Am I A Slut?

One of my best girlfriends remarked to me one day that she was starting to worry about her “number.” As a single lady in her late thirties who had not spent a significant period of time in long-term relationships, she had clocked up a fair few sexual partners, she confided, and was concerned that she was bordering on “slutty.”

Her confession caught me by surprise as, from my perspective, my friend could never be a “slut” no matter how high her number. This was not simply because she was my friend, but because she wasn’t the “type of girl” I considered could ever be a slut. After all, my friend is extremely well educated, has held a number of senior managerial positions and has run several of her own businesses over the years. The reason she hasn’t had a successful long-term relationship is to do with her own career and lifestyle aspirations not the fact that she likes sleeping around. These, it seemed, were the values to which I personally referred in determining whether a woman was behaving in a slutty manner, and my friend was most certainly not.

I told her my opinion and we laughed about it. But we never “swapped numbers” so to speak, and I guess it shows that even the most sexually liberal women do, somewhere in the back of their minds, keep score, and possibly occasionally worry about it. I must state up front than the term “slut” can apply to men as well (who hasn’t known a man-slut in their time?). But this article is about how women perceive other women and most importantly, about how we perceive ourselves.

So what’s with the number thing? Is it a viable way of determining whether a woman is a slut or not? Personally, I don’t think the actual number of sexual partners one has had has anything to do with it. After all, there are many reasons a person may have had a higher than average number of partners (the average Briton has apparently had ten according to the Guardian Sex Survey 2008). If a woman has been in a long-term relationship for ten years, it’s to be expected that she will have had fewer than her single friend who’s been casually dating during that same time period. Equally, those who do not marry until later in life may easily accumulate more sexual partners than their “married straight out of college” friends without engaging in behaviour that is in any way “slutty.”

Another reason someone may have had a lot of sexual partners is simply that they’ve had more opportunities to have sex. They may be particularly sexually attractive and receive a lot of offers, or their work may bring them into contact with a larger proportion of available and sexually charged potential lovers (rock stars and hot fitness instructors spring to mind). As Jackie Weaver, the much-lauded Australian actress who’s had her fair share of sexual encounters once said: “‘Promiscuous’ implies that I’m not choosy. In fact I’m very choosy. I just happen to have had a lot of choices.” I agree with her thoroughly, as if you’ve had a hundred people vying for your affections, absent any physiological or moral reasons to decline, it almost goes without saying that you will have accepted at least some of them.

The number itself is also a very fluid concept. I’ve been sexual with a few more people than I’ve had penetrative sexual intercourse with, so I don’t include them in my number, but some people might. It’s evident then that the actual number of people one has had sexual relations with is a fairly poor measure of how loose they are with their sexual license. It’s also obvious that whether or not a woman is a slut is a purely subjective test, and one that women often have very idiosyncratic views about.

I have another girlfriend, for example, who told me when we were in our late teens that it was very important to her that she wait until she was married to have sex. She then had sex with her first boyfriend in college and spent some time assuring herself that they would eventually get married, so it was okay. They later broke up and she is now sexually active with her new boyfriend, effectively raising her target number by a whopping fifty per cent! At the beginning of this new relationship, my friend was an emotional wreck, convinced that her sexual impropriety made her little more than a common slut. But the point is she’s now happy with a much nicer chap, and by most peoples’ standards, two sexual partners is a very modest number.

But if we can’t refer to a simple number, but must rather look to a set of behaviours when determining whether we are being slutty or not, things get even tougher. I refer rather affectionately to an eighteen-month period in my own life as my “slut phase.” I was in my late teens and after losing my virginity at the fairly tender age of fifteen (the guy was also fifteen for the record), I admit that I was keen to add a few notches to my belt. I racked up no fewer than six sexual partners before finishing high school. Yet, other than my closest girlfriends, nobody at my school knew of my extra-curricular activities and I was certainly never called a slut. What was even more relevant to me was the fact I was a straight-A student, diligent and hardworking to a fault and am still teased by my friends today for being a goody-goody. So was I a slut? If one were to refer to mere numbers alone, I undoubtedly was, but according to my own set of criteria, I was as far from it as possible. After all, I wasn’t flaunting my sexuality, I didn’t dress provocatively and I certainly didn’t kiss and tell (until now, at least). Rather, I considered that I was on my own personal voyage of sexual exploration, which lasted until I met my first serious boyfriend aged 19.

Yet I’m sure looking back that there was something else to it as well. Leaving aside all possible Freudian interpretations, I’ve since thought it was my way of expressing my adolescent rebellion. At that time in my life, I wasn’t experimenting with alcohol or drugs the way a lot of my peers were, and for me, having sex was a fun way to push the boundaries. But what is so strange to me now is that at the same time as discreetly pursuing my own sexual adventures, I happily agreed with other girls at my school that certain members of our peer group were “slutty” because of the way they dressed or behaved. Those were the girls who piled on their make-up and wore short skirts and push-up bras and flirted mercilessly with the boys (whether or not they actually took things further). As a high-achiever who kept my sex life private, I felt that somehow, I wasn’t like those girls, even though they may very well still have been virgins. Therein, I suppose, lies the foundation of my own personal “slut” judging kit that remained with me through the years but of which I only became aware during that fateful conversation with my thirty-something friend. I’m pretty sure that every woman has her own very personal views on what constitutes a slut.

In retrospect, though, I don’t believe that any of us are sluts. Personally, I’m not ashamed of how many people I’ve had sex with. I’ve had more sexual partners than either of my two long-term, live-in boyfriends, and felt totally comfortable disclosing my number to them early on in our courtship. But as an adult, I also no longer accept my own initial assumption that some women are sluts just because of the way they dress or behave. If there is a “certain type of woman” that is a slut, what type of woman is she? A woman, perhaps, who has learned, for whatever reason, to express her sexuality through promiscuity, or one who seeks to resolve her emotional issues through sex with many partners. In such cases, aren’t we simply dealing with individuals who should be accepted and supported through their life’s challenges as we all deserve to be rather than branded as sluts? Are we not simply speaking of women who, like all of us, feel lonely or afraid at times, but who, unlike many of us, seek a resolution through sex? Equally, if a woman simply has a voracious sexual appetite and the means to satisfy it, why shouldn’t she be able to do so without retribution from her fellow women? We all have our numbers and our reasons for having the sex we have, and none is more worthy or valid than the others.

If this is the case, as I believe it is, then effectively there is no such thing as a slut at all. There are only women: some like adventure, some love sex and some hope that by having sex, they will find a friend. There are so many more motivations for women to seek sex that we must surely accept that who we term a slut probably has more to do with our own prejudices than any other factor. So if you’re at all worried about your number (or associated reputation) my advice would be this: ask yourself if you are truly happy with how much sex you’re having and with whom you’re having it, and if the answer is yes, then just change your perspective and get on with things. After all, if life’s a book, who wants to read only one page?

Contact the author, Reliable Joe, here: editors@morningquickie.com