Slutty Sluts Vote Sluttily

(Note: I wrote the majority of this in the Amsterdam International Airport waiting for a flight on three hours of sleep, so my apologies for typos/incoherence.) So, apparently, I’m a slut. I’m a single, suburban, Planned Parenthood using, serial-dating white girl who voted for Obama. According to BSkillet of the “Christian Men’s Defense League,” I am a slut.

There have been a lot of jokes made about this now-pulled (though still available via Google Cache) post, and it is, indeed, an exercise in absurdity. While a friend got all ragey over it, I had issues stifling laughter as I read the post in the middle of a meeting (sorry, guys!). Illogical to the point of absurdity, BSkillet is hardly worth responding to.

Hardly, but not entirely useless. BSkillet expresses some extreme views, to be sure and commits numerous logical fallacies – straw man, generalization, ad homeniem, red herrings…pick your poison. It’s very easy to respond to such absurdity with equal absurdity (and some Hipster Sexism to boot, which is so fun*).

But BSkillet’s absurd misogyny serves to mask some views he actually shares with many evangelical Christians in America. Defense of sexually active women and “sluts” was actually a large factor in the election. To some extent, BSkillet is, well, right. I mean that, of course, in the most qualified sense of the term – his point, that women – particularly women of color – have made a large impact in the electoral process and changed the face of this election is undeniable.

How he arrives at his point, however, is reprehensible, misogynistic, and racist. That goes without saying.

But, as a woman with a lifetime of experience in the evangelical American church, his views on women did not surprise me. His thoughts, indeed, resemble in a more bald-faced fashion, teachings I absorbed as a member of the church. Whether it is black or white women, sexual purity is the end-all-be-all, and women as a whole are not highly regarded even if they do remain pure (BSkillet proclaims as much when he opens by saying “this is why women shouldn’t be in government” before he ever reaches the “slut vote” point).

BSkillet’s extreme point is in fact symptomatic of a larger culture that thinks women’s sexual choices and agencies are/should be up for a popular vote. It is unsurprising, then, that a culture in which the purity of women is everything would give rise to a man and a movement (The Christian Men’s Defense Network) in which women are discounted and even reviled for failing to live up to a man’s definition of pure.

Keep in mind that BSkillet is not just one extreme outlier, but is actually part of a larger movement in society. His writing is shocking only in the baldness of the misogyny, not in its views. The larger evangelical culture as a whole does, in fact, believe that a woman’s sexual activities are reason enough to discount her opinion in the public sphere.

The larger evangelical culture does, in fact, think that my dating life is reason enough to discount my work and my opinions in entire. I cannot tell you how much criticism has been levied at me simply for the fact that I am unmarried and childfree. Simply existing as a woman in the world of the church makes our opinions dependent upon the choices we make with our bodies, rather than independent of them. My decision not to change my name if/when I get married is, because I exist as a woman in the church, a political and declarative one.

It is not hard to leap from the evangelical church’s teachings to “the slut vote” and “what are those slutty women thinking.” In fact, I would say they make quite the bridge.

*Sarcasm font.

Feminism is Not the Enemy

I have a love hate relationship with Christianity Today’s Hermenutics blog. They post some good stuff, but they also post some real tripe. And some of the stuff they post is outright hurtful to women and a poor portrayal of Christianity. This last is my complaint with Her.menutics’ latest post about hook up culture. Ever since Wendy Shalitt published the definitive reactionary Christian guide to hook up culture, the phrase has become a dog whistle for sanctimonious pearl clutching about women who *gasp* have sex! WITH MEN! And do so without commitment!

OH MY GIDDY AUNT!

Here’s the thing: complaints about hook up culture from conservative Christianity usually follow two lines, both of which we see in the Her.menutics article. The first is that “hooking up” is not God’s plan for sex. That might have some meat to it, and I’ll get to that in a minute. The second, however, is the devastatingly off base “hook up culture and the sexual revolution is about making women act like men.”

