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For NFO/LW #4 - Your friend kinda wins the privilege Olympics, in terms of being a bunch of potentially easily offended groups at once - said the bi girl - but gosh, I can't think of anything wrong with straight guys doing drag. Drag is theater. I know a transvestite, a couple of drag queens & trans people. Nobody seems upset when people play on some other part of the gender spectrum. *shrug*
Thinking about that makes me wanna meet/swap lipsticks tips with Eddie Izzard..
UIC: Do you really want shit like that back?
Also: I personally wouldn't call someone who does drag, even in a burlesque context, entirely cisgender: flexible in the definitions.
I think good drag is (among other things) also a commentary on femininity, whether it's performed by a man who comically misses the mark (Dina Martina) or a man who nails it (Jynkx Monsoon).
I've always wondered why there aren't more female performers doing male drag. Carry Brownstein's Lance in Portlandia is the only example I can think of, and I love her take on masculinity.
Help me out here, because I'm always behind on how Kids These Days Talk: I thought "cisgender" meant "I was born this gender and I'm happy being this gender," period. Nothing to do with what gender(s) the person involved is attracted to emotionally or physically, and nothing to do with what clothes the person likes to wear.
If I'm understanding you, you seem to be implying that anyone who dresses as the other gender for performance reasons has some small desire to change genders. That doesn't quite make sense to me.
I propose: slyt
If a woman fucks many men, they call her a slut.
If a guy does the same thing, all of a sudden he's a homosexual.
It's reasonable on some level to resent that drag tends to dominate the social understanding, but it's not enough to subtract -- we need to add counterexamples. Eddie Izzard does well, but he's just one person. It's difficult, because your down-to-earth sort aren't out to get into the spotlight, and if they're trying to pass as women, they usually want to not be "identified" at all. Yet that's the reality we have to speak to and live by -- even for the plainsclothed among us, we should acknowledge and speak to this complexity whenever the character of the broader group is called into question... and it most definitely will be. Repeatedly.
Of course, it could be that the winners and losers in a sex-better-tinged atmosphere just aren't much to my liking. If one accepts that there always have to be winners and losers, there are worse systems.
Are the Privilege Olympics different from the Oppression Olympics?
Cisgender and cissexual (often abbreviated to simply cis) describe related types of gender identity where an individual's self-perception of their gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth. (Wiki)
If your idea of a new word were to go through, I think it should have a Scandinavian vowel (or at least Nordic, as Iceland might produce the winner).
There's a Scylla and Charybdis in taking down Bad Labels. One can get too NALTy, or, in a properly zealous effort to detach overly bad connotations from a neutral quality, end up attaching excessively good labels to it. The key is to steer between Disowning and Veneration to get to Acceptance.
I'm glad you enjoyed the FoL reference. Who would ever have thought that Ms Whelchel would have turned out to be such a Christianist? (I've accidentally encountered a few of her radio appearances, maybe three or four over the last dozen years; they were not edifying.)
I hope people will give Dan's answer to Girl the respect it deserves. So much attention is given to an erroneous good girl/slut divide that not enough attention is given to the equally erroneous past/present divide.
I see nothing wrong with (and a lot right with) the fact that I used to have sex with a lot of men and now am in a committed relationship that means monogamously sleeping with only one. I wish more women could make that transition gracefully. Instead, too often we get the likes of Dr. Laura and others on the Right who seek to disavow their sexual pasts. They enjoy it at the time, then decide that they were wrong and didn't really enjoy it. Worse, they seek to convince others not to "make the same mistakes" that they did.
As for reclaiming the word slut-- I wouldn't have chosen these, but the terms I hear used most often to describe women who have many sexual partners with full enjoyment and without shame are "liberated" and "modern" woman.
Crinoline @17: Does Dr. Laura have some kind of hypersexual past she now disavows? I would have put her in the "talking out of my air-tight repressed ass for the Lord" category, not the "was bathed in sin, now I'm born again" one.
How about slǝt?
