you can call me sl*t
nota bene: my personal experiences cannot and should not redefine any word's impact for all who have been or will be hurt by it.
CW: discussions of sexual trauma
Normally, I would start a letter to you with, “hello, lover” but in a moment you’ll see why that felt, tonally, off.
The first time I was called a slut was in the fifth grade.
The year before, the fourth grade, if you’re into that sort of thing, I had kissed my then-boyfriend of approximately nine days on the cheek. My first kiss, if you count that sort of thing. We broke up soon after for reasons I cannot recall, though I can still keenly remember the gut-wrenching pain of it all, and that is enough.
The next year, we’re back to fifth grade for those keeping track, I was called a slut by my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend and by extension him since apparently, he strongly insinuated that I was one and she passed along the message.
I cannot remember how I retaliated. I do know that I was punished along with them with a recess detention, so I must have responded in kind. But I didn’t even know what the word meant. I just knew it had been used to hurt me. Looking back, this was perhaps my first lesson in the power of words; how a word I had no definition or knowledge of, no context for, still managed to inflict pain and cause harm.
After that, my reputation was sealed, in the way that elementary school reputations often are. Without any sort of evidence, only a word hurled from one child to another, I was “a Slut”.
I love words. I love their meanings. I love watching their evolution through time and culture. Love to bear witness to word birth, death, and re-birth. A common refrain among authors is that “it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be written”; essentially, you don’t have to spend hours finding the perfect word in that sentence. You just have to write a sentence and find the perfect word later, presumably in the revision stage.
This has never worked for me. I spend large chunks of writing time looking for the word. The right word. The perfect word. The One.
The word or combination thereof that illustrates what I mean, how I feel. The word that takes the vibes and makes them concrete and tangible and gives them weight. I make lists in my notebooks of the words I’ve looked up, researched, dithered over, for no other reason than I just want to collect them.
Part of our punishment in the fifth grade was to look up the word. Ms. Sebben, my fifth grade teacher, obviously also keenly understood the power of words and why it is our responsibility to know them before they can be included in our lexicon.
Because, for those of us not bitten by radioactive spiders, words are our power and with great words comes great responsibility.
I can no longer remember the dictionary I used. I know it was a physical dictionary. A flesh and blood book, if you will. I’m too old to have had access to computers in my school unless it was during computer lab class, once a week. Whoever wrote that dictionary, Webster or Merriam, Cambridge or Oxford, or Collins, their definition of slut was one that spoke to me on a deeper level.
Rationally, I understood that slut was a word used to hurt people, women specifically. Me, even if I was not yet womanly. It was a “bad” word. One not repeated in front of teachers or parents or tattletales. I understood this word was a weapon, not only because it was used to cut me, but because of how it was defined. Despite not having a strong concept of what sex was yet, I knew that it was not something I should aspire to.
And yet, I remember, upon reading the dictionary definition of slut, one singular thought, or maybe a better word for it, a feeling.
When I read what slut meant, I thought, I felt: honestly, that sounds kinda great.
In the eighth grade two popular boys asked me to go to the movies with them on a Friday night. I was eager to go because I was eager to be liked, by both boys and girls, as friends and as more. It didn’t really matter how someone liked me. I simply longed for it. I longed for my peers’ acceptance, their approval, their love, with a depth that is still hard to measure with tools and numbers. I longed for it the way a seawife longs for her sailor to return home, longed for it the way Henry the VIII longed for a son. Tragically, selfishly.
Obviously, it was of the utmost importance that I be allowed to attend the movies with those boys. My parents said no. No amount of begging and pleading changed their minds. Those boys, classmates that I hoped to be able to call friends by Monday morning, told me to lie, suggested I sneak out. But I couldn’t and I didn’t and I never met them at the movie theatre. The disappointment within my pre-teen body was heart breaking, rib cracking, breath catching. It was the pain of almost, of wishes never coming true.
That Monday, one of those boys told me, plainly, without shame, that they had planned to “force me” to perform oral sex on both of them at the movies that night.
Because I was, according to them, a “slut”.
I felt that pain again. The heart breaking, rib cracking, breath catching relief of a different kind of almost.
Throughout the rest of my public school career, the word slut was used by my peers in reference to me on multiple occasions. I always found this to be quite peculiar because — by definition — a slut was someone who participated in a lot of sex and for most of that time I had never had sex.
I didn’t look a penis in the eye until I was 18 years old.
I was a slut because I was one of the first girls in my class to develop breasts and of course, I interpreted the attention I received from their development to be a reflection of me, a reflection of my classmates’ acceptance and approval of me. That’s not what their attention was, but I was certainly a slut for interpreting it that way.
In high school, when an older boy liked me, flirted with me. When he caught my attention at the window of my closed classroom door and waited until I found an excuse to step outside. When he skipped class to hang out with me on my lunch period. I was a slut. I was a slut because I thought he liked me, but he also had a girlfriend and I didn’t know about her. I was a slut and I should have known.
I walked down hallways and heard whispers — sometimes louder than whispers — that word: slut. The fact of my sluttery was written on bathroom stalls, discussed on MSN messenger, in locker rooms, at parties I was never invited to.
Ruby {not my real name} was a slut. And reader, that pissed me off. Because god what I would have done to actually be a slut.
The definition had stuck with me since the fifth grade. It had grown, mutated, with context and age and culture. Maybe the original definition had stopped having meaning altogether for me, like when you type it again and again until you’re not sure you’re spelling it correctly anymore.
Slut — personally — no longer felt like a word that could hurt me.
Slut felt aspirational to be honest.
God, what I would have given to be a slut when I was actually called one. To me, slut meant physical connection, pleasure. Slut was abundance, satisfaction, desire. Slut meant enjoying something, simply because you could, not because you should, maybe especially because you shouldn’t.
Slut is satiation; every muscle in your body having been well used. Slut is a gift; spreading love, and joy, pleasure, and your legs as wide as you possibly can. Slut is greed; stuffing your mouth full until whatever is left dribbles down your chin. Slut is collecting words because you like how they sound and how they taste, their bulk in your throat, their weight on your tongue; and, because you want to be filled with them, with words, written in a cloud, scratched onto paper, spoken into sweat-slick skin or soft pillows. Slut is self-acceptance, knowing yourself, what you can take and what you won’t put up with; what you want, need, and what you deserve.
Slut is the keen longing for something that you probably shouldn’t want and may never have. Something you’ve never even experienced but know that you are missing without it.
Slut is still a dangerous word, a sharp weapon. Slut cuts and leaves you bleeding, it tears flesh. Slut demands meekness and propriety and restraint in the name of righteousness. Slut sucks your power from you to feed a capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist machine that seeks to keep you drained of all your power.
Slut deserves your and my respect. Slut is a powerful word and demands great responsibility.
But when you call me a slut, when I call myself one, know that it doesn’t hurt and I do not bleed — unless I want to. When you call me a slut, I am not meek. I am a queen with her crown on and her tits out, and blood on her hands, running you down with her gold-plated chariot.
Call me a slut and I fall. I throw myself backward, eyes closed, beatifically smiling, into the depths of a feather-filled mattress, each individual plume delicately painted in permanent ink with that word.
Call me a slut and I feel it like a satin lash against my skin. Call me a slut and I gather each letter toward me, a dragon on her piles and piles, miles and miles of gold. Call me a slut and picture me, biting your pillow until it explodes in a cloud of cotton around us. Call me a slut and hear me laugh — hear my laugh — a cackle, a giggle, glee.
Call me a slut.
Please. I’m begging you.
Slut is a powerful word, used to wield and withhold.
Slut is power, but so am I, lover. So am I.
xo,
Rubes