That’s not a new argument. “Feminism is about turning women into men” is about as old as it gets. While hook up culture is not synonymous with feminism (there are all sorts of reasons a girl may “hook up,” and plenty of them have to do with reinforcement of patriarchal expectations of women as sexually available public property), feminism – or the movement for women to be seen as human beings with their own desires and agency to act on those desires – enabled the normalization of such a hook up culture.

The culture itself, however, is not anything new. There’s a reason prostitution is called the oldest profession. If you look at the newsletters of The Advocate For Moral Reform from the 1830s, you see early feminists decrying the idea that men can “hook up” (or be libertines, in their parlance) without consequence, but women cannot. Indeed, one of the first issues tells a fictional story about a woman who had been employed in a house of ill repute who finally managed to work her way out of that life and get a respectable job as a servant in a kitchen. The woman had to hide her past as a prostitute in order to maintain her employment and her job could be in jeopardy if a former customer happened to recognize her. The customer – the libertine man – would face no consequences while the woman would likely be back out on the street.

Yes, even in 1834, women were complaining about the sexual double standard. And these were church going Methodist women, to boot.

The sexual revolution of the 20^th century, then, was not about “making women act like men.” Rather, it was about removing the double standard that surrounds sexual activity – the double standard we find replicated again and again in rules about sexual activity on private Christian campuses and on Sunday mornings from the pulpit (stories about this will be appearing in my upcoming book; they are too many to list here).

The removal of the double standard does not, in fact, make women act like men, but instead removes judgment for the use of their sexual agency. After all, in order for “men to act like men,” as these arguments presume, they kind of had to have women to sleep with, did they not?*

The sexual revolution, then, removes the stigma that these women faced, and normalizes the culture of uncommitted sexual activity.

And here, Christians of America, is where the first point about “God’s plan for sex” comes in. When you whine and lament hook up culture “turning women into men,” you ignore the much larger significance of sexual ethics. Complaining about women acting like men laments that women have agency to make sexual choices, which is a step way too far.

Instead, I think you have a better argument if you acknowledge that women have the agency to consent and will – quite often – make choices you disagree with. Removing female agency or lamenting the presence of it is not going to make a lot of people happy about your sexual ethic.

I propose a different tactic: acknowledge that women have the same sexual agency that men have. That women have just as much right as men to consent to sex and to experience and explore their sexuality. And then examine why women AND MEN are “hooking up.” Why do we have a culture that prizes unfettered sexual encounters? Have we placed too much baggage on the idea of sex that we created a false dichotomy of unattached or totally married (yes, church, you have)? What role do we play in both minimizing and elevating a biological function?

I think much of the fear and pearl clutching about “hook up culture” and the sexual revolution of women – it’s always lamenting over the women hooking up, always – comes from a desire to have a spectre to blame. If we can simply say the problem is women being encouraged to be “independent” and “act like men,” we have a villain – those “anti-Christian feminazis.” And if we have a ready, available villain at which to hurl our accusations, we don’t have to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, we got it wrong, maybe, just maybe, our scare tactics and strict God Forbids-God Allows sexual ethic isn’t translating and never really has. If we have something else, something outward, to blame, we don't have to look at how we might be doing things wrong.

Because God forbid we figure out how to present sexuality as healthy, consensual, AND committed, rather than just saying women who express agency are sluts and virgins are totes better.

God forbid we actually think about how our rhetoric makes women think about themselves and how our current elevation of virginity and purity isn’t translating to a culture that doesn’t get married until their late twenties and faces patriarchal sexualization and objectification day in, day out.

God forbid we actually examine how to make our own sexual ethic work without shame or guilt heaped on the party who expresses sexual agency.

God forbid we actually look inside, rather than just blaming the Enemy.

_____

*Note: This is in heteronormative terms because this is how the original article sees sex, so I'm going off of that. Naturally, there exists an entire realm of sexuality that is not man-woman relationships.

