Slut doesn’t mean who you sleep with anymore

I learned what the word slut was when I was 11 years old.  I was explaining the intricacies of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield’s love lives in Sweet Valley High to a babysitter.  She said they sounded like sluts.  I asked my mom later what the word meant.  She explained to me it meant ‘women who slept with my many partners’ then she asked me how I found out about the word.  Needless to say, that babysitter didn’t watch me that much anymore.

The word was mentioned here and there in the media while I was in high school and the beginning of college.  But it was around 2001 with the onset of the Hilton sisters and Tara Reid that I heard the word thrown around a lot more.

We all know that Paris Hilton became a household name when her sex tape with an ex was released to the media around the time her show The Simple Life debuted.  The world was quick to diagnose her as a promiscuous, attention-seeking slut.   I wondered how she could be branded as a slut when she made the tape with a boyfriend.  I am sure Ms. Hilton has had her share of one-night stands, but I wondered why she was being attacked for having consensual sex with a partner.  What wasn’t under as much of an attack was her misinformed decision to leave such a private tape in unreliable hands.  Of course, she could have wanted the video to be released.  However, the fact is the media narrowly focused on her sexuality and proclaimed her a slut but no one ever paid much attention to actions that led to the release of the tape.

Now we have Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie and a slew of other young women who wear provocative clothing, party all night long, dance on table tops with a bottle of tequila, have a cute boy or much older man on their arms, and some sort of tiny dog that accompanies them everywhere.   The terms media slut and attention whore have been used to describe each of these young women more than once.  But what struck me about these descriptions is that many of these women have been in long-term relationships.  Whenever they are caught kissing someone at a party it is written up in Us and People.  This behavior is described as risqué, unrespectable, and nothing a “good girl” would do.  But what twenty something year old woman hasn’t kissed a boy at a party?

Slut no longer just means how many people you sleep with.  It means you enjoy life with abandon and don’t really give a flying f*** about what people think.  It’s a power statement for some people; the young women being described as sluts own millions of dollars, are successful business entrepreneurs, and seem to live satisfying if drama filled lives.  Of course, these standards don’t determine happiness for everyone.  Standards of success have changed in the last decade from having a law degree equaling success to a reality TV show meaning “you’ve made in life.”  With our revised priorities, our language has adjusted itself.

Our sluts today are not the sluts of yesterday who thrived on men’s attention and sexual dalliances, today’s so-called sluts treat men as an accessory.  Of course, the term is still used to explain women’s relationship to men and their sexual behavior.  How do we move away from explaining women in direct relationship to men?  Of course, we can’t get anywhere with that unless we take women out of the sexual microscope.  Once that is accomplished, our priorities will focus on talent and intelligence as main indicators of success.  Sexuality will always be a part of the picture but not the central determining factor toward a woman’s identity.