It's like if someone writes in and says "Why am I so fat?" Yes, society treats fat people unfairly and ignores their beauty, but being too fat is a real problem. The question reflects the LW's despair over lack of control over an aspect of her life. The LW's question, "Why am I such a slut?" suggests that she doesn't want to be what she calls a slut. "Slut" doesn't mean "person who uses sex to celebrate freedom" to her. Maybe it means "person who seeks out partners who make him/her feel like crud." Maybe it mans "person who cheats on a good partner because he/she can't help him/herself." Maybe it means "Person who gets manipulated into dangerous situations of sex by others."
Sure, society has a double standard for men and women, but if you feel you're not in control of your own desires, whether they're for food or sex or anything else, that's bad. The question "are you fat/a slut? How many hookups do you have/what's your BMI?" is relevant, because sometimes people feel guilty even if they're not really fat/a slut, but don't ignore the question.
Visually, femininity offers an endless variety of outfits, accessories, hair styles, makeup, shoes, and, of course, breasts. Masculinity, on the other hand, gives you a choice between ... hmm ... different styles of facial hair?
As for mannerisms, femininity is about expressiveness whereas masculinity is about stoicism. It's no coincidence that "diva" is a feminine construct.
If you think about Carrie's Lance character, he wouldn't really work as a solo act. His best scenes involve interactions with his girlfriend, Nina. Still, there's something enjoyable (and strangely flattering) about a woman adeptly satirizing masculinity through imitation.
I actually nearly evoked her earlier for a different reason. One of her running themes to married women whose husbands were inclined to make more frequent requests in the bedroom than met with their preference was that they should just do it when asked if they were anywhere within reasonable distance of a neutral mood, because it would often get them into it and even a slightly subpar climax was still more fun than no climax.
It is absolutely impossible to know what the first letter writer really meant by her cryptic little note, but I have a hunch that Dan missed the intent entirely and so his answer, while I applaud it, likely didn't help the lw with her dilemma, which I think indicated more her own unhappiness with her sexual behavior and its aftermath, and less something requiring a feisty reclaimed-slut-empowering response to those who would try to shame her.
If she is complaining about the almost universal condemnation of sexually active females (see above), I leave it to the wordsmiths around here to do justice. If she is using it in the context of being an out of control addict, there are 12 step programs easily found.
Finally, if this is with regards to a youthful indiscretion, this is the nasty bite of experience.
Peace
Yeah, I pretty much call that "growing up". The "One Twue Way" people are usually that way because they're exhibiting the zealotry of the recently converted.
Maybe Dan should ask his winged monkeys to take up a collection to help with GC's self-awareness project.
Seriously, no matter how GC meant her question, unless she has already re-framed "slut" to be positive or unless she's asking Daniel Bergner/Jesse Bering level questions of causation, and wants to know from an evo-psych or biological perspective why sluttiness is a normal human female behavior pattern, she needs to start with this one:
"Why is my (or anyone else's) being a slut a bad thing?"
My sluttiness has brought me friends, adventures, self-knowledge, knowledge about straight men, stories, and a lot of fun. I recently responded to a Miley Cyrus slut-shaming piece on Facebook to launch a passionate defense not only of sluttiness in general, but using my own sluttiness by way of example. Then I thought about who sees my Facebook posts: my teen daughters (14 & 19), my 76-year-old mother, my former students (I am a university instructor), a few of my colleagues with whom I'm real friends (did I mention that I am a university instructor without tenure? At a Catholic university?). And then I thought that if I didn't post because those people would see it, my whole point about not being shamed for being a slut--about refusing to be shamed for something I don't find shameful--would have been disproved. So I posted it. I don't know who noticed it; my mom or kids didn't exactly give me a thumbs-up "like" sign! But I felt better for doing it.
I recommend a rephrase. By definition, being a slut is bad. OED: "A woman with too many sexual partners," emphasis mine. AHD: "A woman considered sexually promiscuous." ("Promiscuous" is "indiscriminate in choice of sexual partners") emphasis again mine.
Too much of anything is bad. Choosing one's sexual partners indiscriminately is unwise and can lead to medical and emotional problems.
Perhaps the issue is better phrased, "Why is my (or anyone's) participating in the hookup culture bad?" or "Why is my (or anyone's) having many sexual partners bad?"