Giving In And Giving Up

[trigger warning: sexual assault] “No,” I said as I pushed the boy off of me in the backseat of a car. I held up my ring finger on my right hand, “You won’t get to do that until I have a different ring from this.” The boy stared back at me, dejected and shamed. “Well, then, I guess that settles it. Let me drive you home.”

You may have guessed – based on the fact that I was single well into my 20s – that this never actually happened. But that doesn’t mean this scene didn’t play in most of my ideas of future relationships from the time I first donned a purity ring and made that pledge to stay a virgin until I was married.

Whenever I thought about what it would take to keep myself pure, I never imagined fighting for my own self-control – after all, I was a girl, and all I had to do was wait. I would not be the one who wanted to have sex. No, instead, I imagined that the “fight” for my purity would be a literal one – a boy would be pressuring me, would be trying to convince me to help him satisfy his urges, and I would have to be the one to say no. I would have to push him off me because chances are, he wouldn’t want to take no for an answer. My purity ring would be my weapon, a tangible thing I could point to, in order to remind him of my commitment and what being with me meant.

I only recently realized how completely – excuse my French - fucked up that entire narrative is.

It’s extremely telling that the type of romantic relationship I pictured, in relation to my pledge to purity, was an abusive one. And it’s also extremely telling that I did not have the tools at my disposal in order to identify that relationship as abusive.

In my faux-narrative, I would be wresting my purity back from his prying hands, I would have to be on guard to protect myself from his wandering penis, and if I gave in – there was no question that I would be the one wanting it; I was only ever giving in to his desires – then I would be considered impure, a broken shell of a person who could no longer wear white on her wedding day.

Today, while reading this, it was like gears clicking into place in my head. The situation Copeland depicts is exactly the type of situation I imagined – because that’s how it is almost always depicted. The pure, angelic, righteous girl gets into a relationship with the wrong dude, and after months of pressure, she gives in, she gives it up, she gives “everything” away.  And thereafter, she’s sullied, she’s no longer “pure.” She will have to beg forgiveness from God and from her future husband in order to be an acceptable bride.

The equation was simple. Guys wants sex, needs girl to have sex. Guy pressures girl to have sex. Girl has one of two choices: “give in,” or “stand up for Jesus.” Girls who “gave in” were bad people. Girls who kept pure were good people.

Simple. Simple.

There was, of course, better language and better phrasing in each of the stories and narratives, but that’s how it was always sold to me. The testimonies told by crying women in church were ones in which they felt pressured by the world and by their boyfriends and so they gave in and gave up.

Even the language surrounding virginity reflected this abusive and coercive narrative – a girl was always “giving up” her virginity, or “losing it.” She was never actively choosing to have sex, and if she was, there was something deeply, inherently wrong with her.

And if you “gave in” to one boy, then other boys had no reason to respect you. You’d become that girl in the school, the one all the boys came to because they knew you were “easy.” And since you were already sullied, you’d figure why not, and let them, one after the other, have you. Before you knew it, you had no sense of your personal identity and were just a vessel passed around among the boys for pleasure.

That was the narrative. That was the story. No nuance. No deviation. Because if you allowed for nuance and deviation – if you allowed for a story in which both people in the relationship wanted to have sex, in which one wasn’t coercing the other but both were active participants, then the narrative of the brave hero standing up for purity was totally lost. You can’t be a brave hero standing up against pressure if you desperately desire the thing that you’re being pressured to do.

Because, let’s face it, the “she gave in, she was coerced” narrative is so much easier to paint – it’s so easy to point to where the girl went wrong. Well, if she hadn’t gotten involved with a boy like that…. If she had just had more strength to cling to Jesus… If she’d just been more righteous…

Consent doesn’t enter into the picture, because if enthusiastic, positive consent is discussed, it might end up teaching people that healthy sexual relationships can and do happen outside of a marriage relationship. And then all hell breaks loose!

