Vixen In The Sack: What's Your Number?
By C.S.M.

Once upon a time in a magical city called New York, ten girls sat drinking Choctails at a hip dessert place in the East Village. By the time the drinks arrived the conversation had, predictably, turned to sex. Everyone knows that when girls group up and play the “get to know you’’ game, the first question on everyone’s mind is some variation of “what’s your number?” – and I don’t mean telephone.

One by one, each girl took a sip of her drink for courage and announced her number. Two blondes at the end of the table proudly announced that they were still card-carrying members of the Virgin Club. The Latina bombshell in heels so high they were unfathomable shocked everyone with a confident “five.” The girl to her left chugged her entire chocolate martini before mumbling, “somewhere around twenty-ish…” into her empty glass. The rest fell somewhere in between.

The most well-known double standard just might be the one regarding numbers. The higher a guy’s is, the more respect he gets, but if a girl hits double digits, she’s a slut – or is she? Women today receive mixed signals from every direction. The media makes the women of Sex and the City (whose numbers range from 17 to 41) into icons while simultaneously telling us that we should like and respect Miley Cyrus because she wears a purity ring.

Granted, the majority of women fall somewhere in between these two extremes, but the combined social pressures of staying pure in a world that is allegedly full of sin and the need to turn men into mere notches on the bedpost are enough to make a girl crazy. We end up sitting on our beds with an open bottle of wine and a notebook and rely on our best friends to help us remember every drunken hookup and “Omigod-I’m-Going-To-Marry-Him” relationship we’ve had since the fateful day we lost our V-Cards (if, in fact, that day has already occurred) until we can state our official number – and then we spend years trying to justify that number to ourselves and others, even as it continues to grow.

Once you admit your number, either to yourself or to anyone else, the natural thing that follows is for somebody to make some kind of judgment call. But who gets to make that call, and is it really necessary? The person making the judgment has their own number that is influencing their opinion; girls with higher numbers, for example, are far less likely to think of anyone as a slut, no matter how many people they’ve slept with. Similarly, a girl who is a virgin or who has a lower number will probably not make fun of a member of the purity-ring-wearing crowd.

Then, of course, there are the statistics that back up both sides. According to psychologist Victoria Zdrok, “women with higher numbers tend to be more educated, have more liberal views and higher self-esteem.” Other people say that premarital sex corresponds with higher divorce rates. If a Sweet Briar student was to head down 29, they would find an entire campus ready and willing to throw biblical texts at them in an effort to make them understand that premarital sex is wrong.

But despite all of the hype, your number is just that – a number. It does not define who you are as a person; it is simply a measure of your experience in a certain area, much in the same way that an IQ test is a measure of intelligence. The way to deal with it is to simply take charge and not allow anyone to make a judgment, because at the end of the day, your number is about you and the decisions you have made. Nobody can change that, and nobody should.