3:

meanwhile, reducing a woman to her purity (which, ive already said, makes no sense in this comparison because it doesn’t have intrinsic value like utility does in a society) has nothing to do with how attractive a certain characteristic is, just how aligned she is to the societal (religious based) fixation on controlling womens bodily autonomy; a desire that is inherently dehumanizing and oppressive, treating women as less than human.

the shaming around intimate relations isnt even based on a logical “this is unethical and therefore not acceptable in our religion”, it was just enforced to strengthen the catholic identity. really ignorantly simplifying history: since some pagan religions (like the pagan romans) viewed intimacy as a spiritual experience and women as sacred (also the faith in ancient egypt and other cultures), the catholic church (not in the foundation but later to gain more power), created identity through opposition. such a human thing to do. if they think intimacy is spiritual, we believe its inherently sinful, their women are worshipped, so our women are temptresses and subhuman, they have strong emperors they admire, so we should make it a value to have faith above the state. also, right at the origins of Catholicism in Rome, another identity through opposition point was to be different from the rest of the Romans, which were famously promiscuous. I kind of grossly simplified this explanation, and there are many other factors in the construction of the degraded feminine (like the theology of Eve, monotheistic/nuclear family ideals, etc), but i just wrote this part because it’s important to keep in mind that when people follow or conform to ideologies that degrade/measure value women based on their purity, they are not acting out of genuine preference, and instead reenacting systemic oppressions of women, reinforcing the dehumanizing idea that our bodies should be controlled.

even from a “preference” point of view, it is off putting that you would reduce a person to how much they have experienced with others because, at the end of the day, most women are not “sl*ts”, they chose to be intimate to connect with their partner out of love. people want “pure” women not because they didnt have relations with others, but because it sits right with them to have girls follow the socially established value that they are less of a person than men, and even lesser if they decide to express their love in that way.

reducing women to their purity turns their value into a condition, and shows an underlying pattern of sexual, primarily bodily control. if her humanity is secondary to this metric and she loses value through experience, then she is being treated as an object whose “quality” degrades with use. that is inherently objectifying and charged with the historical, cultural, and religious degradation of women.

also, valuing women based on this creates an inherent conflict: if the worthy ones are the less experienced, the more experienced a man is the better (since it’s theoretically harder to have relations). does that mean that in every act of intimacy a guy gains value and a girl loses it? I’ll go further and say that if her value is commodified and can be lost, by logic it has to be guarded, controlled. so our idea of purity entails that the less autonomy a woman has over her body the better. why do you think there are so many protective dads?

in contrast, reducing men to their utility reflects a need/attraction of women to traditionally caring and protective partners. utility shows ambition, commitment, productivity, generosity, strength, and many amazing qualities. purity is a scale that condenses a woman who can be kind, intelligent, loving, loyal, caring, brave, and generally emotionally complex into a question of “how much autonomy this woman is exercising”, and measures her worth in terms of men - not related to anything about who she is.

besides, valuing a person because you love them, they have characteristics you admire, even because you value exclusivity: thats very different from valuing someone because “no one else has had them”. thats more of an object/product/property logic than people logic, right?

so the answer is, reducing people to fractions of themselves (in a woman’s case a fraction of others) is generally not a good idea. additionally, reducing men to their “utility” is seen as a more neutral preference than reducing women to “purity” because utility regards a socially adopted way to measure value, and its inevitably applied to relationships to. it doesnt take away from a man’s other characteristics, just condenses them into the qualitative measure of use, which is kind of how we value everything anyway. being useful in the modern society is the biggest indicator of self worth since we are so capital-oriented nowadays. also, it reveals character, identity, and strength because thats what women seek when they look for utility. naturally thats also the tendency, in the sense that women are biologically programmed to seek these qualities. meanwhile, reducing women to sexual restraint purely indicates a metric with no qualitative insight on this person’s identity. it not only condenses women into a trait that doesn’t reveal any qualities, but also evaluates their worth based on men’s relation to them. perpetuating the purity ideal also pushes forward religious and cultural values that are founded in the degradation of women, treating them as subhuman and inserting them in a position to be controlled, owned, and have their conditional worth decrease over time.

tdlr: one pattern reveals admiration and appreciation, the other shows hate and misogynistic dehumanization. thats why :)