Subtitle: "Well, if you say you haven't, you're a prude. If you say you have, you're a slut. It's a trap. You want to but you can't, and when you do you wish you didn't, right?"

Sub-subtitle: "I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have to do everything in threes. That's kinda how I got my reputation in school as a slut."

This is an interesting article about sluts.

I found the article particularly fascinating having found myself on the receiving end of the slut grenade countless times. My initiation into sluthoodom started when I had the great misfortune of going through puberty at age nine (yes, nine), and I continued to receive my "slut badges of dishonour" all throughout my school career (including graduate school where I was accused of sleeping with professor(s!) for good grades), and I believe I've recently earned some"slut wings" for all the shit I put up with in my email inbox due to this site.

(For future reference, I love it when people I don't know send me emails filled with sweet words of respect and admiration like: "DO YOU WANNA DO IT? With your help i am a sexually frustrated scary cock mess and you ain't goonna fix it. Sorry for picking you just figured with the name an alll....I want you to take this meat and do some tricks with it, you game." Those emails are pretty much the best ever. Especially when I respond with a "Fuck off" and some days later I get a response: "Well hello how are ya ? I still wanna fuck are you ready to get aquainted??")

I vividly remember the first time I was called a slut. It was summer, I was nine, I even recall what I was wearing - a pale pink ribbed tank top and a pair of white cotton shorts. I was playing in my backyard with my brother and some neighbourhood boys (WHORE!). We were jumping on the trampoline when I looked up to see my mother standing on the patio, hand on her hip, lips pursed, the angry furrow between her eyebrows boding no good thing.

"Get in the house," she hissed.

I knew I was in trouble but I had no idea why. She yanked me into the kitchen.

"Go put a bra on right now, you look like a slut bouncing all over the place in front of those boys."
I never knew the ugly, black, self-hating shame that haunts me still until that moment. I wasn't sure what a slut was but I knew it wasn't good.

"I told you last week you couldn't walk around like that [pointed stare at my chest] and not wear a bra. Get in and put one on right now, and put some pants on. You don't want your father to see you bouncing around like that."

The last thing you want to hear, at age nine, is your breasts invoked in the same breath as your father. 'Tis scarring.

The bra had been a point of contention between my mother and I for weeks, ever since I had grown breasts basically overnight. Well, I was age NINE, I didn't want to wear a fucking bra. I didn't want to be different from every other girl in my class who was flat as a board and playing with Barbies. I was still colouring in activity books. I most definitely did not want to wear the fugly thick cotton bra my aunt had sent me in the mail. (It came with a card: "IT'S YOUR FIRST BRA!!!!" Yay.)

The bra came in a green box and had a very uncool lady sporting said bra on the front of it. She was jumping in the air like "Oh I love my bra so much I must punch my fists in the air and jump in celebration!!" What kind of bra comes in a box? A fugly one, that's what. Why didn't I get to have a pretty lacy bra, or at least a nice cotton bra with a cute cartoon character on it? Because my mother hated me. I got the bra rejected by nine out of ten German hausfraus. I buried the bra boxes in my bottom drawer under my pajamas.

I hated that goddamn bra. I hated how boys snapped it. I hated how the girls in my class called me Over The Shoulder Boulders (the creativity of schoolchildren is breathtaking). I hated how the seventh grade boys called me a slut every single day on the bus and cornered me in the very back row, taunting me with a singsong "SHOW US YOUR TITS." I hated how the bra dug into my shoulders and left red marks on my ribcage. I would rip it off as soon as I came home from school. But as I was informed by my mother that summer day, this was no longer an option. I might as well sleep in the bra, just in case during my sleepwalking episodes someone might see my vile breasts unfettered.

[The next time my mother called me a slut was when I was thirteen. I had gone to a party and met a boy (FROM ENGLAND HIS NAME WAS PAUL HE WAS SO CUTE) and we had made out and I got my first hickey. Well...hickeys. I looked like I had been beaten about the neck with a truncheon. I thought this was dreamy. I was a dumb thirteen. I was so dumb I came home and showed my neck to my mother. She looked horrified and said, "You like being a slut? Because that's what girls who get those are. How far do those hickeys go down?"]

I was called a slut by the man who molested me, and then called a slut by some people when I turned him in for it. People I didn't know told stories of my slutdom all through the town due to that incident until we mercifully moved when I was eleven.

I lived in a Muslim country with mullahs on every corner wielding canes to hit any exposed Western flesh. I had men follow me while shopping and grab my ass or slyly rub up against my breasts while I perused a newstand. I was told "Western women are sluts. If you were in your own country where you belonged you wouldn't be here to be rubbed up on, so it's your own fault anyway."

My first consensual sexual experience was dutifully reported the next day to all the boys in school. That afternoon I had several of them knock on my door and ask for the same "treatment" I had given [name withheld]. Gleeful accounts of my sluttishness ran through school faster than a starving cheetah at an all-you-can-eat gazelle-n-impala buffet at the local Nambimian savannah.

At yet another new school I was called a slut by frenemies for "stealing" the boys they liked, for wearing short skirts, for wearing bathing suits, for wearing pants, for having long hair.

I've been called a slut for dating too many people, for turning down dates, for dating the wrong people. Almost every success I've enjoyed (including the laughably small "success" of this dumb site) has been chalked up to me being a slut. (As to this website, I call myself the "hot" librarian after all. I posted pictures of my...HAIR, you know. What do I expect? To not be thought of as a slut? Of course I'm a slut! That's the only reason anyone reads here!) Good grades = having sex with professors. Working as a waitress at a sports bar = HUGE SLUT. I mean, if you are a waitress and you wear a skirt you will obviously sleep with anyone. Everyone. Triple that if you make good tips.

Sadly I've been called a slut by women far more than by men, by women who are on average far smarter than the male slut slingers. I'm sure I'll be a slut for writing this post.

I'm tired of the typing the word "slut." Oh yeah, and of being called one too.