I don’t believe in sluts. Sluts, like supportive strapless bras and the Illuminati, do not exist. There’s no such thing. The Atlantic published a piece that echoes these sentiments, discussing the examinations of two sociologists who found that the young women with whom they worked called other women sluts for a multitude of reasons, not all of which reflected sexual promiscuity. According to the article, calling someone a slut hardly reflected the victim’s “real-life behavior,” and was just a way to facilitate trash talking amongst the young women for a variety of reasons, from economic status to outfit choices. Cool. Not.
This language persists beyond the article’s findings; on my home planet of Twitter, women are called sluts or whores for just about every conceivable reason. Being friends with a guy, having past sexual partners, talking about sex, wearing clothes, being a female, breathing oxygen, exhaling carbon dioxide — all of these things reduce women to being that (or those) ho (or hoes) over there. In short, according to these people, nothing you can do will grant you redemption from Supreme Sluthood at this point, girl. We are all high priestesses of the Church of Latter Day Thots, strung together eternally in a ho convent. It’s time to stop trying. Just log off. Probably, only Jesus’s mama is safe from slander at this point.
Obviously, all of this is absurd. Whether or not you call someone a slut for a “reason,” women should no longer have to suffer the weight of society’s totally unfounded disapproval of the expression of female sexuality. There’s no need to continue to ascribe a woman’s perceived moral “deficiencies” to some fault that somehow circles back to what she does with her body, and with whom. What a woman does safely and consensually with another individual is no one’s business but her own, and the reduction of the impact of a woman’s actions to her sex life is indicative of the sexism that much too often leaves women vulnerable to the shuttering of their emotional and sexual well-being, and as we saw in Santa Barbara just a few weeks ago, their physical well-being as well.
No one is calling boys sluts and whores when they act up, and I have yet to witness a man being referred to as a thot — and even when men are promiscuous, sexually-charged language doesn’t exist to condemn them for it. This is not to say that they should be, but that being said, this language shouldn’t exist for women, either. This dichotomy makes the goals of feminism that much harder to achieve. Sex, of course, is fun, but more importantly than that, it is natural for human beings of whatever gender to desire it.
I hit the ground ugly crying when Dr. Maya Angelou died. Her body of work and her lifetime of excellence embodied an indomitable and graceful spirit — where she spoke, flowers grew, and to me, her words were a bolster for femininity, a call to arms for the celebration and defense of women. But upon her passing, people used her language to do the very thing that she condemned; people bemoaned the times and the customs, wondering why women would prefer to be “bad bitches” than “phenomenal women,” traipsing the Twitter streets, hoping for the deliverance of a woman whom we poor other hoes can emulate. But alas — as it turns out, Angelou herself once fit the mold of what people deem sluts, having had her son at age 16, and working as both prostitute and madam in a brothel.
Thank God for women like Angelou, the unapologetic bad girls, whose lives flourished despite the stultifying society in which we live that impedes sexual expression and shames those of us who dare to risk modesty and reject respectability politics in order to live our truths. Imagine those young women without the incredible inner strength Angelou had, whose inner brilliance you could trample by worrying about their sex lives. Mind your business. Stop hating. Let women flourish in the summers of their sexuality. You don’t get to police our bodies or tell our narratives, as both are ours and ours only to share and tell.
Sierra Mannie is a classics and English major from Ridgeland.
