During the show, "Sex and the City," one character stood out from the rest and that was Samantha Jones. Portrayed by Kim Cattrall, she was a sassy, and fearless PR (Public Relations) executive who had sex with just about anything in a pair of pants, and for a brief moment in season 4 someone in a skirt. I got to thinking about her recently and thought how fearless she was to have sex with a lot of partners.

She didn't care if she was labeled a slut, floozy, tart, you get the picture. Was she, right? Did Samantha have the right idea about life? Then I thought of a question I hadn't before. Is the world afraid of people like Samantha Jones, or could it be that they are afraid of the labels that come with being as promiscuous as Sam? In the end, the question really becomes: what’s wrong with sluts?

I looked up the word slut online; and it says, “a woman who has many casual sexual partners”. Some of the synonyms are prostitute, whore, and these are the only formal synonyms. The others which are informal include floozy, tramp, hooker, hustler, tart, scarlet woman, loose woman, etc.

Whether it is with one person, two or somewhere in the triple digits why does this matter so much to other people? Does that really make you a slut? Perhaps it is the stigma that goes along with being a promiscuous person. In the film “Easy A," the idea of being promiscuous was how one girl managed to make a difference in many people’s lives.

For those that didn’t see the film "Easy A" pays homage to the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne in that it describes the exploits of Olive Penderghast; after she tells her friend that she had sex with a college freshman. The catch is that she made the whole thing up.

However, the entire school believes it and decided to run with it as well as make up so much more. In this way, one girl becomes a “slut” and the stigma goes so much farther. In the end, she tells people what really happened and ends up riding away on a lawn mower with the guy she loves free of the Scarlet A she brands herself with.

The word slut is slowly becoming a word that goes two ways. Only for guys, it comes in the form of the word f***boi, (commonly spelled with an “i” instead of a “y”). This word describes a guy who is fast with women and dates several of them at once.

Slut is still a harsh word because of the connotation it has to puritanical ostracism. In the 1600’s women were not allowed to be single and ready to mingle. Instead, they were married and bound with that age-old ball and chain known as children. Maybe being a slut is a bad thing but if that’s the case wouldn’t we all be bad… except maybe the Amish they stick by the same principles of that era.

Think about that people aspire to promiscuity; at least that’s what most literature tells us. Helen Gurley Brown, the woman responsible for putting promiscuity as well as Cosmopolitan magazine on the map, wasn’t afraid. She was more than willing to let her readers know that she had sex and it was okay for them to have sex as well.

Cosmopolitan magazine to this day is known for talking openly about sex; though not as graphically as letters in Penthouse Forum. Perhaps the more people talk about it the less of a stigma gets attached to the word slut; then it goes on as just another word in a person’s vernacular.

As an adverb, the word becomes slutty. It is used to describe clothes more often than not, but clothes don’t make the slut… do they?

Clothes these days are all pretty much the same; meaning that if one person looks slutty most people do. Everything is tight, meant to show off a woman’s curves as if she is some sort of prize to be won. That’s really it though… a prize.

Some guys view women as a score not yet scored, but figure it’s one more hole punch in their sexual punch card. Now it really boils down to whether or not sluts or sluttiness can be viewed as deviant behavior.

Deviant, in this case, means something along the lines of out of the ordinary, not viewed by society as normal. In this case, sluttiness/being a slut does not really fall under this category. It’s more or less thought of as deviant but isn’t.

Being a slut is not so much deviant as it’s viewed as shameful; which it shouldn’t. Overall being a slut is something that people make shameful because, just like homosexuality, they listen to the Bible. I’m not demonizing the Bible, but it seems to be the go-to excuse when people don’t like something.

Homosexuality is something that this comes into contact with a lot because of the fact that it’s not in the Bible that a man can’t love another man or a woman can’t love another woman. People; don’t use your religion to not like something if you don’t like it say that instead of hiding behind the Almighty.

Sluts shouldn’t have to walk around in the dead of night so no one can know that they are a slut. Instead, like Samantha Jones, they should pride themselves on being sexually adventurous. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what they should be called: sexually adventurous.

The word slut has such a negative connotation when it isn’t really necessary. In this society, we are deprived of romance and starved from knowing the difference between sex and a relationship. Sluts just have the right idea because all they want is someone to look beyond the label of being a slut and see the person.

That’s right. Sluts are people too, but because of the demonization that goes along with being called a slut, no one gets to know the person. They could be high school/college students, grocery store clerks, or perhaps the person that you might fall in love with.

Sluts are human and the less emphasis that is put on that word, the more people are going to realize that being a slut is not as bad as it seems.