As for Miley Cyrus, there's good slut-shaming and bad slut-shaming. Speaking ill of a woman who has lots of partners and it's all her own business? Bad slut-shaming. Speaking ill of a woman who rubs her genitalia against someone else's on national television? That person could use some shame.
Please tell me you didn't just use "evo-psych" - in a sentence. (A variation on shades of Graham Chase in My So-Called Life congratulating the straight-laced Patty on her use of "hooch" - as she yields to peer pressure and then proceeds to get drunk.) However, brushing that aside, I'll venture that it wouldn't surprise me if the Letter Entire did not consist of only that one sentence but rather merely concluded with it. Like Mr Symmington in The Moving Finger realizing that the first four words of the sentence, "I can't go on Wednesday," in his wife's handwriting would make a tolerable note for her arranged apparent suicide, clever Mr Savage realized that responding only to the last sentence of the letter would show how pro-feminist his sensibilities are. I salute him, but I'm inclined to wonder why he thought he needed to do such a thing.
If the real GC is following the thread, I entreat her to provide the full text if edited or to explain her reason for sending in such a bare-bones question. It seems to have been highly successful.
" (And along those lines, almost every person I've ever met refers to animals of indeterminate sex as "he," sometimes "it," NEVER "she.") "
- with the notable exceptions of cats. Almost everyone I know will refer to a cat whose gender is unknown to them as "she", ie, female until proven otherwise.
On the subject of straight men doing drag. I've had a couple of straight, cis male friends who enjoyed occasionally dressing as women (not, mind you, doing a drag show) - basically because they thought it might be fun to go out in a skirt and blouse, or because they like how it looks and want to wear it to, or just as a "dressing up in costume" sort of thing... the whole point dressing up in costume being to present to the world as something you aren't, in this case, as a woman. In those particular cases, I didn't feel that they were doing anything disrespectful to women, or to people who are transgender, etc etc. That's just my opinion though.
I'd heard the name, did a quick google, and...she can go back to "Meh". If she has damaged people through exercising hypocrisy, that just makes her like the rest of the conservatives that want other people to pay their way. It's not as if we aren't trying to do something positive...
Peace
Personally I don't care how many sex partners she has, and I'm not morally against revealing clothing and provocative dancing. I just thought the whole thing was crass, tacky and tasteless.
A drag queen (man) stands on a stage dressed as a woman and gets cheered.
Meanwhile, the transsexual just down the street is beaten to death for the same thing.
Being seen as a man in a dress is a male to female transsexuals 2nd worst fear (which often leads to their worst fear) and here you have a man doing that very thing for entertainment. More than that, comedians and the media in general have long used drag queens/man in a dress to make transsexuals the butt of their jokes.
Basically, while drag kings and queens mock the gender divide, that divide happens to be the struggle of transsexuals.
By coincidence there was a story about contact tracing for gonorrhea by the Spokane county health department on NPR this morning.
Antibiotic resistant GC is a real threat; the CDC had to change its treatment guidelines last year.
Corvicula1979@43, re: "couple of straight, cis male friends who enjoyed occasionally dressing as women"
I've been learning that many men who "occasionally" dress as women secretly think about it a lot, and actively look for excuses to do it in public. As to how many of them tend to fantasize about sex with guys when they're dressed as women, that's hard to say. But on crossdressers.com, many "straight" guys admit that they have had sex with men -- but only when dressed as women.
"while gay men seem to have an innate affinity for drag, there are straight guys out there who do it and do it well"
Not all of them turn out to stay straight, twenty, thirty, forty years later.
Assuming that no physical calamities ensue, or that no one is emotionally or psychically damaged--both of which, btw, can happen with one sex partner and aren't guaranteed even after 200--how can you justify this line of thought without invoking some value system that says sex is good only in measured doses or under a specific set of circumstances. After those conditions are established, it's a short jump to someone deciding who gets to set the appropriate number or limit, or under which circumstances (does there have to be love? Does there have to be marriage?) sex is okay.
I don't accept that.
There are ways to be sexy without dressing up as a baby hooker. If Ms. Cyrus wants to project the idea that she's not an innocent little girl any more, she'd be better off going sophisticated.
