>>17923708
>"a family of engineers"
A Slut
Slut
July 5, 2010 |
2
In just a few more words than this post’s title, I was recently informed by someone thatI, apparently, have a reputation for being a whore. I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight, to whatever extent such a record even needs setting.
I’ve never really thought of myself as someone who has an abnormally large amount of sex, or has it with an abnormally large number of partners. OkCupid, conveniently, asked precisely those questions in a test I took a few weeks ago, and informed me that I’m less experienced than the average 21 year old, in terms of number of sexual partners. (I have a policy of not lying to computers, so I have to hope that that’s at least somewhat representative of how I actually compare to my cohorts.) While the validation from a site that specializes in gathering too much information was welcome, it merely served to confirm what I already believed: that I’m having the correct amount of sex with the correct number of people — for me.
Of course, the broader point here is that, as someone who makes responsible (read: safe) choices, I shouldn’t have to justify the particulars of my sex life to anyone under any circumstance. But I couldn’t help but feel, in the aftermath of the “you’re a slut, let’s not be friends” conversation I recently had, that it was worth taking a little time to think about the sex I’ve had, what it meant to me, and whether it’s ever really possible to put aside your sexual past.
This year, my road to emotional recovery from my last breakup began with getting an STI test one afternoon. Shortly after leaving the building with a negative HIV test result (and a negative everything-else result by text a few days later), I had to ask whether that really added up to the kind of sexual clean slate that I was imagining it to be. Being sexually active for a number of years, this was by no means my first HIV test, but it was the first that triggered anything other than a temporary sense of relief; I felt, somehow, vindicated, as if karmically, all my previous choices had been validated by writ of not having “won” the STI roulette.
That’s of course a stupid way to look at things: sexually-transmitted diseases aren’t karmic, they’re microbial, and their probabilities of transmission are in no ways affected by the moral or emotional dimensions of my sexual choices. But on a personal level, a clean bill of health gave me some much-needed distance from my sex life. The sex I’d had up until that moment — whether in a relationship or more casually, whether good or bad, whether I walked away from it feeling cheap and used or loved and connected to another human being — was compartmentalized and entirely in the past.
The slut conversation, whatever its validity (none, I would argue, but I’m the one wearing the scarlet ‘A’, so who am I to talk?), did have the effect of bringing my own feelings about my sexual past back into my present. After the almost transcendent moment of clarity following my STI test in Oxford, I suddenly felt guilty again about the people I’d slept with. Being called a slut was enough, for me, to make me actually feel like one, even if, objectively, there have been no practical consequences for my sexual behavior and, when I think back, I don’t have any particular problems with my own actions.
Is what I’m left with in this situation just an updated version of the high school mentality of being concerned with my reputation, rather than with my own feelings about myself? Possibly. But that’s not going to stop me from getting another STI test in a couple of weeks, just to try to get that feeling of validation back.