It truly amazes me that this is the narrative I bought into for years. It stuns me to realize that I pictured an abusive, coercive relationship as “the norm” because that was how “standing up for my purity” was presented. And that is hugely problematic – in this way, in this kind of narrative that is supposed to be encouraging, we are normalizing victim blaming. We are normalizing abuse and assault. We are not only failing to give women tools to recognize abuse and coercion, but we are actively instructing them that it is their fault if they get themselves into that situation.

And that is wrong, wrong, wrong. We need to take a better, positive approach, one in which both parties in a relationship are active, emotionally healthy people who approach it as equals, not as one passive and one active who is engaging in coercion. We need to teach men and women what a “yes” looks like, and when to give that “yes.” We need to teach men and women that no one – no one! – is allowed to touch them without their enthusiastic consent, and not because they need to hold to some standard of purity, but because they are human beings who deserve to have their “no” heard and respected.

And we need to teach that a person who survives an abusive, coercive relationship is not to blame for the relationship, no matter what “bad decisions” he or she made. Rather than forcing them to ask for our forgiveness, we need to offer love and grace freely and unconditionally. Then, only then, will we give people the tools to create healthy, stable relationships free of abuse and coercion.

Men are not slobbering libidos in human form. Women are not passive angels who need to say no. Let’s do the human race the respect it deserves and allow grace and love to rule the day, instead of shame and coercion.

____________

If you or someone you know is experiencing pressure to do things in a relationship (especially sexually) that you are not comfortable with, it is not normal and it is not healthy. I would strongly urge contacting RAINN.org. They have phone and instant messaging options available.

Terrorism and Othering

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.” – John Green, Paper Towns

I remember standing in line at an office on a Sunday in 2009, and reading a headline on the TV screen: “Kansas Abortion Doctor George Tiller Killed.” I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I remember being slightly surprised as the headline changed to discuss the location – Dr. Tiller’s church. But that was all that surprised me.

You see, the first headline told me everything I needed to know about the case: “Kansas Abortion Doctor…Killed.” Specifics didn’t matter because there were a number of things I could assume, just from a headline: the man was likely the only provider of abortions in the state, he had probably been harassed for years, and the person who killed him probably had a history of connections with pro-life groups and organizations.

And the story unfolded: Tiller provided late-term abortions, one of three people in the US at the time to do so, and was one of the only people in Kansas to provide abortions at all. And his killer, Scott Roeder, was a man connected at several levels to Operation Rescue, an organization which frequently held protests and vigils outside Tiller’s Wichita office (though Operation Rescue denies any connection to Roeder, he frequently attended meetings and had the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in his car at the time of the shooting).

(For more information about Dr. Tiller’s death, see this excellent documentary narrated by Rachel Maddow for MSNBC).

For me, Dr. Tiller’s death was just another sad chapter in a decades long string of clinic bombings, fires, and assassinations.

The latest came in the form of a failed bomb at a Wisconsin Planned Parenthood on Sunday night – the bomb went off, but burned itself out, causing damage to the building but luckily not injuring any workers as they were not in the clinic on a Sunday night.

This happened just a couple short weeks after Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’ office was set on fire by a man with a Molotov cocktail. Davis was an outspoken supporter of Planned Parenthood who had recently entered the limelight by talking about how Planned Parenthood helped her out as a single, teen mother.

I was born in 1986. In my (relatively short) lifetime, Drs. David Gunn (1993), John Britton (1994), Barnett Slepian (1998) and George Tiller (2009), as well as clinic escort James Barrett [in the same case as David Gunn, above], receptionists Shannon Lowneyand Lee Ann Nichols (all three in 1994), and security guard Robert Sanderson (1998) were all killed for doing their jobs.

