Too bad I went to sleep before getting your guys' responses about the whole Rory = slut thing. Still gonna respond, though it's been a while.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like much about Rory this season at all, and I really don't like that they had her have an affair with a married man. Especially a man who got married pretty much to spite her, from what I can tell. It was selfish, stupid, ill-advised, completely evil and unfair to poor little Lindsay, and should have screwed her over a lot more than it did.

But it's not like she cheerfully continued screwing him behind his wife's back for months or years. She had sex with him twice, in a two-day period, in the heat of passion or whatever-the-hell. Lack of self-control? Sure. Incredibly slutty behavior? I don't think so. The term "slut" seems to imply to me that she would feel no remorse for her behavior and, no matter what she said to Lorelai about it, she clearly did. She ran away to Europe for two months with Emily, for God's sake, just to pull herself away from the situation! If I had found myself in such a screwed-up mess, my response would be something similar. Take myself away from it so I can get perspective and then act.

And she acted correctly. She tried to pull out, to end the illicit affair. The exact results? Not good, clearly. But if the letter had not been found, Dean would have either split or not, his own decision.

Maybe the strength of my reaction is purely because I don't understand the term "slut." Some dictionaries say it can mean simply "an adulterous woman" which I suppose Rory fits. But then the girls that get called "sluts" in high school aren't, because the football team, generally, isn't married. The term "slut", to me, has come to be synonymous with "sexual manipulator" or at least "shamefully easy" (only with even more disdain and judgmentalism - God, I really hate the word) and I don't believe that Rory fits those meanings.

There's no correlation for me between "slut" and "sexual manipulator." To me it means "person who boinks with people they shouldn't have sex with."

So Rory was a slut.

A man who bangs a married woman and is even momentarily defiant about it is a slut in my book too.

Huh. Okay. Fair, then.

So the mislabelling is actually those girls in high school? Because, you know, much as I find it distasteful, having a who-can-give-the-most-blowjobs-to-football-players contest isn't really something I would actually qualify as "shouldn't".

As for the man thing: I'm sure you do think that. It's one of the reasons I love this board and the people on it. But I'm sure that if Dean were the main character, "Dean is a big fat slut" would not have become a major internet expression, you know?

To me it means "person who boinks with people they shouldn't have sex with."

Huh. To me it's all about frequency.

To me it's all about frequency.

If I have sex once every three hours with the same guy does that make me a slut?

Gris -- I do think the blowing the players is basically slutty, just as I'd think eating the cheerleaders was.

To me it's about indiscriminate boinkage - a consistent lack of regard for niceties of place, time, partner. Two partners in a year doesn't even begin to ping my slutometer, not even if one of them is married. Especially if it only happened twice and she physically fled the continent to get away from it. Spectacularly bad judgment, yes; sluttery, no.

Of course, I speak as someone who (a) has seen exactly one episode of GG ever, and (b) has the same visceral squick about the word slut as Gris. Buffistas aside, it's very much treated in the big wide world as a punishing label for girls who openly like sex.

I feel weird being on the more conservative side of the term, since I got no problem with casual sex.

But hey. I don't feel being called a slut is life-ending either, so that may be it. I've been called it before, I'll probably be called it again.

JZ got it much better than I did.

Slut is just a word used to insult women for being sexual beings. I try not to use it. I itch when I see it. There's no masculine counterpart that carries the same sting, because of broader sexual...I don't even want to call them mores--opinions, maybe?

Anyhow, I'm agin it, and I'm for Gris, if he's anti-it.

Holy cats, Bob Harris knows Robin/Scrappy? He just got so much cooler in my book.

(Robin, of course, can get no cooler, having reached the top of my personal Cool Food Chain.)