THE S WORD

"She's such a slut!"

Aged 12, I overheard this being spat out as I walked down the school garden path. It was my second year in an all girls' school and (surprisingly) the first time I had heard the word being said in 'real life'. Standing before me were two girls ejecting a succession of hate-filled words about their (coincidentally absent) peer. That same night I found myself sitting at the desktop and typing the four letters into the urban dictionary search bar - s l u t:

1. a woman with the morals of  a man 
2. A derogatory term. Refers to sexually promiscuous person, usually female
3. a girl that's fucked so many guys she can't close her legs anymore
4.  female who enjoys performing sexual acts with multiple partners

Just to be sure I double checked in the Oxford Dictionary and found this:

derogatory
a woman who has many casual sex partners

I couldn't believe it; I was going to school with one of them, a real life, fully physical, no strings attached slut. Bearing in mind that I was a product of 9 years in Catholic education, I had only just learnt that sex wasn't  kissing with tongues, so it's understandable that everything was moving way too quickly for me. Ever since, I had yet to encounter somebody who was short of opinions (and synonyms) regarding 'sluts'. It is a word that embedded itself within our everyday vocabulary and is rarely, if ever, said positively. So I should probably being by removing all negative connotations from the word; a slut is simply a person, usually female, who has/has had multiple sexual partners. Today I sit at my laptop, three years on, thinking nothing but 'who the fuck cares?'.

Now I'm not asking for biblical references or catechisms or cultural tutoring from an elder, only for you to take a few minutes to think about the concept of slut shaming:

1. making a person feel guilty or inferior for certain sexual behaviours or desires
2. the act of criticising a woman for her real or presumed sexual activity, or for behaving in ways that someone thinks are associated with her real or presumed sexual activity.

Let me break this down for you. Slut shaming is making somebody else feel bad about choices a person has/n't made regarding their sexuality - how 1582 of us. We live in a society that believes that women do not own their own bodies. From the unsettling 'Purity Balls' to the downright sickening (Female Genital Mutilation), mankind has always been obsessed with controlling female sexuality. In the Western world it's less likely that a woman will perform sexual acts strictly within marriage, so unlike in many other traditional societies, slut shaming isn't solely a result of extramarital sex. Here in the West there's an overwhelming social need to police women on what is considered to be the "normal" and "acceptable" boundaries of sexuality.

Assuming that the majority of our readers live in the West, I'll discuss Western slut shaming. A 'slut' is somebody that has a lot of casual sex. 'Slut-shaming' is an act against somebody who doesn't conform to the 'norms' of female sexuality. This way, a virgin can be a victim of slut shaming without even being a 'slut'. If the skirt is too short you're probably a slut. If the bust line is too low you're probably a slut. If you're not sexy, you're not attractive and therefore failing as a woman. If you're sexy and having sex but not letting people know you're having sex because you're a girl and having sex is disgusting *deep breath* then you're doing it right. Does it make sense? No. Is it still happening? Yes. I think we've found our problem..

As females are more likely to be labelled as 'sluts' it's no surprise that slut shaming is more common among us. Being a 'slut' is considered unattractive, and for a person who's life is 99% based on 'How to be Attractive to the Heterosexual male 101' this rings alarm bells. Girls are taught to compete for the attention of males and will consequently spend their lives dodging the 'slut' label, even (especially) if it means sticking it on their peers. We face the impossible task of having to be sexy without insinuating that we're having/actually having sex and therefore spend the majority of our adolescence in particular walking the moral tightrope of never actually doing anything but knowing exactly what we're on about when somebody else does. It's no wonder that slut shaming is one of the biggest threats to sisterhood. We're in a never-ending competition with nothing but a handful of friends and tear stained pillows to prove it, only I don't remember actually signing up for it - fun (!)

I know this is a lot to take in and probably way too wordy, but it's important that you understand the basis of what I am saying. You should be able choose what you do (or don't do) with your body and who you share it with, without fearing judgement or feeling guilty. This also means that everybody else deserves to have the same freedom with their bodies. What others do with their bodies is their business and theirs only, we really need to move on from the 'girls don't own their bodies' craze of the middle ages. 

Still want less words?
Your body, your choice.

p.s. How much sense does it make that heterosexual boys are expected to have tons of sex but girls aren't meant to have any at all, can somebody let me know exactly how that works...

Posted by Melissa