Saturday, March 03, 2012

Define A Not-Slut Woman For Me, Please



If you step back from this last Rush a**holery a bit, what do you see?

That the old sexual double-standards are well and thriving! Women who like to have sex are sluts. Men who like to have sex are...? Studs? Even heterosexual men who have sex with many different women are admired. They "scored."

But women turn into sluts by having sex. A stud would be a positive label but a slut is a negative label, never mind all the attempts to take the term back and to expand it into concepts such as "book slut" for someone who loves reading.

The studs and sluts game is a zero-sum one, at least in the wingnut world. That's an important point to make. The studs can only "score" by turning many women into sluts who are then subject to contempt. But if the studs fail to score, the women temporarily escape the label of a slut but the studs lost. Sexual love as a war game.

These double-standards smell moldy like something brought down from the attic, something old. But nope. They are alive and kicking right now.

Hence the question I posed in the title of this post. What is a not-slut woman like? A virgin who has spent her whole live in a secluded convent? A married woman who has only had sex when wanting to get pregnant while making absolutely sure that the missionary position is applied and that she gets not one tingle of pleasure out of it all?

That's not the context in which Rush Limbaugh and others called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute. That context is all about stopping women from speaking up, stopping women from participation in the public arena and stopping women from being uppity in general, and the weapon used there is to first equate a woman with her sexuality and then berate that sexuality.