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.)
Huh. I have never hesitated to call a man a slut. Did so this weekend, in fact, quite a few times. I'm also fond of the term man-whore.
Over the past 2-3 years I've read three or four parenting/counseling books like Reviving Ophelia, Odd Girl Out, and The Sex Lives of Teenagers, along with I can't even begin to count how many newspaper and magazine articles, and it's kind of disheartening how little has changed in the last few decades WRT adolescents and young adults and the way they see female sexuality.
The double standard about a boy who has shitloads of sex with anything that moves (or lies about it and pretends he has) is great, and a girl who is visibly connected to her sexuality -- anything from actually sleeping around to sleeping with her steady boyfriend to being a virgin who wears sexy outfits to school -- is slapped down for it, hard. And of course girls do just as much of the enforcing and punishing as boys do.
It's something that therapists and teachers and counselors have been aware of for a while, and working to change, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference.
Bob is a wonderful guy. How do you know him, Karl?
p.s. thanks for the sweet talk.
Karl is great with the sweet talk.
