Dear All Women Who Still Use the Word “Slut,”
Slut. The word itself sounds like something you might find on the bottom of your shoe, and the funny thing is, the women who you call "sluts" begin to be treated as such. In its most simple definition, a slut is a woman who has many sexual partners. Key word here? Woman. Not “person,” and not “man,” but rather, woman. A woman, much like yourself, who has many sexual partners. Not all that different from you perhaps – I mean after all, what constitutes as “many”? Three? Five? Ten? Seventy-five? Whatever. Calling someone a slut just because they have “many” sexual partners isn’t that bad, right?
Right! Except for the fact that when you call another woman – a fellow woman – a slut, you create for her a label that places her in a dangerous category.
Rape culture. According to Feminist Theory, rape culture is a culture in which sexual assault flourishes based off the society’s attitude about sexuality as well as gender norms and implications. However, people will always find fun, new ways to judge each other. And you can just as easily call a woman a slut based off her clothes or the way she carries herself, rather than exclusively calling her a slut based off of her sexual history.
Did you know that there’s a coined term for people doing what you do by condemning women for their hyper-sexuality? It’s called "slut-shaming," and it is a huge part of rape culture, since it is a widespread problem that you only feed into. The more a woman is labeled a slut, the more she is susceptible to falling prey to arguments behind rape like, “She’s a slut, she wanted it,” or “Did you see what she was wearing? She wanted it,” or “Did you see her flirting with him the whole night? She wanted it.” Luckily, there are people fighting the good fight against slut-shaming. Slut Walks are events happening all over the world where people come together and protest slut-shaming; some of them come dressed in the way a classic “slut” would.
So if slut-shaming is such a widespread issue, then why take this time to address only women who participate? Because, as feminist writer Audre Lorde would say, “There is no hierarchy of oppression.” What is meant by this, is that women in general are oppressed under the patriarchal society we live in. So this means it's simply unethical for women to begin to try and “oppress” other groups, especially their own group, being other women. By calling other women sluts, you therefore begin to oppress them and ridicule them for taking part in a completely normal activity, one that they might find empowering for themselves. To all women who still call other women “sluts,” realize that the implications behind the word go beyond your personal opinion on a fellow woman’s sexual activity. And realize that we as women need to stand against rape culture in its most basic form: slut-shaming.
