She's A Real Mae West ~ July 2007

"You mean.....the sluuuuuuut?" The word hissed slowly out of his mouth between bites.

About five weeks ago, I was sitting at dinner in a fancy Hollywood restaurant with three movers and shakers, all guys. Two of these men were screenwriters and one was an advertising executive.

The conversation veered toward, what else, but last season's American Idol, the various contestants and what we each thought of them.

At one point, we started to talk about the beautiful girl from New Jersey, only no one could remember her name and one of the screenwriters said, "You know... the sluuuuuuut." I didn’t think I heard him correctly, because who in their right mind would say that in front of well, someone like me, a vocal proponent for women? So I said, "What did you say?" And again he said, with relish, "The sluuuut from New Jersey." He drew the word "slut" out, savored it, as if the longer it took him to say it, the bigger and better he became. Here the conversation came to an absolute dead stop. No screeching, no grinding, no swerving. Just dead silence a beat and then quietly seething, I kindly asked "Why would you call her that? You don’t even know her."

He gave the response of someone quite thrilled with himself: "I know the type. She was the girl in high school that ‘did’ everyone."

Again, me trying not to sound incredulous because this was a really nice guy who I cared about: "Maybe she liked ‘doing’ and being ‘done’. Some women, a lot of women actually like ‘doing’ very much."

Him, with disgust: "She just gave the guys exactly what they wanted."

Me: "And that’s... a bad thing?"

Him, with an air of male superiority: "Just makes her a sluuuuuuut."

Again, he was savoring-every-last-drop-of-the-word. I had to ask, "If you gave me exactly what I wanted, would that make you a slut?" No answer. I continued: "What’s the matter with enjoying ‘doing it’ and, most importantly, what’s the matter with giving someone what they want? Isn’t that like, a form of love or caring?" I inquired. “And when a guy gives a girl ‘it’, does that make him a detestable slut?”

Ah... finally a hint of lucidity behind his eyes. He veered the conversation very quickly away from sex in general. I would like to believe he found a little education in our conversation. I would really like to. When he so cavalierly branded this beautiful young woman a slut, I can't even explain to you my visceral reaction. It was the eruption of a primitive maternal protectiveness. Where did the word "slut" come from, anyway? In the five weeks I've been stewing over this, I did a little research. The earliest use I could find of anything like it was from Chaucer in 1386. He used "sluttish" to mean sloppy and dirty (and he was talking about a man, by the way). Yet somehow, in less than a century, the word "slut" became the definition of a "loose and immoral” woman... and only a woman. Funny how that works. So here in 2007, when the word "slut" came slithering out of that screenwriter’s mouth, suddenly it was Salem, Massachusetts circa 1692, and someone had just pointed a finger at a girl from New Jersey and screamed "Witch!”. Or maybe I didn't travel back quite so far in time; maybe it was just back to my junior year of high school.

There was a girl, we'll call her Mary, who got pregnant that year. She was immediately labeled a “slut” by nameless, faceless, high school kids. I remember she used to wear blue knee socks with a lavender skirt to school at least once a week. She was a little quirky that way. She didn't wear a lot of make-up. You would have called her fresh-faced; she had light brown hair down to her shoulders and she didn’t talk much. But she was pregnant, and that made her a "slut." All the other sluts that we'd seen wore lots of make-up and had big hair. So when Mary became a slut we, the good girls of Hempfield High, didn’t know where the next one was going to turn up. We were each privately terrified that it was going to be one of us. Once Mary was labeled a slut, that was it for her. I remember one day walking toward her in the hallway between classes. She carried her books close to her chest over her slightly protruding belly. Her eyes connected to mine... sweet, gentle eyes. A cheerleader in full cheering regalia walked towards her from the other direction and growled “slut” as she passed. Mary dropped her eyes from mine and kept walking past me, shamed and decimated. The next week, she dropped out of school. I never saw her again. I heard she had a healthy baby boy. To this day, I wonder how she coped, enduring hateful stares, cruel remarks and mean-spirited shoves in the halls. I wonder where she is now? I’m still haunted by Mary.

Words are so dangerous. They’re so ephemeral, not really there, yet so deceptively powerful. "Kike," "n&##*r," "chink", "spic," "wop," "mick"... just reading these words makes you cringe, doesn't it? They're unacceptable; they blatantly reek of racism and hatred. And yet the words "slut," "whore," "skank," and "cunt" are used daily without a blink of the eye. Let's face it, words like "slut" are assassinations of the same ilk. They are annihilators of character, verbal prisons from which there is no escape. They are social condemnation; they are obliterators of lives. I’ve seen it. Girls like Mary haunt all of us. Mary was not the first and she was not the last "slut" to be ostracized in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, or in any other town in America.

Through enormous social and political pressure, racist remarks have become almost a crime, whereas the slut-whore-skank-cunt words have not. I don’t understand how one set of hateful words becomes off-limits under social pressure, yet another set does not. Even more baffling, the use of words to annihilate women has become so deeply enmeshed in our culture that the main propagators are now women! Women attacking women. Isn’t that a recipe for extinction?

IT’S NOT OKAY ANYMORE! Can you say it with me a little more quietly? It’s not okay anymore. And here’s how we make it not okay: first off, a woman who enjoys "doing it" and having "it" done is a healthy, normal, even wholesome woman. Notice the word woman. I am not advocating for irresponsible sexual behavior or premature sexual activity but to stop with the abusive hate filled labeling. We all have sexual desires, and that's a beautiful thing. Some of us start exploring earlier than others. Some of us experiment in ways that some of us don’t, and that's okay. No need to negatively label anyone because of how she/we like "it." Maybe there’s a woman who likes to do "it" more often than you or maybe it's someone who made a mistake at one point in their life... we all do, we're human. Instead of judging her harshly, why not admire her stamina? If we want to give her a title, why not take a cue from our male counterparts? Let’s elevate her instead of tearing her down. Let’s Mae West her. She’s a player. She’s a Cleopatra, a Mata Hari, a real gentleman’s woman.

And men: you want your woman to give "it" to you? If you’ve ever said any combination of the words slut-whore-skank-cunt within earshot of one woman on the planet, then you’ve shot yourself in the foot bigtime. You say it; we'll hear it. You wonder why your woman doesn’t like doing "it" to you? Are you serious? The double-standard shuts your girl down hard. You want a fully-realized, sexually alive woman in your life? Stop using sexually derogatory remarks. Stop even thinking them. Even if you're not talking about your woman, if you call any woman a slut-whore-skank-cunt, you better believe that the message you're sending is that you think women who do "it" in any way shape or form are disgusting and wrong. You might as well just cut off your own member, guys.

So, here we have a self-extinguishing culture of women and a self-castrating culture of men, all because once-upon-a-time-down-the-line, someone decided that sex was bad... especially if women were having it. Maybe, guys, if you referred to those of us who give "it" as fine, healthy women – elevated, loving and profound – then a lot more women might be willing to do "it," to enjoy "it," and to give both themselves and you exactly what you want.

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