I heart Mark Morford

And my google news alert on "slut feminism"

As relevant now as when it was first published on June 18, 2004, Mark Morford's San Francisco Chronicle column entitled "In Defense of Sluts," which starts out like this:

Sluts are good. Sluts make America proud. The world needs more sluts. I contend this without shame or conflict. God bless America.

But what I really admire him here for is not just blindly praising sluts or being funny with lines like "I thought I was all over the modern pro-slut feminism thing like whipped cream on a soy mocha." but for examining why the slut epithet continues and his own flawed ideas about it. Putting women on a pedestal is just not the answer. There may very well be biological and certainly cultural differences by gender, but these grand sweeping "really women are better/kinder/gentler/nicer/etc." therefore they should be praised and glorified, but only as long as they stay within certain precious modes of behavior.

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?

The whole thing is worth reading, but I think there's this idea, again, that feminists or self-proclaimed sluts want to be "just like men," that rings slightly false. Morford writes that "we need more of the self-defined sluts...regularly nonjudged sluts who can do whatever they want and sleep with whomever they want..." and I do agree, to some extent, but I don't think we should just want to simply emulate men.

It's not my place to judge anyone else's behavior, but I will say that for me, I've certainly been on the other side where people sortof assume that for me sex is just a quick and easy transaction, a one-time, non-feeling, no-strings event, which it certainly can be, but wasn't for me. I think that while the whole "ethical slut" ethos may not appeal to everyone, there is something to be said for thinking about people other than yourself, which it is possible to do and still be as slutty as you want to be. A friend was saying I should write about the art of the one night stand, and how to have a good one - I may do that at some point, but I don't necessarily know the answer. In recent memory there's been one amazing one and several pretty dismal ones, so I'm certainly back to the drawing board. I don't necessarily think we need more sluts, but we need less judgment about other people's sexual choices. It's such an easy criticism to fall back on, perhaps the easiest next to slamming a woman's looks, and there really is no equivalent for a guy, so women can either embrace their sluttiness or perceived sluttiness, try to live up to some really fake ideal that's close to impossible. Emily White's Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut looks at this pheneomenon and how you don't even actually need to be slutty in order to be branded a slut, which I'm sure isn't a news flash to probably anyone reading this.