In my short 26 years of life, acid has been poured over the entrances of clinics in Miami (1998), clinics have been set on fire (including one in my hometown in 1999, as well as numerous incidents all throughout the 2000s), cars have been literally driven into clinic buildings (Rockford, IL, 2000; Rochester Hills, Michigan, 2006; and St. Paul, MN, 2009) , multiple Molotov cocktails have been lobbed through windows and doors (most recently being the incident at Wendy Davis’ office), and several clinics have been bombed or experienced attempted bombings (most recently in January in Pensacola, FL, excluding the already mentioned incident in Wisconsin on Sunday).

Additionally, numerous pro-life organizations have participated in harassment techniques, publishing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of “abortionists,” encouraging their followers to call them by the hundreds, though the content is up to the individual caller.

And yet, in recent memory (since I started paying attention in 2009), the incidents of bombings, of threats, of attempted arson have been reported as “isolated incidents,” done by “unhinged fringe members” of the pro-life movement – if their connection to pro-life movements is acknowledged at all. Even with a consistent pattern of attacks on Planned Parenthood clinics and Planned Parenthood supporters, each new incident of violence is treated as isolated, as fringe, as not representative of the movement as a whole.

And I’m willing to grant that it’s not representative of the movement to bomb clinics, but the lack of willingness to acknowledge ANY complicity in this form of domestic terrorism smacks of intellectual dishonesty.

I grew up in the pro-life movement. While my parents weren’t the “stand outside the clinic and protest” type, I frequently heard – at church, at school, at home – imprecations of those “sluts” who would “kill their babies.” I listened to my OBGYN uncles rant and rave about the irresponsible ladies who just shouldn’t have sex if they don’t want a baby, and talk about how they urged their patients to have more children (instead of adopting…?). I side-eyed the Planned Parenthood across the street from my high school, thinking bad thoughts about “free condoms” and low cost birth control – because, obviously, that was just enabling the sluts. And I financially supported the local pregnancy crisis center – the Abstinence Clearing House – by wearing a shirt with a cute dog on it reading “Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date.”

And then I met women who had abortions.

They weren’t the irresponsible sluts I’d been raised to revile – they were people who were already mothers, they were college freshmen who had to scrape together the money to pay for the abortion (it goes without saying that they did not have the money to pay for the medical care of a pregnancy, let alone a child), they were women who had taken every precaution they could. They were and are real people, with real, complicated stories and motivations and lives.

And the people who work at the clinics are real people, with real, complicated lives and stories – everyone from the doctor to the nurse to the receptionist in the lobby is a real person, just like you, and just like me.

The rhetoric of the pro-life movement (on the whole) doesn’t seem to think so, though. They like to talk about women who get abortions as “irresponsible,” without ever considering how abortion, in some cases, might just be the responsible move. They like to offer simple solutions, like women simply not having sex in order to avoid pregnancy – a solution that only works in a world where rape and incest are not reality. They like to characterize doctors who provide abortions as “baby-killers,” ignoring the numerous positive efforts they make in providing birth control and the hardship that is life as a doctor who provides abortions.

“I am a good citizen, and I am very real.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I’m not writing this necessarily to implicate the pro-life movement as a whole, or even necessarily to rail on about domestic terrorism,* but merely to point out this: Clinic bombings, terroristic attacks, Molotov cocktails, cars being run into buildings can be pinned down to one thing, and one thing alone: Othering.

We encounter a lot of people in our lives, many of whom we’ll disagree with, and most of us manage to disagree peacefully. But we create a toxic environment, a world that encourages violence, when we Other the people we disagree with – when we make them, in our minds, into something so unlike ourselves that we strip them of their humanity and dignity.

This is what the pro-life movement consistently and successfully does to abortion doctors and to women who get abortions. This is the stuff of hate crimes – when a teenager on the street becomes nothing more than a black kid in a hoodie. This is the lifeblood of a political environment that breeds shootings, and shouting matches, that leads pundits to rip off their mikes and storm off set, that props up figures like Rush Limbaugh and scares off any moderate criticism. Othering is how we get to absurd proclamations like “The entire Tea Party is racist,” or “Liberals are all atheist, god-hating scum,” “The GOP doesn’t care about the poor,” and “Liberalism is a mental disease.”

