Friday, March 22, 2013

Slut Realities


On April 29, 2012 I reposted a blog a friend sent me on Facebook. It was about the idea of a “slut”.

Essentially, the idea of a “slut” is a myth told to women to keep them in their place. Just as Santa will not actually bring you coal on Christmas if you break a few of the house rules, you will not actually turn into an intrinsically tainted, unpalatable creature if you break one of society’s rules and have sex with one too many men. The word “slut” isn’t a criticism for having too much sex necessarily, but for being a woman: a real, living, breathing woman with quirks, foibles, normal sexual feelings, and personality; and failing to live up to the societal ideal for a woman: the passive, pliable, perpetually innocent, and sexually available Barbie doll. --- STFU, Conservatives

I wasn’t as well versed with women and gender studies last year as I am now, but it’s definitely worth mentioning that I still have a lot to learn. To prove my point, it wasn’t until a few months a go I gave into the process of reclaiming the word to combat slut shaming. I have always maintained that sluts did not exist, as there is not a unanimous definition of the word. For example, there is not a formula that calculates the amount of sexual encounters a woman has in period of time and with whom to produce a “slut”.  But the reason why I am bringing this up now is because I have seen “slut” and “whore” way too many times this week, and I was able to understand that the experiences of the person being labeled a slut are so real.

You see when the two young men went to trial after evidently raping a young lady; the entire media explodes with things like:

“I’ll stop tweeting about this whenever everyone understands that Jane Doe is a whore.”
“The slut was definitely asking for the D.”
#sheaslut
“Whore status”
“She’s a town whore anyway…”
“lol I say I don’t feel bad for that chick in #Steubenville and all the sluts come out to defend the slut”
“the bitch got what she deserved”

The list goes on and on, but the ultimate message here is that sluts are not seen in any way shape or form as being real life human beings because degrading humans is wrong but degrading sluts is not.

After reading this I thought to myself, how easy is it to reduce a human being to a simple deviant label to excuse one’s wrongful actions. These labels exist to dehumanize people and justify oppression including rape. If the woman is a slut she is no longer warranted respect, dignity, and according to these tweets deserves to be raped. Why? Because the slut is not a woman she is a soulless machine whose function is to have sex. The slut is merely a sex toy. A slut is a thing that fell short from being a human being because she was not able to live up to society’s standard of “woman”; the submissive, sexless, passive, poise woman. A slut is the vicious threat to the patriarch society, the very basis of our culture. So of course, the slut needs to be put in her place! And if you rape a slut it is not a crime because you were only using the machine as it was intended.

So if the slut shows signs of being somewhat of a real human such as claiming to be abused, society is extremely quick to point out that she isn’t, because above all, above a human being, she is a slut.

In the end, the social construction of a slut is never enough to define her realness but is always enough to take realness away from her. And all that’s left to understand is that the slut’s experiences are so real, and those experiences carry feelings, and her feelings are more than enough to prove that she lives.

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