Slut, Deconstructed.

I'm 25, and I've have had sex with 26 (give or take? define "sex"?) people. Whoo doggie, right? But let's break that down.


-Most sluts are not as slutty as you think.
I'm 25. I lost my virginity at 15. So 26 partners is only two or three a year. It's hardly going home with a new guy every night. To break it down further, 6 of those partners were serious romantic relationships, and you can't call a girl slutty for sleeping with her own boyfriend, right? So now it's 20 casual partners over 10 years--a raging, wild, man-eating two per year. I'm so cock-crazy I need it every six months, baby.

I'm not trying to imply that 26 isn't so much but if your number is really high then that's a different situation, morally or socially. I'm only trying to demonstrate that a lot of numbers that seem stratospheric actually break down to very moderate indulgence.

Oh, and a woman in "my god, you can see her everything" clothing dancing on tables and flirting with every guy in the bar might be a virgin for all you know about her.


-Sluttiness doesn't damage anything.
Having sex isn't like smoking; it doesn't give you bad skin or a raspy voice or a propensity to call people "darlin'." Nor does having sex with multiple people have some magical deconstructive effect that having sex multiple times with one partner doesn't. Nor are STDs little angels of justice that start spontaneously generating and bypassing condoms once you reach some critical number.

It's not some slow destructive slide psychologically, either. I suppose if you're slutty for some really unhealthy reason and you hate it--or if you're constantly exposed to slut-hatred from the outside--it could bring you down, but then the sluttery itself isn't your real problem. I've had sex with 26 people and I think that love is real and sex is magical and there's nothing quite like that ineffable, unpredictable spark between two people. And fuck, I would know.

On the other hand, there's not some amazing positive effect either. I haven't become some kind of sex expert, nor met anyone who's fucked so many people that they've learned the secret moves. I'm just more convinced than most that everyone is really, really different in bed, and the only ways to learn are to ask and experiment.

By the way, my vagina's actually pretty tight. If it were loose--if vaginas were made of some kind of fragile inelastic material rather than tough and active muscle tissue--it would be permanently stuck at the diameter of Rowdy's hand, anyway. After that it doesn't matter how many cocks I've had; some were big and some were small, but none of them had knuckles.


-You can't tell a slut by looking.
Clothes are such a powerful symbol in media that you expect a slut to be dressed like a Bratz doll (and a pervert like either the Borg Queen or the biker from the Village People). I, and pretty much all the other high-number-holders that I know, don't have the fashion sense God gave a CS major. It's t-shirt and shorts or skirt in the summer, t-shirt and jeans and jacket in the winter. Whooooo baby.

I'm not super flirty either. I'm kind of shy and awkward, sometimes even prickly. It's just that when I open up to someone, well, I really open up to them.


-Being a slut doesn't mean you can't have relationships.
Rowdy and Sprite know about my past (and present). They like it. They're slutting it up pretty hard themselves. We're, like, Team Slut. We are also in an actual, serious, not-just-sex relationship(s) with cuddling and talking and shared experiences.

See, it turns out that when you take a slut out to dinner, she actually doesn't gnaw on the silverware or start humping the waiter's leg. Hell, she doesn't even hold up a sign saying "I AM A SLUT THIS GUY IS DATING A SLUT." Most sluts these days are thoroughly housebroken and may even have outside interests and personalities.

Are there guys who don't want to date sluts? Sure! And why the hell would I want to date them?



A conversation I had with Rowdy last night:
"You know, when I said I was bisexual on OkCupid it seemed to scare off guys, so I changed it to straight."
"I know you're bi. I'm not scared off."
"Yeah, but you're, like, open-minded."
"So it was important to you to keep a lot of closed-minded guys around?"
"Yep."