Othering is a bipartisan problem. However, it most consistently is connected with violence and terrorism within pro-life movement, likely because the stakes are raised so high. It is genuinely believed that they’re preventing a “holocaust,” that “the most dangerous place for a black baby is in the womb” (thereby playing on race war rhetoric), that abortion doctors are “heartless baby-killers.” Rather than being halted and questioned and asked to be more nuanced, the most flagrant mongers of this hateful rhetoric are encouraged, celebrated and awarded (think of the vans that drive around cities showing pictures of “aborted”** fetuses on the sides).

And then, when a bomb goes off at a clinic, when an abortion doctor is shot in the back of the head while standing in his church lobby, when a clinic is vandalized and bricks are thrown through windows, when a clinic escort is assaulted walking into work – all of these things extend from the ongoing and sustained practice of Othering.

I don’t have any practical solutions, other than to remind you to rebuke those in your life who Other people. Remind them that everyone has a story, that your enemies are men like you. And, little by little, we’ll regain some of the dignity necessary for civil discourse.

*I say terrorism because these attacks are the definition of terrorism – a violent attack meant to send the message to others in a community that they are in danger.

**This pictures are most often actually medical pictures of stillborn babies, not abortions as the campaigns frequently claim (warning: link contains graphic content).

UPDATE: It has been confirmed that the man who bombed the Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinic on Sunday night was doing so explicitly as an anti-abortion move. He is quoted as asking the judge in his arraignment if the judge knew "how many babies were being killed in that clinic." "Baby killer" as Othering functions well in this situation.

Wherein a Cat Becomes a Dog

The most common logical fallacy I seem to run into nowadays is the false equivalence. It’s the argument that because A is similar to B, then they must be the similar in all respects. For example, the statement, “cats and dogs are both furry, fuzzy creatures, so they must be interchangeable,” is an obvious false equivalent. This becomes a lot harder once the issues get more complicated, however. Some recent examples of false equivalence are, say, Mark Driscoll’s defenders who say that Driscoll’s critics are being just like Driscoll in  being mean and “tearing him down.” However, this is a demonstrably false equivalence because, often, Driscoll’s critics are not pastors with a congregation that numbers in the thousands. When Driscoll makes a negative statement about someone, thousands hear it and believe – because it is coming from a pastor – that it is somehow God breathed. This is not the same thing as a blogger who gets maybe 3,000 new views a month pointing out that something Driscoll said is harmful.

That’s a false equivalence. The audience, purpose, and context are different.

I came across another one today that I think needs expounding, considering it’s the third time I’ve heard that.

Frequently feminists will point out the double standard in how we discuss sex between men and women, in that women can be labeled as a “slut” but there is no equivalent word for men. The response, I’ve discovered, from some weird corners of the internet, is to point out that “creepy” or "creeper" is the male equivalent of the word “slut.” The argument goes that a man labeled “creepy” faces the same social stigma and ostracizing that a woman who is labeled as a “slut” does.

In the recent comments on Rachel Held Evans’ blog, a man labeled “Oak Park Dave” helpfully demonstrated this false equivalence:

I would disagree that there is no male equivalent slur for "slut." I think there is a functional equivalent in the word "creepy." This term is often applied to low status men without cause in an attempt to control who they should desire and how they should act.

See the false equivalence? No? Let me explain.

