Part 2 in the sex series.

Please read this first: why anti-sex work feminism is objectifying.

Now, for the S-word.

That word hits me like a slap across the face–it leaves marks. And it’s so totally unexpected when it does happen, now that I’m not in high school or even college. When it slips out of the mouth of a male friend–not directed at me or a real person–I shudder before calmly and patiently explaining that I wasn’t OK with that word in ANY context, I didn’t care how much I disliked the girl in question. That it’s a word that hurts me as much as any woman it’s directed at.

My ex used to use the word a lot and I honestly can’t believe now that I stayed with him as long as I did, because it should’ve shown me that he thought women’s sexuality needed to be controlled. And that I should’ve known it would come back on me, because there are no good girls and bad girls, there are just girls and they are all me. Every time we try to delineate boundaries between the girls that do the right things and the girls that do the wrong things, we’re just trying to make excuses for why bad things happened to them but can’t happen to us. And that’s just wrong. And when my ex called some girl a slut I would refuse to talk to him until he apologized, but it kept coming back, that return of the repressed, because the attitude inside wasn’t changing, he just wanted to appease me.

I’ve successfully reclaimed bitch. You can call me a bitch all day and I’ll laugh at you, admit it with pride. Other people, not so much–I’ll still bristle and tell you to stop if you call Hillary Clinton a bitch in front of me (although see last post for reasons I’m not feeling too bad for her lately)

But slut still stings worse. Even in situations where the woman wears it as a badge of honor, I’m still uncomfortable with it. I cannot see it that way.

Maybe because slut is the one most often used by women against other women (along with ‘fat’). Women used slut to wound and to mark others as inappropriate, as socially unacceptable, as vicious–a slut will take your man, she doesn’t care, in fact she likes it. She doesn’t deserve female friends, she’s not loyal to women, she just cares about male attention. Slut doesn’t even mean you have lots of sex or even any sex–it just means you look like you might, or talk like you might.

The slut is a monster. Her body is the body of all women (”a cultural body”). She doesn’t recognize boundaries (”harbinger of category crisis”) and she is not like you (”dwells at the gates of difference”). She is what you should not be, she defines by being it what is wrong (”polices the borders of the possible”) and yet, strangely, she makes you jealous. You want to be her. (”Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire.”) Most importantly:

“They [monsters] ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them.”

My college roommate gave me the craziest look when I told her that I was going to a fetish party the night before Halloween. Despite the fact that at the time, I’d never even had sex. But I’d made myself appear sexual and I’d talked about sex, out loud. That was enough.

(I almost felt the need to justify myself further here by talking about said roommate’s sexual behavior, which shows you how deeply this shit is ingrained–it’s certainly not right for me to pass judgment on her sex life any more than it was for her to do it to me. Hell, it’s stupid that I justified myself by pointing out that I was a virgin.)

But the point is that when a woman publicly appears to be sexual, declares herself sexual, we try to shove her back into that box.

There’ll be another post in this series about ‘virginity’ so I’m not going there right now.

What I am going to talk about instead is feminist slut-shaming.

See, the anti-porn types love to do this and disguise it as concern for all women. Kind of the way your friends would pull you aside in high school and tell you that “I didn’t say it, but this other girl over there said you were a SLUT so you better watch it.”

That’s just not okay.

Sex workers get it the worst, of course. They’re pornified. They’re penis accessories and will soon be used-up-has-beens. They’re fucked up and in denial and playing Russian Roulette. (thanks to Ren for those links, and if you aren’t reading her yet, why the hell not?)

But it’s not just sex workers. It’s all of us who don’t keep our unruly desires in check. It’s any of us who don’t make excuses for men’s bad behavior and wear what we want to wear. Hell, it’s any of us who don’t hate men, it seems sometimes.

See, me? I’m middle of the road. I’m average size, white, middle-class straight girl. Jewish, tatttooed, overeducated, little bit kinky but mostly I’d fit the definition of ordinary. I wouldn’t come in for slut-shaming at all (and haven’t yet on the blogosphere) if I didn’t choose to associate myself with the pro-sex crowd. Did some writing for Suicide Girls. Intern at BUST. Read Ren and Melissa Gira and Amber Rhea and of course Susie Bright, and many, many others. Which means, according to some, that I can’t be a proper feminist.

I don’t watch a lot of porn, but I will damn well defend your right to do so, and to be in it.

See, my best friends have been strippers for a while. And I don’t mean that in a “I can’t be racist, I have black friends!” kind of way, but in a way that makes it different from being an “ally” (also see Ren on the subject). It means being a person that actually personally loves and cares about people who work in these industries, treats them as people, not as research subjects, and doesn’t fucking dare to speak for them when they are big girls who can speak for themselves.

And their unruly sexuality doesn’t fit in your box. And if it did, it doesn’t belong there. And neither does mine.

Because I’ll talk about it here with my real name up there for everyone to see. Because I realized that my fear of talking about sex was really just another form of slut-shaming. See, I don’t have moral compunction about actual sex. I could honestly give a fuck about social conventions on what I like and dislike and who I like. And I’ve discovered that yeah, my tastes may be normal, but I’ve given myself the freedom to figure it out and to make myself happy along the way.

See, you can have sex, most radfems say. You just can’t talk about it. You can’t openly signify that you are sexual and oh god you certainly can’t signify that you LIKE it, especially if it’s with men. And you certainly can’t make any MONEY off of it, trade on it the way we have to trade on all bits of ourselves in this fucked-up system.

I’m deeply sorry that my orgasms don’t fit your plans for the revolution. Just let me keep a couple of boys around after we dispose of the men, Queen of the Damned style. Until then, though, I have to live in the world I’m in, and sometimes I choose to walk through it in heels and short skirts, and sometimes I choose to flirt with men, and sometimes I choose to actually date and sleep with men, and sometimes I like to read about sex. And I don’t need anyone’s permission to do it–and that IS feminist, thanks.

Just as I don’t need permission from a man to be sexual or not, I don’t need permission from women, either. I thank feminism for teaching me that, and for teaching me to center my own desires, not those of men. So even if they happen to coincide, that doesn’t mean I’m doing it FOR THEM. I’m a big girl, and I do what  makes me happy.

And I’m going to keep right on talking about it.