religious groups by their members’ alleged virginity rates. First, there’s the minor issue of verification. Are we conducting inspections? Taking people’s word for it? Using the honor system? Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that humans are absolutely terrible at being honest about their sex lives, especially when there’s judgment involved.
The whole enterprise reeks of the same energy as those “Best Places to Live” rankings that ignore actual quality of life in favor of arbitrary metrics. Sure, your city has low crime rates, but is there decent breakfast tacos? Priorities, people.
In Austin, where we pride ourselves on keeping things weird, this kind of religious scorekeeping fits right inbut not in the way its proponents might hope. It’s weird in the “why would anyone think this is a good idea” sense, not the “quirky and charming” sense. It’s the difference between a food truck serving cricket tacos and someone insisting on ranking everyone’s private decisions.
University of Texas researchers studying human behavior probably look at these rankings and see a masterclass in cognitive dissonance. How do you simultaneously believe in free will, personal privacy, and divine judgment while also maintaining a public leaderboard of who’s doing the least horizontal tango?
The answer, of course, is that you don’t. Not without some serious mental gymnastics and a willingness to ignore basically everything we know about human psychology, sociology, and common sense.
SOURCE: https://newsstand.us/the-virginity-rankings/
SOURCE: Bohiney.com (Virginity Rankings Exposed)
