The Modern Evolution of the Slut

Depending on what generation you’re from the word slut can be:

1. Empowering (‘I’m a slut, I take it when I want it!’)

2. A word that makes you feel down and dirty with your partner (‘I wanna be your dirty little slut tonight!’)

3. Part of an inside joke (‘hey slut, you got some dick in yo teeth!’)

OR

4. Insulting (‘that bitch is a slut!’)

Back in school, I was pretty determined not be seen as something related to point number four, mostly because of a pretty conservative upbringing and high expectations for the kind of girl I was supposed to be. I had no religious overtones to growing up, but my mother was overprotective and sort of saw me as a porcelain doll in a music box… something that would break easily and must be protected. The last thing I wanted to do was give her an emotional meltdown by wearing fishnets to high school and buying condoms in bulk.

So, I carried out my sexual rebellion when she wasn’t looking, all the while having this secret hang-up about being tagged as a whore and eventually ending up in the used slut bin. I won’t bore you with the dirty details (yeah, I know you were hoping I would, but I’ll save that for another blog), but I was always more of a quality over quality girl. I wanted to collect outrageous sexual experiences, not just fuck a moving conveyor belt of jocks and douchebags. So I lost my virginity to an older authority figure (my skating coach), I played spin the bottle, experimented with girls, seduced married men, got kinky in public, did a few things that are actually just too slutty to mention ever again (to anyone) and finally culminated my adventures with a spontaneous tequila-infused three-way with one of my married lovers and his buddy. Feeling like a sexual lothario of sorts, the blonde vixen that everyone wanted, was kind of like a drug, especially while maintaining my teen princess persona with family and school friends.

A few weeks later, I went to a hotel room to hook up with my married guy again. It was a deeper than sex relationship but he was just as dark, creative and self-destructive as I was so we kind of fed off each other. That night I had an uninhibited, debauched sort of sexual extravaganza of filth with three rounds of anal and lots of twisted dirty talk. I could feel the cum running down the back of my legs as I went to get my car from the valet. That night had somehow been different from all the others. While I waited there under the awning of the posh hotel for my car to be brought around, and with the insides and back of my legs glazed with sticky cream, I felt… like a whore. Not just in the sense of a fun role-play, but literally like a whore. The only thing that was missing was the cash in my purse and in some ironic ways this almost made it worse.

Uh oh, I thought. Maybe I had gone too far… even for my own sense of carefree, rebellious sexual freedom. Nobody had actually called me a slut… except for myself. And I couldn’t exactly just tell myself to fuck off and walk away while maintaining a self-protective ‘that bitch doesn’t know me’ attitude. So, being a bit of an emotional masochist, I let it grate on me and enjoyed the sting. I wallowed in angsty music, I sat outside my lecture hall and wrote a poem about myself called “Whore” and I basically got trapped between the good girl vs bad girl struggle.

So you’re probably wondering why I’m dragging all this emo-girly misery out again, right?

The reason is that this concept is the underlying theme of almost all of my erotica writing. I actually hadn’t noticed the trend until others started pointing it out to me. I tend to love characters that are trapped between their raw desires and social expectations. Sometimes those trappings are self-imposed as women try to measure up to the good girl ideals society values, and other times the trappings are due to wealth, relationships, monogamy or social status. Either way you’ve got the crux of whether she gives into her carnal desires which are often outside the realm of mainstream sex, or whether she just plays by the rules. Needless to say there aren’t a whole lot of characters in my stories that end up staying within the lines when they decide to paint on their sexual canvas.

Which brings me to my last point… about the liberating qualities of being a “slut.” I think a lot of women are afraid to tap into their inner slut and celebrate it, rather than fearing judgment from it. I was one of those girls at one point in time, and based on feedback I get from a lot of my female readers, it’s something that resonates with them as well. Why do women have to feel guilty or wrong for pursuing their libidos into uncharted territories? Do we really want to submit to age-old judgment calls about what bad girls do and good girls won’t?

Think about the last time you felt compelled to tell a new sex partner “omigod, I’ve never done that before,” after partaking in some really dirty sex or hooking up on a one-night stand. The point is, hey, maybe you really didn’t have any experience with it in the past… but don’t feel compelled to explain yourself because of what society expects. Otherwise, how do we progress as vibrant sexual beings that are completely entitled to stripping away our inhibitions when we strip off our clothes?

I’d like to see women reclaim the word ‘slut’ just like we’ve reclaimed the word ‘bitch’. It’s just a word. And more than anything else, if slut means being in charge of one’s own sexual adventures, fantasies and desires without inhibitions while rejecting judgment, labels and rules meant to force us into the two-dimensional “good girl” box… then isn’t that something we should all aspire to anyway?