Slut-shaming is nothing new. When a woman sleeps with more people than whatever arbitrary number is deemed appropriate, her morals and sexual standards are quickly called into question.
But then there’s also the school of thought that assumes there must be some longstanding emotional damage that propels women to have casual sex. Although this mentality is certainly changing (slowly), it’s a rather undesirable dichotomy: you either enjoy sex and are therefore a slut, or you do it because there’s something wrong with you.
A couple of years ago, I wasn’t involved in a conversation that took place between a male and a female friend of mine. After having spent years berating this male friend about his attitudes towards women and sex, the only way that he would agree to participate in a conversation that might explore said attitudes, was if I didn’t contribute to it.
So I shut up. But fortunately, the female friend in question and I were thoroughly on the same page.
‘I just mean that I know a lot of girls who’ve had sex with an excessive number of guys,’ he began. ‘Because there’s something wrong with them…’
‘Because there’s something wrong with them?’ she exclaimed, with the kind of disbelief that I was also hoarding behind my pursed lips.
A lot of potential motives and reasons are presented as to why women have sex, but this is the operative thing when we’re talking about women. Men have sex because they’re manly and horny and it’s natural (or even “normal”) for them to want sex around the clock, and in any and every form they can get it in. But when a woman has sex, and particularly when her desire for sex is greater than that of a starfish, there must be some communicable and quantifiable reason for it.
Of course, behaviours have motives. In a study conducted by Cindy Meston and David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin about why women have sex, they identified 237 unique motives. Obviously you’d need a book to cover all of them, but of note is that the researchers wrote “despite the reigning conventional wisdom, the basic biochemistry of attraction is the number one reason women give for why they have sex.”
Women usually have sex because they’re attracted to a person. Wow. Revelatory.
And yet, conversations like that which took place between my friends show that people do need reminders of this. As far as we’ve come, the notion that women need a reason other than simply wanting to do it remains a rather pervasive one.
Sex is had for a whole variety of reasons. It can be to feel validated or loved. Sometimes it’s to get revenge or because of pressure from a partner. But even when the motive seems self-destructive or ill-advised, pathologising people is hardly helpful.
The suggestion that there’s something wrong with women who engage in sexual frivolities both trivialises the fact that some girls do seek sex in order to feel good about themselves, rather than to just feel good, and also tries to problematise the sex lives of those who do it for no reason other than simply wanting to.
It’s impossible to impose some kind of umbrella reasoning when a woman (or a man) has sex with a lot of partners, as there are potentially as many motives as there are people in the world.
Or at least 237.
(Image credit: 1.)
I want to be starkly honest for a moment and tell you that there was, in my childhood or teenage-hood, some trauma of the kind that back yard pop psychologists like to think causes sexual promiscuity.
I confided this in a very good friend once. Later on in our friendship, I started a sexual relationship with one of her good male friends. She would have scoffed at the idea that she liked or loved him in a romantic way, but she was obviously jealous. And at one point she insinuated that I was the S-word. And that it was perhaps because of my trauma.
He was someone who a few women wanted to sleep with. It was hardly unusual that I did too. And yet. It MUST have been my deep seated emotional issues that forced me into the arms of a guy who was (and still is): incredibly good in bed, and generous, and funny, and good company.