"Bitch" used to mean female canine. Then aggressive or strident human woman. Then sometimes, girlfriend. Now (in addition to these others), weak person, dominated by a more powerful one.
Denotations and connotations are additive. Look at the reclamation of "queer." There's no reason that "slut" has to keep the "too" of "too many" sexual partners in its denotation. We can decry slut shaming all we want, but the only way to really have an effect on the idea behind that phrase is to denature "slut," not by merely replacing the word and keeping the concept (there is some real number of acceptable sexual partners, and once a woman has exceeded it, she is to be morally censured), but by challenging the concept itself.
Too often the response I hear or read to someone being slut shamed is for the woman in question to declare that she isn't a slut. I think it would be better by far for her to say, "yeah, I am a slut. And I am happy. Being a slut isn't bad." We're here, we're sluts. Deal with it, bitches.
I didn't like it. I think it was stupid. But blaming Cyrus and Cyrus alone isn't good slut shaming (if there ever should or could be such a thing): it's the time-honored double standard.
Hate the production/performance all you want, but maybe remember to spread the condemnation around equally.
@43: Yes. All unknown cats are females. They just are.
As someone who is very risk-averse and is turned-off by promiscuity in the opposite sex, I really wish society held men to the same standards that we hold women to with regard to not sleeping around. It shows that a person does not value intimacy, and sex-positivity doesn't mean much when it's encouraging sex without any sense of intimacy. Intimacy isn't just a warm fuzzy feeling you get when you have sex - intimacy means being able to communicate well, and I think it's really necessary for sex to really be considered safe. Whenever Dan gets one of these calls where someone is asking Dan things that they ought to be asking their sex partner, that is an example of sex without intimacy, and that is an unsafe environment in which to be having sex. I say it's unsafe, and not just uncomfortable, because if you don't feel comfortable enough with someone to ask them if they've been tested for STDs or to wear a condom, then that lack of intimacy is an unsafe environment for sex.
Sorry to spoil everyone's fun. I am curious if there are any other straight/bi/questioning/etc women or even gay/bi/questioning/etc men who are also turned off by promiscuous men. I seriously feel like I can't be the only one.
oh for fucks sake
Sincerely,
One Exasperated Slut
I'm dead positive you're not the only one.
But wow holy shit, am I thankful you don't run things.
Sorry to keep harping on this, but, what should we call the happily sexually active women that have only one partner? I'm not drawing a value judgement, I just would like a non-offensive term for women like my wife. It bothers me somehow that I can't come up with anything better than MILF.
Ah, whatever...
Peace
Or sløt which may not mean anything but has that unpronounceable vowel that looks cool.
Becoming accepting of sluttiness as a good thing doesn't have to mean condemning monogamy or exclusivity. It's the same principle as realizing that same-sex marriages have no impact on opposite-sex marriages.
The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities (ISBN 1-890159-01-8) is an English language non-fiction book written by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy (given as pseudonym Catherine A. Liszt for the book's first edition). The book discusses consensual non-monogamy as a lifestyle, and provides practical guidance on how such long-term relationships work and are put into practice.
The authors define the term slut as "a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you."
The term is reclaimed from its usual use as a pejorative and as a simple label for a promiscuous person. Instead, it is used to signify a person who is accepting of their enjoyment of sex and the pleasure of intimacy with others, and chooses to engage and accept these in an ethical and open way — rather than as cheating.
The Ethical Slut discusses how to live an active life with multiple concurrent sexual relationships in a fair and honest way.
Sexed-up (nope).
Do you just want a word that tells the world, "my wife likes to have sex, she's good at it, and we have it frequently."? I guess there's no such a one-word descriptor. Do we need one?
But the feminists where I pop in from time to time tend not to be of the sort who think that the Solution to Everything is to start holding men to the unfair standards that have been imposed on women. Equalizing agency and then arguing where the line might most beneficially be drawn is much more the order of the day.
You straight kids play tag on your own lawns! If Mr Married wants to brag that his wife is as busy with him as you once were with a dozen people combined, I don't want any part of either side of that.
(Actually, there seem to be one or two profound angles to that comment, Ms Cute. Do you really mean to call orientation so transitional?)
