Something happened recently that just caught me completely off guard. Someone had blatantly told a nasty rumor about me to my face — and the worst part about it is, they believed it. I was so baffled because for one, why would you tell someone a rumor you heard about them in the first place and second, it was such an elaborate lie that I didn’t think someone could even believe it. What I had just been told stuck with me the whole day, but then it got me thinking; why should I feel ashamed or embarrassed for something that is not true? Also, if I were a guy, this situation would be completely different.

What I’m talking about here is maybe the biggest double standard that women have to suffer through: having too many sexual partners makes you “slutty.”

This is all kinds of messed up. When guys get around with a lot of girls, they are labeled as “the man” or a “stud,” but if a girl sleeps with “too many” guys, she’s deemed as “slutty” or “easy.” This isn’t really new information, but society still puts this stigma on women, which is more than slightly ridiculous.

For one, people shouldn’t judge others on their number of sexual partners, especially if what they heard was from a rumor. Rumors are almost 99.999 percent never true ladies and gentlemen — come on now. Second, your personal life is absolutely no one else’s business to know or talk about to others. Unless you’ve been dating someone for a while and they ask how many people you’ve slept with, then maybe you could talk about it, but other than that, I’d say don’t worry about it. Even if a girl has slept with a lot of guys, more power to her. Every girl expresses her sexuality differently. Some are more confident than others in their sexuality, but no one should judge.

Now, this brings me to another double standard: confident men are leaders, while confident women are bitchy.

Really now? Why is this? Why is it that when men are assertive, it’s deemed sexy because they know what they want? Isn’t it just as sexy for women to know what they want too because god forbid, women are so indecisive, that when they actually know what they want and go for it, they are looked at as a crazy bitch who doesn’t care about anyone else but themselves. Say what now?! It’s a dog eat dog world out there and men have always been the top dogs, but now that women are breaking through the glass ceiling, society feels inclined to keep the status quo in which it was before.

Wait, I am in the twenty-first century, right?

So, you see, these double standards are inevitable and they exist, but we don’t need to acknowledge and reinforce them. Men, don’t call girls slutty because honestly, you’re probably a slut too. Don’t call us a bitch because we know what we want and work hard for it. If you know what you want and work hard to get it, would you want to be called arrogant for that? I didn’t think so.