“Creepy” is a label that responds to action that is taken within the public sphere. Instances in which a man may be labeled creepy include, but are not limited to:

1. Looking at a person for longer than is comfortable or socially acceptable (eg, a person staring at another on public transit).
2. Attempted closeness that ignores the nature of the relationship (eg, a lab partner who shows up at your house with take out when he was not invited).
3. Behavior that transgresses certain personal space boundaries (anything from unwanted touching to picking up someone’s mail for them unasked, etc).
4. “Just happening” to show up where a particular person is going to be, possibly repeatedly.
5. Offering personal information unsolicited and out of proportion to the relationship in question (eg, the man who would corner me at the desk when I worked at a library and tell me all about how he got discharged from the military after he got hit by a van).
6. Developing a nickname or pet name when they have not been given permission to do so or in a way that is out of proportion to the relationship (ie, a woman calling a man she’s been on two dates with “babe” or “honey”).

And so on.

What’s something you noticed here? “Creepy” behaviors tend to be gender neutral. Do men tend to get labeled as "creepy" more than women? Undoubtedly. Does this mean that a woman cannot be labeled "creepy"? No, no it doesn’t.

So there’s the first part of the false equivalence – the idea that “creepy” is an exclusively male term.

Here’s the second: “Creepy” has nothing to do with sex. “Slut” has everything to with sex.

“Creepy” is not a commentary on the private sexual behavior of an individual. It is not a comment on the decisions one makes about who he or she does or does not sleep with. It is, instead, a commentary on how one behaves in public.

“Slut” is a term that determines one’s worth based on one’s private behavior in a private realm – the bedroom. “Creepy” is a response to behavior perpetrated in the public realm – a classroom, public transit, one’s workplace, etc. What’s more, “creepy” is the imposing of oneself upon another person, and is therefore an incident in which a person can inform another to back off, or to return to socially acceptable norms. It is not unlike when John Watson tells Sherlock that what he’s done is “not good” – he’s informing him that his behavior has transgressed particular social boundaries.

“Slut” does not act in the same way. A woman who chooses to have and enjoy sex is labeled as a slut not because she made someone else uncomfortable, and certainly not because she made someone else feel unsafe in their own skin (which is often the result of ‘creepy’ behavior). The only “social boundary” that she is transgressing is one that is arbitrarily imposed upon her, not one that is a part of a social contract.

The social contract is the realm of acceptable public and relational behavior that we all enter into when we enter into a public sphere. For example, a professor who hugs their student on the first day of class could rightly be labeled creepy (but a professor who gives a student they have been working with for years a hug at graduation is not creepy – the relationship has changed enough to be socially acceptable – see the difference?). Or, in another instance, a person who meets a person and then starts calling and texting that person every day – that’s creepy. I’m a woman, and I have been on the receiving end of that behavior – from other women. They would, rightly, still be considered creepers, despite the presence of the va-jay-jay.

“Slut” does not function in the same manner. A woman does not have to do anything to be labeled a slut. I have witnessed virgins being labeled “slut” simply for being willing to go on a date alone with a guy. I have seen women who chose to have sex before marriage labeled as slut, even though they later married this partner and never had sex with anyone else. Slut is a term that is designed to make people fall back in line, yes, but it incorrectly labels private behavior as a public social transgression. What a woman chooses to do or not do in the bedroom is open for public comment, and labeling her a “slut” is a judgment upon her character that affects all parts of her social life.

“Creepy,” while it can carry a social stigma, does not carry the same level of stigma that “slut” does. Because “slut” is an insult based on private acts, there’s not much a woman can do to rid herself of the label. “Creepy” men or women can develop and change their creepy behaviors and disprove that social stigma – mainly because “creepy” occurs in the public realm.

So this, friends, is a prime example of false equivalence. Can we stop pretending that it’s not a double standard, already?

Thou gleeking hell-hated malcontent!

Big brash bold statement: Our current sexual ethic in the American church does just as good of a job objectifying women as secular “porn” culture.  