I must admit that the best sex I've ever had was in the context of extraordinary intimacy (looking at you, NotASpaceAlien @57); nevertheless, I've had had plenty of great times with near-strangers. It's a different kind of sex. Sometimes freer.
But the point is that neither kind is better or worse, objectively, or morally speaking.
I don't find promiscuous men particularly attractive. I enjoy intimacy.
That is exactly why I don't want to discourage promiscuity in anyone. If it isn't socially acceptable to be promiscuous how do I know that the guy I am interested in is really not promiscuous but just puts on a good front?
How does it promote intimacy if someone has to pretend to be something that they aren't?
Or is Dan just playing on the title of the memoir "Girl, Interrupted?"
I think there must have been more to the letter.
(Thank you for not choosing to paraphrase Ms Nixon. I used to be neutral about that group of women until I saw how complete Ms Parker's unjustified self-satisfaction had become [during an interview in which Mr Cooper was doing everything but service her] and now they all default to LMB territory.)
The idea that people who have been promiscuous can't be intimate is totally ludicrous.
Personally, I find the opposite. I don't want to be with someone who can't tell the difference between sex and intimacy.
You're more than welcome to prefer non-promiscuous people but that reasoning is way off in my mind.
Please don't confuse the "Palin Approved" Commercial season with the celebration of the birth of a child of unmarried teenage parents escaping the oppression of a murderous patrician society.
Peace
please re-read my post, keeping in mind that it is a response to NotASpaceAlien.
I don't say that intimacy and promiscuity are mutually exclusive, just that I like the first, and am not too fond of the second.
My main point was: trying to enforce a social stigma for promiscuous people will lead to less intimacy.
I propose the "Oh-TL":
One True Love encompasses any gender in any orientation in a monogamous relationship (should we cover monogamish here too?). For the purpose of our definition, frequent, loving sexual relations are implied. No length of relationship is required, though OOTL ("Oo-TL" or Old One True Love) could be a possibility.
Why do we need a one word descriptor? Because it represents another step in the sex positive direction. Seriously, no one word descriptor for what is purported to be the "ideal" relationship state in our society?! I want a single word for describing the person that makes George Takei say "Oh My!" out loud.
I just want to point out the sex negativity that pervades our society (and allows the "sex sells" thing to be used as a cudgel on children!). I hate bullying (as the youngest in a large family and lifelong nerd) and the artificial barriers of race, gender, and orientation that (for poor overprivileged me) get in the way.
I just need a little quiet time to drink away my tantrum (green tea should do).
Peace
Maybe one day the word "slut" won't mean "too many" or "indiscriminate," but right now it does. Being a slut is bad because it means the person doesn't think about his/her sexual choices.
While we're being precise, be careful with the word "only." There are plenty of ways to fight the double standard that have nothing to do with the word "slut" at all. Racism is taking a huge hit, and the word that rhymes with trigger didn't get reclaimed. It got phased out and replaced by words for "black person" that connote strength. "Chick" used to be an insult and now suggests energy and agency, but we could also chuck "slut" and start fresh with a word without negative connotations.
@55 I have similar suspicions. Cyrus is a young woman and may have been pressured. (Remember Brittney Spears? At the time, she said her costumes et al. were all her own idea.) However, she is at least technically an adult. Is it worse to give her all the blame for her performance or to assume that she was a weak-minded little girl who cannot be given responsibility for her own actions?
@60 I don't know. "Happy"?
@75 YES.
@79 I'm confused. How is "sex sells" used on children and what does sex-negativity have to do with it? I don't think your idea got across.
Most of my friends made the transition that Dan mentions. We manage to look back at that part of our lives without shame or regret. I have the attitude that sleeping around was the right for me then, it isn't the right thing for me now. It might be the right thing for me again at some later date. I can't predict the future.
The puzzle for me is what happened to those 2 who didn't make the transition. They basically dropped me when they took up monogamy, children, and that white picket fence. It's like I reminded them of a past they'd rather forget. Or honestly, I don't know what they were thinking. I can say that those rejections from friends I had no sexual relationship with have hurt me far more than getting dumped by men who slept with me and moved on.
