Let's Talk About "Slut"

Modern society is bizarre in that men who manage to "get all the girls" are considered manly, whereas women who sleep around are considered "sluts", which is supposed to have negative connotations involving unfaithfulness. Many feminists have pointed out the absurdity of this double standard, but that is not what I am here to talk about, because we should all know its bullshit by now anyway.

What I want to ask is why is being a slut a bad thing? The fact that society seems to consider "cheating" as the ultimate insult to a relationship seems to imply that sex is closely tied to love. Thus, "sex" is supposed to be something special you only do with your beloved, and getting kinky with other people trivializes what is supposed to be a unique and meaningful act.

I think this is kind of stupid.

The problem is that this directly ties how much you love someone to whether or not you are having sex with them. By tying sex so closely to love, you end up trivializing love itself by implying that somehow love cannot exist separately from sex, and that sex implies love, which seems incredibly immature. It also denies that there are different kinds of sex, and simply lumps all sexual activity into one giant intimacy category that is supposed to be reserved for a married couple.

This appears to be a vestigial remnant of uptight religious practices that sought to heavily regulate all sexual activity. I suspect the reasons behind this lie mostly in the total lack of birth control and issues of sexually transmitted diseases in ancient times. By limiting sex to consenting monogamous pairs, outbreaks could be contained and unwanted births were minimized, thus ensuring all children were born to caring families, to a degree.

We don't live in ancient Egypt. We live in 2013. We have widely available birth control and condoms and various well-established methods of safe sex that minimize disease transfer, and furthermore have tests to determine if someone is a carrier. We can go be sluts and not cause a pandemic or a sudden influx of unwanted pregnancies. At least, as long as the men aren't raping women all the time like a bunch of fucking assholes. Or as long as we don't let a bunch of religious dickheads treat women like second class citizens who shouldn't be allowed to control their own body, and should no longer have access to contraception or get abortions.

By the way, I should point out we wouldn't need nearly as many abortions if males just stopped raping women. The fact that this is still a problem in modern society is mind boggling.

I'd like to think that, if I fall in love with a women, and she falls in love with me, our love is going to transcend our sex life, because I think equating love with having sex with someone is kind of pathetic. The only person she is ever going to have unprotected sex with is going to be me, and vice versa. Everything else is just sex for fun, which is considered healthy for almost everyone involved as both exercise and stress relief. Consequently, consensual sex is usually a win win situation for everyone involved, and I would really like to see more sex instead of more stupid angry political debates. As the hippies all liked saying, make love, not war.

Of course, I also think that if both people in a relationship feel that exclusivity is important, it's their decision, and no one should stop them. This is especially true if they get strong, lingering feelings for sexual partners. I'm just sick of society viewing open relationships and "sluts" with contempt, because there is nothing wrong with it. I naturally do not expect any of this to actually happen, since humans are often jealous and insecure, and therefore they will be terrified at any possible threat to a relationship, or any suggestion that they are sexually inept. This is really sad and I don't think it is necessarily an inevitable consequence of human behavior, but it is unlikely to change due to how deeply it is ingrained in our culture.

Despite this, I would be far more confident of choosing the right person if they could go get kinky with their friends and come back and love me just as much as before, since then we truly love each other for who we are, not because of who we have sex with.


Note: Ironically, I seriously doubt I would ever have sex outside of my relationship simply because I wouldn't have the time. If she wants to, though, I would still be totally ok with it.