Today, we live in a world where people hear something and think it is okay. There are racial slurs thrown out during soccer games, there are foul names used to address people, along with the foul mouth used in everyday talk between friends and enemies. Don’t get me wrong, I’m right there with you. That son of a biscuit who cut me off during rush hour traffic today sure did hear my colorful vocabulary. But, we need to be selective of the words we use to describe other people. Especially the words we use to describe different girls.
People toss out words such as slut and whore like they are candy. We use them in our everyday language without truly thinking about what we are saying. When you Google the definition of a slut, the results are “a woman who has many casual sexual partners." How does one determine what the word “many” means? When I sit down to eat some M&M’s, fifteen in my eyes in “many” but when I think about the number of dogs I want to adopt, five is “many” in the eyes of my parents. Society determines how many is “many."
When you continue to think about the term and its concept, you then are passing judgement and ridicule on a person. Don’t get me wrong, I have judged plenty of people, it is something I want to work on. But I always feel shameful afterwards for various different reasons. One of the main reasons though is because I do not want someone passing judgment on me. Especially someone whom I do not know, because a large amount of time that we are referring to someone as a “slut” we do not know that person. We judge them from either seeing them at a party or hearing other things from other people. We are just assuming information that we do not know about a person.
Over the years, the word “slut” has gained popularity. I am not sure if it is because the term is becoming more casual in the mouths of young people or if people are just becoming more judgmental of others. But I have a feeling that the second reason plays a major role in its coming of popularity. People pay money to sit around and watching other people on television and cast judgement on them. People are paid to act idiotically in shows that are passed off as “reality tv” where we all know that the Kardashians are not all that perfect and they don’t have their shit together more than any other family. But there should be a desire to be less judgmental of people, this helping cut down the popularity of negative words such as slut.
If we as girls think it is okay to refer to other girls in negative and derogatory terms, then we are simply giving permission to guys to do the same thing. This is about 75% of the problem, though. As I mentioned before, a large amount of time we determine someone is a slut is based off of word of mouth from a guy we are hooking up with, wanting to hook up with, or one of our friends is hooking up with. But why is it okay for a guy to have “many casual sexual partners” without being called a slut or a whore but not a girl? This is a double standard that society holds and holds on tightly to. The double standard needs to end and the standard itself needs to end. It starts with girls not calling each other sluts and taking away the permission for guys to call girls sluts.
Stopping this word is not going to happen overnight. It isn’t even going to happen while I am in college. I will be lucky if it ends by the time that my daughter is in middle school and hearing it role off the tongues of her peers. But I do believe that this word’s popularity can trickle off just as it trickled in. So please, don’t let people call your daughters sluts for no reason, we should fight just as hard to end the s-word as we have fought to end the r-word.
