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Please, Call Me Trollop

Slut, whore, skank, dirty and demeaning, all of these words call to mind one type of person: a woman. We do not call just any woman these words; we call a promiscuous woman, a sexually free woman, these cruel, demeaning names, names with such power as to evoke hatred and loathing. These women are dirty, sinful, immoral, and wrong. After all, a good woman would only have sex with one man, ever, and that man would be her husband, right? A man, on the other hand, who enjoys sex, sleeps with multiple women, and does not attach emotion to sex, is a player, a stud, and maybe even a man whore. The first two are fun and sexy; the last, in order to be applied to a male, actually needs a masculine adjective and, even then, it comes with giggles and snickers.

Even when a woman is not promiscuous, if she is simply hated, she is labelled with cruel names in order to evoke pain. I ask why? Words are just that: words, and yet they have so much power as to describe a whole gender and cause that gender pain. While cliché, the old moniker, ?sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me? has something to it. On the surface the cliché is, of course, wrong. Words obviously can and do hurt. However, what was actually meant by the old phrase is that words only have the power we give them. We can alleviate some of the pain from these labels by ignoring them. I suggest we go one step further. We should not simply ignore the insults spat in our direction. We should embrace them.

In her essay ?The Power of Words? Simone Weil accurately explains what words truly contain. She states, ?If we grasp one of these words, all swollen with blood and tears, and squeeze it, we find it is empty? (221). Slut, Whore, and Skank, are all empty words when we remove their power. Simone Weil adds:

It is true, of course, that not all of these words are intrinsically meaningless; some of them do have meaning if one takes the trouble to define them properly. But when a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and can no longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomes simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. (221?22)

It is our job, as sexually liberated women to remove the banner, the war cry of the self-proclaimed righteous, take their ?hostile slogan? and force them to define it. Rather than simply sitting back and asking a traditionally patriarchal society to change its ways, we, as women, should change our attitudes. If we are to embrace these insults we can force the insult spewing masses to define the labels they throw at us. We may be sluts, but we are proud. We are the ones with more love and pleasure to give. We are the ones with multiple partners, and that makes us not individual women, but an army of a heady mix of passion and support. All these labels do is accurately describe our objectives.

I am all but the meaning of a traditional, and dare I say, pious, woman. In fact I am not even typical in the ?clique? I belong to. I was not brought up to believe in waiting until marriage specifically, but I was brought up with respect for myself. When I was sixteen years old my uncle asked me where my purity ring was. It was all the rage at the time, a symbol of virginity only to be replaced by a wedding ring. Having no clue what the right answer was, I told him I didn?t know where to get them, and one week later I had one in the mail. I didn?t believe in it. I didn?t like it. But I did not yet know why I didn?t agree or believe. Fast forward a couple of years, I discovered sex, which society told me was a sinful, dirty, evil abomination of human nature. Once again, I asked why? Why was it bad? Why was it wrong? Was it because I was a woman? It was accepted and encouraged that the soldier I loved have it. To his friends I was a prude if I didn?t, and not worth his time. He served; he deserved to ?get some.? To the rest of society I was a slut if I gave it up. Why was he allowed, even encouraged to have sex? Why wasn?t I?

Months later, my future husband and I delved into the swinging lifestyle. I found more freedom and more happiness in a sexually liberated community than in any other world I had yet to witness. Seven years ago I found who I was. I was the virgin slut. I had only slept with one man, a man I would eventually marry, but I was promiscuous. He relished in my new found self and I suddenly went from good girl to slut, and I was honest. Therein lay the problem, though, honesty. I could find honesty in my relationship. I could find honesty among a few in our newfound lifestyle. But I could not find it in the world as a whole. A woman had two choices: she could be nice, and monogamous once she was married, and, let?s face it, dishonest, lying about her desires, pretending she had sex only to fulfill her ?wifely duties,? never for her own pleasure; or she could be honest, or maybe even just suspect for promiscuity, cruelly teased with names meant to drag her down. Sadly, the honest ones in the world were not that way because they knew themselves, but because they sought themselves. And the only thing they found was cruelty, both in the form of words they themselves gave power, and in the form of men who only sought to use them for their own pleasure and no more.

My protest lies not with these misguided women: they need help, assurance, and a new path to find their confidence. My protest also does not lie with ignorant people who choose to mislabel the wrong women. My protest lies with my fellow sexually liberated woman. I argue that we stop allowing the wrong women to be granted our hard earned labels. We stop being insulted by the labels. Embrace them! Enjoy them! Relish in them! Words have such great power; instead of letting them be used only negatively to tear us down, it is our responsibility to change our mindset, and, maybe, change the world. It is our responsibility to change the extreme power of these former insults into empowerment. Now, finally, one can feel the power of being labeled a slut.

In the book The Ethical Slut, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy define a slut as ?a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you? (4). Like the authors of The Ethical Slut, I seek to ?reclaim the original English words [relating to sex] and, by using them as positive descriptors, wash them clean? (8). The difficulty in changing the way we think of words like ?slut? and ?whore? is that they are so deeply ingrained into our psyche as negative words, that it becomes complicated to ?shake them from your own personal ethos? (Easton 14).

We generally speak of sex in two forms: the polite scientific form, and the dirty, degrading, insulting form. The Ethical Slut says:

If the only polite way to talk about sexuality is in medical Latin?vulvas and pudendas, penes and testes?are only doctors allowed to talk about sex? Is sex all about disease? Meanwhile, most of the originally English words?cock and cunt, fucking and oh yes, slut?have been used as insults to degrade people and their sexuality and often have a hostile or coarse feel to them. (7)

So we can either be polite, and medical, removing all humanism and passion from the most basic human and passionate act, or we can degrade the most intimate act of love, in any form, to something base, violent, and crass. I refuse this mindset. As humans we share love and passion through the joining of two (or more) people. So if we are going to use the only words we have at our easy disposal for describing a beautifully passionate and powerful act, then we must change our reaction to the power of these words. In order to do that, we must change our attitudes.

Slut should become a word of power for the labeled, rather than used against them. A word that screams ?I am alive, I am passionate, and I am generous with the love that I have to share!? It is inevitable that the world would suffer resistance in the changing of such deeply embedded ideas. It is always necessary to start small, start with only slightly offensive words. Start with words that require us to think about their meaning, words we are forced to define before we can have a gut wrenching reaction. With that I say we start with trollop. A word no longer strongly embedded in our vernacular. This is a word that will require thought, thoughts that will lead to understanding sexual liberty. So in that spirit, I will be proud, if you would please, call me ?Trollop.?

Works Cited Easton, Dossie, Hardy, Janet W. The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures. New York: Celestial, 2009. Print.

Weil, Simone."The Power of Words." Simone Weil: An Anthology. Ed. Sian Miles. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Print.

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