Now, let me explain. When we tie a woman’s goodness or badness into whether or not she is having “the sex,” we again reduce them to their vaginal activity or lack thereof. When we say that all a woman is worth is an unbroken hymen, we objectify the woman all over again. She ceases to be a real human being. It’s a pendulum swinging back to the other extreme – in an attempt to respond to a pornified culture, we end up creating this entirely sex negative world in which whether or not a woman has had sex becomes the only mark of good or bad morality, and turn her back into an object.

This is bad primarily for the reason I cited on Thursday – there are numerous ways in which women end up becoming sexually active, and when all we do is tell them “don’t do it or you’ll be a bad girl,” we end up with no conversation on consent – no dialogue about what it actually means to say yes. We end up, when we look at this sort of thing in public policy, laws that say once a woman has consented to sex, then she has consented to anything and everything that follows. It’s a damaging thing to teach young women – that no matter the circumstances surrounding her loss of virginity, if she has "lost" it, then there is no way back.*

The second is the problem of “slut-shaming.” For those of you not experienced in feminist terminology, you’re in luck.

“Slut” or “whore” is supposedly one of the worst thing you can call a woman. That’s why people reacted with such shock when a man called Elizabeth Warren a “socialist whore” at a town hall meeting this last week. It is a distinctly female insult, and mean to be an impugning of one’s honor.

But, as I’ve mentioned here, it’s a sliding standard. Perhaps the Warren example is a good place to start – there is absolutely no evidence that Warren is a “whore.” Indeed, Warren is a wife and former stay at home mom. But, none of the truth of it actually matters, because the insult is quite rarely actually linked to sexual activity. Rather, it is a way of silencing women, a way of cutting off the dialogue, a way of ending the debate. It is meant to remind women of their place in society; it serves to say that their only worth is between their legs and once labeled a slut, the label is very hard to shake. It is a label that, for some reason, is meant to impugn a person’s moral judgment in all other areas of life.

So, once again, I put out the call. Define “slut” for me. I’m serious about this – how many men does a woman have to sleep with before she’s a slut? 5? 10? Do the circumstances surrounding each partner matter? I have friends whose “number” is quite high, but each one of those was over the course of a serious relationship. Is she a slut? Or is slut more of an attitude – a “slutitude” if you will – even if the woman is a virgin? How do you identify a “slutitude,” then? And, why, even still, is that an insult?

You see the problem, I would hope. This analysis of slut shaming is by no means a promotion of wanton sexual activity, but rather a plea to understand "slut" is not and should not be an insult simply because it is so undefined. And it is a plea to be more creative with our insults. I mean, seriously, the worst thing you can call a woman is something implies she enjoys sex? Really?

But despite the lack of a real definition, the label of “slut” is one that can make a girl’s life hell. Even without ever experiencing sex, a teenage girl can be labeled a slut and teased all around the school. Women who get to the top of their respective fields frequently have to face insults about how she “slept her way to the top.” Again, society attempts to remind women that their only worth is in their unsullied sexuality – showing even a predilection toward sex can damage a girl’s reputation in many areas. Heck, when I started talking about sex more on the blog, I received some comments implying that I may no longer be Christian. Um, what? I thought that was for me to decide?

So, let’s make an agreement now: Since slut doesn’t really have a definition, and is such a gendered insult that perpetuates a negative view of female sexuality (calling a guy a slut doesn’t have the same impact at all), let’s be more creative, shall we? If we absolutely, totally need to insult someone – which, I would argue, is probably not a good idea, but say we’re just having a rage moment and need to vent – why not go with something gender neutral? Or something pertaining to that person’s actual nature and personality rather how s/he uses her sexuality? I mean, heck, if you need to, bookmark this website of Shakespearean insults. At least you’ll sound like you aren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel for insults.

Now, off to the comment section, thou qualling half-faced hedge-pigs! Have ye any personal experience with “slutitude”?

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*As a side note, I hate the term "loss of virginity." It's not like it fell out of your pocket when you were running to catch the bus. But, as there is no good replacement - other than possibly "became sexually active" - I go with it for now.