Being a Slut
By B
Grade: B-
I have always had a fondness for girls with bad reputations. The bigger, blonder, and trashier the better. My main problem with The OC is that the wild girls don’t seem wild enough. Where is the slathered on eye makeup, I would like to know? Where are the two inch roots and the ill-fitting PARASUCO jeans? The girls on this program are just a bunch of bland, run-of-the-mill Tveenagers, especially the incredibly boring girl played by Mischa Barton, who is, implausibly, supposed to be the bad one. Her TV name escapes me, but she is always OD’ing and so forth. Her hair is never messed up. This show sucks. It does not know that being a bad girl is all about being a weird looking slut with a low-level Ritalin problem. Now Rayanne Graf of My So-Called Life-- there was a little hooker I could get behind. She wore things like crop tops, Dazzy Dukes, and backwards baseball-caps, all topped off with kooky Cleopatra eyeliner. She was always sleeping with scuzzy older men and Angela’s boyfriend and that one time when she did OD didn’t she also try to sleep with her mom’s boyfriend or something and then Patty Chase came to the rescue? Something of that nature. Here is a girl who knows what being a slut is all about.
Being a slut is all about catching a spark and setting it off and then standing by and watching everything burn. It is about being so in control of your own out-of-controlness. It is all about making your roommates worry because it is two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and you haven’t come home for the third night in a row, but fake-out because you are in your room, half asleep, listening to them gossip about you. They just think you’re not home because you slept in your shoes instead of leaving them by the door.
Being a slut is about taking whatever opportunity the world offers, and crossing your fingers. Unfortunately, sometimes the world offers scabies, or worse. I am not advocating crazy behavior here, and trust me, I’m certainly not advocating getting scabies. But I do think that the sluts of the world are doing a sacred duty. We are love soldiers. Being a slut is going into battle, armed with almost nothing, and fighting for a much higher purpose, knowing that injury is all around. It is being hard and vulnerable, taking off the armor only to go in for the sneaky stiletto thrust to the gut. The job of a slut is to vanquish. Because there are blue-eyed mercenaries from heartless kingdoms lurking everywhere. Sometimes you get the job done. Sometimes you lose.
The day after an impromptu orgy (which you may or may not have gotten paid for) a slut might feel slightly bummed out for being, well, a little slut. After all, there is something vaguely undignified about spending a night with two different sets of gay, shaved balls banging against your closed eyelids. Is this making your life more fun? Or just more smelly? The danger of being a slut is that you forget who the joke is really on, because most of the world believes that it is the slut who pays. Wrong of course-- but as soon as a slut buys into this conceit, the game is over. The danger is that you begin to believe the gossip. The other danger is forgetting which side you were on in the first place.
Being a slut is about taking whatever opportunity the world offers, and crossing your fingers. Unfortunately, sometimes the world offers scabies, or worse. I am not advocating crazy behavior here, and trust me, I’m certainly not advocating getting scabies. But I do think that the sluts of the world are doing a sacred duty. We are love soldiers. Being a slut is going into battle, armed with almost nothing, and fighting for a much higher purpose, knowing that injury is all around. It is being hard and vulnerable, taking off the armor only to go in for the sneaky stiletto thrust to the gut. The job of a slut is to vanquish. Because there are blue-eyed mercenaries from heartless kingdoms lurking everywhere. Sometimes you get the job done. Sometimes you lose.
The day after an impromptu orgy (which you may or may not have gotten paid for) a slut might feel slightly bummed out for being, well, a little slut. After all, there is something vaguely undignified about spending a night with two different sets of gay, shaved balls banging against your closed eyelids. Is this making your life more fun? Or just more smelly? The danger of being a slut is that you forget who the joke is really on, because most of the world believes that it is the slut who pays. Wrong of course-- but as soon as a slut buys into this conceit, the game is over. The danger is that you begin to believe the gossip. The other danger is forgetting which side you were on in the first place.
Here is what Mark Doty says about sluts in his poem Tiara:
“… Sometimes we wake not knowing
how we came to lie here,
or who has crowned us with these temporary,
precious stones. And given
the world’s perfectly turned shoulders,
the deep hollows blued by longing,
given the irreplaceable silk
of horses rippling in orchards,
fruit thundering and chiming down,
given the ordinary marvels of form
and gravity, what could he do,
what could any of us ever do
but ask for it?”
Being a slut is not always fun. It is never safe. A slut gives up a lot, not least of all reputation and peace of mind. But being a slut is a little bit like being a priest or a nun. If it calls you, you have to answer. It is your responsibility.