Maybe this has nothing to do with Dr. Laura. I can't say that those ex-friends ever took to far Right hypocrisy, but it has seemed like it to me.
Secondly, Is there anything actually morally or ethically wrong with being indiscriminate? Why? We may fall back on ideas of disease protection now, but the real and underlying reason is that a woman who isn't choosy about her sexual partners is dirty and sloppy (hence the earliest meaning of "slut") and is worthy of condemnation. For the record, historically, any woman who had sex with anyone except her husband(s), even if just one other man, even if raped, was considered to be a"slut."
As far as the Miley Cyrus issue goes, I do not assume that Miley Cyrus is a "weak-minded little girl who cannot be given responsibility for her own actions." She's an adult. But she didn't act in a vacuum, and in the larger picture, she had much less responsibility as an individual artist performing a song and dance routine on a show than the show's producer or the network executives. This is not because she's a powerless, manipulated little girl, but because any individual artist/performer has less power in terms of a program's content than the producer, the sponsors, the network. I don't mean to imply that they pressured her into her performance; I simply wonder why all the vitriol is reserved for the woman in the bear costume with her tongue lolling out and the foam finger and no one considers chastising network executives who no doubt got hard thinking about what this much publicity would do for their ratings.
All the answers were great this week and so were the letters! WTF did DYKES think a bunch of Reddit Lesbians were going to say? It sounds more like a Coven, or a fearful tribulation out of the Odyssey to me.
If you've never seen nickelodeon or Disney channel advertisements for young girls, or beer commercials, then it's tough to explain. The bottom line is to entice girls to role play with toys reinforcing sex role "displays" (makeup, flashy minimal clothing) while setting them up for the hammering society doles out to girls that actually act that way. If you can stand it, watch programming aimed at preteen girls for the advertising. Then contrast how society would likely treat the girls if they themselves dressed/acted out the same way.
Enticement of the forbidden, need I go farther?
It comes down to the weirdness I didn't want my preteen daughter to be exposed to. If I'm unclear on the concept, sorry. I grew up with advertising for cigarettes and shampoo that enticed men to fetishize/touch random women's hair.
Peace
Please shout it loud and from the rooftops. She is a walking, talking basket case of self-loathing and projection.
Slat: slattern, negative female connotation
Slet: no connotation
Slit: negative female connotation
Slot: potentially negative female connotation
Slut: negative female connotation
Slyt: no connotation
Odd how those homonyms ended up having such specific connotations.
Peace
PS: I'm just feeling aggravated by the whole commercial season spiced with SAD thing.
The flip side of that is that if someone is not indiscriminate and unthinking, then he or she is not a slut. I would add that even if Ms. Cyrus has never had sex with anyone, her behavior at the awards show was still slutty and merits shame. I do believe that the network executives should be blamed for Ms. Cyrus's performance. There is a remote possibility that it was entirely her own idea, but they shouldn't have permitted it. It is likely that she was at least encouraged, if not pressured, to behave so tastelessly.
@84 I think I see what you were getting at. Children, especially girls, are sold sexualized and gender-role-ified products on the one hand and punished for either rebelling from these roles or from acting them out as they get older. I did wonder why the girls in children's programming were always so scantily clad even in the snow (and this when I was a small child).
Decision to do/for...?
Girls want to be girls...Yay!
Girls want to be walking/dancing models of commercial excess...?
Girls who want to be (young) women free to explore their sexuality...SHAME!
Girls and boys that are given factual information on their reproductive rights and responsibilities...SHAME!
Girls and boys that are told that unless they've got a certain body type and clothing allowance they're losers...?
Girls and boys that want what is being fed to them (through marketing) because they aren't mature enough to reject messages that will make them miserable...? (Hey, let's sneak out and get really drunk!)
My daughter wears clothing that sometimes gets sent back for a censorial redo (son: Mr. Shlub, like his Dad). She's a teen, so it's her decision (NOT Glamor or some marketing executive's dictate) and as I've stated in weeks past her sexuality is her own, with our advice (NO SHAME!).
