There are lots of words that we use to talk about women we don't like. Bitch, whore, cunt, tramp, bimbo, dyke, slut, and on and on. These are not particularly nice words, and each one carries a slightly different set of connotations, a different set of implicit reasons why our addressee is undesirable. Some of those connotations match up pretty closely with those of words we use to describe men: dicks and bitches are similar; so are cunts and douchebags. "Fag" and "dyke" have obvious parallels. But some of the words we use to talk about women we don't like lack those more masculine parallels. In general, what those words have in common is the implication of promiscuity.
The difference between "bitch" and "slut" is that the former says, "I don't like you," while the latter is a bit more complex: "I don't like you because you have a lot of sex, and sex is bad." And so I think the latter is more damaging, because sex isn't bad. "Slut" has power because we still think that there's something wrong with women who have sex, 40 years after we should have changed our minds.
Many people have made efforts to reclaim "slut" (Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, for example), and they've had a little success. But not much. The Tomato Nation article I linked to was written eight years ago, and if there's been a big change since then, I haven't seen it. I think part of the reason efforts to reclaim "slut" haven't fared well is that they've been directed at the wrong audience.
Typically, when an activist movement tries to reclaim a term, it's the members of that movement that start using it to refer to each other in a positive light. LGBT activists have been quite successful doing this with "queer," to the point where the former epithet is practically an academic term. They haven't enjoyed quite so much success with "fag," but there's still been a notable change in perception and use of the word over the past few years. But the thing about queers and fags is that there isn't really any way you can twist those words to apply to people who aren't queers or fags. But sluts are different. The unusual thing about "slut" is that, while it is certainly a gendered term, it's more about promiscuity than gender. And that means that there's a little trick we can pull.
When we're reclaiming a word like "queer," a problem that we run into is that the only people who can really do the reclaiming are queer people. If a straight guy calls another straight guy a fag, it's very, very hard for it to not sound like a pejorative, because otherwise the word wouldn't make any sense. But if a guy calls another guy a slut, well, that's a little bit different. Because the cool thing there is that we all know exactly what that means. He's not calling his friend a woman; he's calling him promiscuous. In that context, the gendering of the word just drops away. Many will jump to point out that this is just a harmful double-standard, that if the word is good when used about a man and bad when used about a woman, that that's a bad thing. And they are certainly not wrong. But it means that there's a way to break the gendering of the term in a more general sense. And if we can do that, then I think it will genuinely weaken our crazy, crazy idea that sex is bad.
There are a lot of feminists out there who are also men, and many more men who believe in women's equality but are uncomfortable with the term. And if my experience is at all typical, a lot of the time they feel like they're sitting on the sidelines; we want to help, but it's hard to see what we can do (and there are some feminists who really don't help dispel that attitude). So this is a call to arms directed towards you, gentlemen: start calling your friends sluts. Say it all the time; say it always with a note of approval in your voice, and perhaps a slight hint of envy. Say it about the friends you wish you were getting as much action as, and say it (positively, approvingly) about the women you know and love who love sex and aren't afraid to admit it. And say those two things in the same breath, say them right next to each other. When you call Betty a slut and Bob a slut, make it absolutely clear that you mean that word the exact same way in both cases, and it's a good thing. Clarify if you have to, but keep doing it.
Language is an important battlefield in the fight against oppression and sex-negativity. "Slut" and words like it are weapons used by idiots to try and take sex away from us. They're trying to scare us out of enjoying life, out of using our bodies the way we want. If we can change what those words mean (and we can!), then we can take those weapons away from them. That won't be enough to win the culture war all by itself, but it will make every battle just a little bit easier.
N.B. Readers may be curious as to my choice of the words "we" and "us" above. It is not my intent to lump myself in with the misogynists that I'm railing against, but rather to make it clear that I'm part of the society that I have a problem with. It's my society (and your society, too!), so I have a responsibility to improve it. Feel free to insert "our society" if it makes you more comfortable.
Comments
Furthermore general usage of the word slut doesn't mean someone that likes to have sex. Rather it means someone who will sleep with anyone as long as it they have a pulse.
A better word for which to fighting would be cocksucker: It does both genders harm by insinuating that man ought to be ashamed of himself because of feminine or homosexual qualities.
I find your suggestion that I, as a man, call my friends sluts to be absolutely asinine.
I agree with the man's point about cocksucker though! How can that be used derogatorily??
That's not so great either, as it turns having lots of sex into a bad thing and has implications of fucking anything that moves, as Max said. I'm not sure we'd be able to shake that association, but reclaiming it is worth a shot.
I think the worst part, though, is that most women are actually called sluts because people don't like them for completely unrelated reasons. Like that they think she's stupid or ugly or bitchy or fat or too pretty.
I knew a girl in high school who was universally known as a slut, but she was actually in a monogamous relationship for three of the four years there. While she was flirtatious and very pretty, she certainly didn't sleep around much. But she was bitchy and people didn't like her. So they called her a slut.
What this does is it equates women who have lots of sex with women who people don't like. It's a way to punish women who step outside what's considered acceptable behavior while simultaneously policing female sexuality. There's a book that goes into this called Slut: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum that's well worth reading.
Since I realized this, I call people out on it. Every time someone calls a girl a slut, I say something like: "Do you mean she has a lot of sex? Sex is fun. Why is that bad?" and then "Do you mean you think she's mean and you don't like her?" Even breaking down the way it's used to punish generally "deviant" women is a step in the right direction.
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