Mark Morford, my favorite SF Gate Columnist touches on a favorite topic of mine today: SLUTS. In Defense Of Sluts / You know what the world needs? More sluts.
Men love sluts. They will agree with a woman if she tells a man that so and so is a slut. "Oh yes, she is just a slut," he will say as his eyeballs are falling out of their sockets as the slut walks by. He thinks, "Man, I could do her." Well yes, he could and so could everyone else. I was never threatened by sluts because men rarely have serious relationships with sluts because 1. Sluts don't want a serious relationship (another column) and 2. Men have a double standards.
Morford brings up sluts because of this headline: MADONNA BRANDED A 'SLUT': Queen of Pop Madonna has been branded a 'slut' by Michael Jackson's Jewish adviser Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.
I am sure Madonna is freaking out cause some guy named Shmuley thinks she is a slut. He's some guy who also happens to advise Michael Jackson. oy vay. Morford thinks that Madonna hasn't been a slut since the Reagan years. I would have to agree with him on that... but then again we don't know how much of it was actual sluttiness and how much was just for show. I contend that a lot of it was for show which would make her a media slut.
Morford: But it raises an eternal question. "Slut." Still potent. Still a deadly stinger of a word. Still being bandied about like some sort of ultimate conviction, a nasty hammer blow, a definitive curse. Like a woman sharing her sex with unbridled abandon is unethical and wrong and dirty and, well, slutty, whereas if a man does the same he's considered, well, Colin Farrell. Is this still true? Is this still where we are?
Me: Well technically, yes.
Morford: And it ain't just men slapping this label around. In fact, as any female with a vociferous circle of friends can attest, women can be far, far nastier than men in their condemnations of their own. Women call other women sluts (and worse) all the time, savagely, brutally, meaning it in the most degrading way possible. And then they drink too much Diet Pepsi and steal their best friend's boyfriend. But that's another column.
Me: How did he know about my diet pepsi?
Morford: Which brings me to my flawed theory as to why there exists such a nasty double standard, why there will always be a double standard, why men who have tons of unbridled wanton sex are considered hunky lotharios and women who have tons of unbridled careless stupid sex are considered sleazy unwanted harlots barely more highly evolved than a rat snake.
Morford: Here it is: Because women are more powerful.
Me: Shhhhh. Not so loud.
Morford: Because women control and contain and embody the most potent of energies this world has to offer: its sex, its reproduction, its libido, all about Earth and the divine feminine and cycles of the oceans and the moon and birth and death and men can only stand back and kneel down and buy flowers and candy and go, wow, and damn, and oh my god,
and then beat each other up and instigate wars.
Me: What do you want, Mark? A sandwich? Do you want me to look for the remote?
Morford: That is to say, women do indeed have a higher degree of responsibility with their sex because it is their most potent and divine strength, a dazzling and eternally alluring hunk of mystical magic, just as men have more responsibility not to abuse their physical strength and their awesome ability to barbecue meats or parallel park.
Me: I am going to take a nap if you don't want anything to eat now.
Morford: This is my dime-store theory. Isn't it nice? Doesn't it sound all flattering and luscious? I thought so. I thought I was being all attuned and progressive. I thought I was all over the modern pro-slut feminism thing like whipped cream on a soy mocha.
Morford: I was wrong.
Me: Just kill that big bug in the bathtub for me, would you?
Morford: I have been set straight, more or less. I have been informed by some very smart very attuned young women with whom I shared the idea for this column that if I offered up this theory, that if I were to humbly suggest that women do, in fact, have a bit more accountability with their sexuality, I would be smacked upside the ideological head. By women. Smart women. Powerful women. Cool women who know things.
Morford: Here's why: Because my little theory ain't exactly something they need to hear. Because that sort of "all-powerful goddess-y controller-of-the-sex attuned-with-the-tides" thing is, in truth, just another ideological ruse, just another manufactured burden, just another contrived role we assume women want to assume.
Morford: This slut thing is, apparently, very tricky.
Me: (yawning)
Morford: "Slut," of course, still has power. Is still packed with derogatory meaning, loaded with baggage. But you have to be careful, I am told, not to completely reverse its meaning, either, and imply that women are these radiant omnipotent sexual deities, as though they are some sort of alternative being, some sort of mega-loaded creature who embodies all these impossibly grandiose concepts that only, in truth, limit and annoy them.
Morford: It is, in its way, just another trap. It is, once again, putting the responsibility for sex and sluttiness and the procreative potency back onto women who don't necessarily want it or need it or feel like they have to embody anybody's inflated sexual notions of anything.
Me: (yawning) Get to the point.
Morford: This is what they say. Just leave us the frick alone, let us play with our energies and strengths how we see fit, let us be just like men, not judged and not put upon, and let us be free to define ourselves how we want to, for good or ill, as guys seem to get to do, as the world has refused to allow us to do for, you know, millennia. To which I say, hell yes.
Me: Good one. I almost fell for it.
Morford: So, then, let's put it this way: You know what the world needs? More sluts. Not the limited ones and not the judged ones and not the ones that little dink-monkey rabbis get to point a scraggily little finger at and go, icky icky icky.
Morford: Rather, we need more of the self-defined sluts, luminous or divine, ugly or silly, egregious or annoying, regularly nonjudged sluts who can do whatever they want and sleep with whomever they want and who don't have to worry about what the hell "progressive" men or "enlightened" columnists or gum-snapping bimbo "Bachelor" bait have to say about it.
Morford: There. That is indeed, truly, what the world needs. Also, world peace. And lots of free lube. And less religious puling. Is that too much to ask?
Me: Nice try.
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