I wish G/C had a source of knowledge that had allowed her to avoid being shamed. I hope that comes across as being without judgement. As I stated in my first post in this thread: youthful indiscretion has consequence, as does ignorance. And with the return of antibiotic resistent venereal diseases...
Peace
I don't think that what I would do sexually is the objective standard for sexual propriety. There are many things that I wouldn't do that I think people should be allowed to do. As for what makes a sexual practice legitimately subject to public approval or censure, I'd say being performed in public is a pretty good marker.
I think reclaiming the word "slut" is not just a distraction from the bigger picture of feminism, it's counter-intuitive. Like most things in our culture, it further paints women as sex objects as opposed to human beings.
...according to you. This is why such definitions are problematic. I thought Cyrus was just awkward myself.
I, too, lament the emphasis our culture puts on women's appearance. But that's not what sluttiness means. I know plenty of young women who are very selective about their partners, and have had very few sexual partners--which seems to be DRF's criteria for deeming a woman a slut--but they still are consumed with the need to be attractive (read "hot") at all times. They still buy into cultural values that say women should be pretty and wear makeup and always look young, and maintain or achieve a particular body type and height/weight proportion. They worry obsessively about aging, about every body part's inability to conform to some media-imposed ideal. They dress in trendy, revealing, tight clothes. But that doesn't make them "sluts."
Conversely, I know women who are professional sex workers, who are "sluts" in the truest sense of the word. Some of these women dress downright dowdily. All are middle-aged, and I'm sure that they don't escape the tyranny of youth culture--but what American woman has? However, if sluttiness were judged by presentation, you'd never, I mean ever, in a million years guess that these women had tons and tons of indiscriminate sex.
@99 I agree. We need to come up with a catchier name than "woman who enjoys sex and is in charge of her own sex life"/"woman who participates in the hookup culture." "Free spirit" sounds a little wispy to me.
Everyone, if you were going to come up for a word for sex-positive, sexually active woman who's in control of her choices that wasn't "slut," what would you pick?
As for the drag thing... people who go through hormonal and other medical procedures to change their gender may be very emotional and insecure at times. This may cause them to see others in a somewhat similar situation who prefer not to go all the way as somewhat "unauthentic" and threatening. Most of them calm down couple years down the road, and if they don't then it is their problem. Michelle T. from PNW, hope you're reading this.
@96 Hunter,
Argh,
This is when I want different colored text in this blog.
The SHAME tag is societal. Keep in mind my target audience is preteen; still think they should be tarted up? In order to sell more dreck? If you didn't see the "you stand out pack attack" in your middle school, thank goodness (I found middle school females to be VICIOUS both during my tenure and for my children's (nieces & nephews as well); the psychological warfare was heartbreaking).
The NO SHAME tag is parental. Is our approach to being sex positive and (we feel) age appropriate 360 degrees opposite from society? Maybe. Are our children getting support? Yes. Are they getting in trouble or self harming? No. What else matters?
If you don't see an age inappropriate advertising assault on elementary/middle school preteens, fine. I did the easiest thing possible, banning Nickelodeon and Disney channels. Did it work for my children? I think so.
Peace
I'm a slut. And I teach critical thinking, which you're not demonstrating. I'm taken pretty seriously by my colleagues and peers. I'm not trying to "market" myself, but if I was, the only people I would worry I wouldn't appeal to are judgmental, narrow-minded conservative misogynists.
@DRF: What, exactly, constitutes "unthinking?" How much thought should one put into deciding whether or not to have sex with someone in order to escape your "slut" designation? What if someone has put careful thought and consideration into the pros and cons of having sex with 87 people? Is s/he still a slut? What if someone has only had sex with two people by age 30, but in both cases, gave no thought to the consequences of having sex with those two people (or the thought consisted of nice hair; I want that)?
What kinds of factors should be considered in order to satisfy your requirement for "thinking" or "discrimination" when choosing whether or not to have sex with a particular person?
Who gets to decide on what those factors should be for everyone? Should this be codified? What criteria should be demonstrated to be eligible for the title of arbiter of sexual correctness? You are free to judge and condemn any man or woman who doesn't follow your own rules of discrimination, of course, but then, so is each individual. Which means that there is no objective definition of who qualifies as a slut.