Slut Shaming and Why It Needs To Stop

What is slut shaming? It is a very simple and subtle thing that many of us do without even being aware of it. It is the process of making women (and men) feel bad about their sexual choices. Often it's the word "slut" or its many synonyms used in conjuncture with a derogatory comment or tone. As in,

"Look at what that girl is wearing, what a slut."

When that is said, several implicit assumptions are made:
1) Girls who wear more "revealing" outfits are "sluts"
2) Being a slut is a bad thing

So let's get a working definition of slut then, since it would be impossible to call it a bad thing if we don't even know what one is!

The simplest definition I can seem to find is someone who has an open sociosexual orientation. This means that they are open to the idea of having sex without being in a committed, monogamous, romantic relationship. Now, most people seem to agree on this definition. But here's the problem: most of us then, by definition, are sluts. What?! How can this be? Sluts are a terrible awful no-good very bad thing... right?

The word "slut" is pejorative, meaning that it can have positive or negative connotations depending on the group that it is used in. A good way to think about this is to talk about America's other favorite set of pejorative words.

In the middle school years, kids are prone to use words like "gay" to talk about things that they don't like. They might say, "this class is so gay," or "I hate this band, they're so gay," when neither the class nor the band contain any homosexuals nor homosexual behavior. Are these kids confused about the meaning of the word? No. If you ask them, they get it right. But when asked why they use the word like that, they'll probably shrug. Everyone knows that when they say something is gay it doesn't mean actually gay. Right. But if the connotation is that "gay" is a synonym for "things that are bad," suddenly this doesn't seem okay anymore. Most progressive teens start getting aware of this around high school and stop calling things gay. They even might call out others that use it, stating that use of the word in that pejorative sense is homophobic. What predicts this kind of pro-LGBT behavior? Knowing someone who is gay. That is why gay rights campaigns urge people to come out of the closet if they can. The single biggest aid to fighting homophobia has been the realization that, hey, lots of people are gay, and they're just people like the rest of us.

What does this have to do with slut shaming? Well, because when it comes to the word "slut," we're still in middle school. We know what it means, but we use it talk about people we don't like, almost exclusively women. In fact, when men are called sluts, it's usually in the form of the euphemistic "man whore." It is far more acceptable for men to be sexually promiscuous and open about their exploits than it is for women. So instead, we have lots of women who are sexually free in this sense, but they feel bad about their own behavior. They feel bad because we have taught them to feel bad. They slut shame themselves. This is because they're in the slut closet and don't want to come out into a world that disdains what they do. But where does this slut shaming come from?

There are evolutionary reasons why men and women have different sexual preferences and strategies. It our ancestral past, it was an adaptive strategy for women to be very choosy with whom they mated with. This was because they would bear the burden of carrying a child to term, being unable to mate in the interim, and then raising said child. So it made sense that women would care more: their investment was higher. Men invested a few minutes of work, and that was all they needed to pass their genes on.

The truth is that these behaviors are rooted in human nature, but reinforced by our society. Because we subvert human nature all the time. Why do we like to eat, often to the point of it being unhealthy? Because it was adaptive in our past to eat as much as we could because food was scare. Now we have obesity, an unintended side effect of this drive. Likewise, most of the sex in we have as a species in this contemporary age is not for procreation. But that's what sex is biologically for. It feels good because those who enjoyed it had more offspring, so we have a species that loves to fuck, and that most of the time is not thinking about having children.

Today we have a set of men and women who seem to police women who might not be as choosy about their sex partners. If you asked them why, they probably couldn't tell you. Evolutionary theory gives us some clues, but its not the entire story. The fact is that when people engage in slut shaming, they are not thinking, "Look at that silly girl! By not being more choosy about her sexual partners and waiting to invest in a man who will also invest in her, she is liable to make a mistake and possibly end up with a poor genetic recombination with a man who will not aid in raising the child!"

There are many dark, undesirable sides of human nature. The fact that it may have been adaptive to be misogynistic, xenophobic, and violent in our past does not mean that because they have some "natural" origin, that they get a free moral pass. We are able to evaluate behaviors in a way that we couldn't then. We are not bound by the chains of human nature; our society allows us to move past it, most people just never consider it.

The idea of taking the word back is appealing to some people. This is what happened with the gay community. Nowadays, you might hear someone describe their friend as "gay", and it will mean just that: that their friend prefers to engage in sex with people of the same gender. So could we do the same with slut? Could slut just mean someone that enjoys sex and doesn't need the restrictions of a traditional relationship to engage in it?

I want to now ask what I feel is the most important question of all: what, if anything, is wrong with being a slut?

I think the people over www.slutsunite.org get it right.

Most people would agree with what is written there. And then suddenly, given that, what's wrong with being a slut?

It's your sex life. As long as you are being safe, sane, consensual, then do what you want. Life is too short to feel bad about doing what feels good.