I read last week a passage in actor-comedian Kevin Hart’s book “I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons” where he talked about losing his virginity as a teenager. Hart lost it to a girl who was acquiring a reputation for too liberally bestowing her favors upon the neighborhood boys. Hart claimed he remained friends with the girl, because he remained discreet about their amours and never joined the chorus of whisperers decrying her as a “slut.” Hart goes on to sermonize:
“People do a lot of things to make life hard for themselves, but one of the stupidest is guys who desperately want sex talking shit about the women most likely to give it to them.”
How true! I laughed out loud when I read that sentence. Silly teenage boys.
But looking back into my past I don’t remember teenage boys or college men mean-spiritedly calling a girl a “slut.” I don’t remember clearly much of anything from 30 years ago, but I do seem to remember boys pointing out a girl as someone known as sexually available. There seemed to be an aura of mystery and power around such a girl. But I don’t remember anyone trash-talking or trash-dealing such a girl.
And in my past twenty years in the adult world of men I have never heard a man call a woman a “slut.” Not once.
But I have heard women call other women “sluts.” And I have heard them make the accusation in a cutting tone that belied the harshest viciousness. And I have heard it often enough.
It can surprise me, the attack by one woman on another woman’s sexual behavior. I am reminded of this today as I read the following passage in Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:”
Each time Joanna [the “slut”] passed, her cheeks got pinker, her head went higher and her skirt flipped behind her more defiantly. She seemed to grow prettier and prouder as she walked. She stopped oftener than needed to adjust the baby’s coverlet. She maddened the women by touching the baby’s cheek and smiling tenderly at it. How dare she! How dare she, they thought, act as though she had a right to all that?
Many of these good women had children which they brought up by scream and cuff. Many of them hated the husbands who lay by their sides at night. There was no longer high joy for them in the act of love. They endured the love-making rigidly, praying all the while that another child would not result. This bitter submissiveness made the man ugly and brutal. To most of them the love act had become a brutality on both sides; the sooner over with, the better. They resented this girl because they felt this had not been so with her and the father of her child.
Joanna recognized their hate but wouldn’t cringe before it. She would not give in and take the baby indoors. Something had to give. The women broke first. They couldn’t endure it any longer. They had to do something about it. The next time Joanna passed, a stringy woman called out:
“Ain’t you ashamed of yourself?”
“What for?” Joanna wanted to know.
This infuriated the woman. “What for, she asks,” she reported to the other women. “I’ll tell you what for. Because you’re a disgrace and a bum. You got no right to parade the streets with your bastard where innocent children can see you.”
“I guess this is a free country,” said Joanna.
“Not free for the likes of you. Get off the street, get off the street.”
“Try and make me!”
“Get off the street, you whore,” ordered the stringy woman.
The girl’s voice trembled when she answered. “Be careful what you’re saying.”
“We don’t have to be careful what we say to no street walker,” chipped in another woman.
A man passing by stopped a moment to take it in. He touched Joanna’s arm. “Look, Sister, why don’t you go home till these battle-axes cool off? You can’t win with them.”
Joanna jerked her arm away. “You mind your own business!”
“I meant it in the right way, Sister. Sorry.” He walked on.
“Why don’t you go with him,” taunted the stringy woman. “He might be good for a quarter.” The others laughed.
“You’re all jealous,” said Joanna evenly.
“She says we’re jealous,” reported the interlocutor. “Jealous of what, you?” (She said “you” as though it were the girl’s name.)
“Jealous that men like me. That’s what. Lucky you’re married already,” she told the stringy one.
“You’d never get a man otherwise. I bet your husband spits on you-afterwards. I bet that’s just what he does.”
“Bitch! You bitch!” screamed the stringy one hysterically. Then, acting on an instinct which was strong even in Christ’s day, she picked a stone out of the gutter and threw it at Joanna.
So it goes all the way back to Mary Magdalene: the desire to throw stones at the “fallen woman.”
Men might walk up and straight out punch, stab, or shoot you. But my experience is that it are women who call each other “whores” and “sluts” and roll around on the ground scratching at each other’s faces or ripping out fistfuls of hair. Or smiling into each other’s face one moment, and stabbing her in the back the next.
I have always had a tender spot in my heart for the abandoned women the world judged as “sluts.” Denounced from church pulpits or sidewalk walk-ups. Most often, I suspect, they are young people chasing their pleasure like anyone else. Exactly like men do. Often as not, like Joanna in the previous passage, they get pregnant and are left with the aftermath, unlike their male partners who want nothing to do with mother or child. It reminds me of Sexto’s sad poem “Las Abandonadas” —
“Las Abandonadas”
por Julio Sexto
— or this related poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz —
“Hombres Necios Que Acusáis
A La Mujer Sin Razón”
(Little known Internet fun fact: a large portion of the traffic on my website accrues from Spanish speaking countries visiting a few famous such Spanish poems.)
The miserable situation of the unhappily pregnant unmarried woman was commonplace in the past, and continues on today. It does not help that these young women are often barely out of childhood themselves! Now she is 19-years old and looking at the dual challenges of parenthood and maybe marriage. It might have been better to have waited a few years before taking on those challenges. How did this happen? Are their own parents asleep at the wheel?
But piling on some godforsaken girl-woman after the fact doesn’t help. They have enough problems as it is.
Like in most matters, it would be best to eschew the extremes. But if I had to err in one direction or the other, I would choose the “slutty” side. I would be more permissive than restrictive in concupiscence — which is a natural phenomenon common to all mammals — especially if common sense birth-control precautions are used. To be clutching and repressive and withholding would be worse than to be giving and open and feeling, if I had to choose my vices.
Or maybe we should just mind our own business? Keep our judgments to ourselves? Prevent our imaginations from intruding into the bedrooms of our neighbors? Not get judgmental about other people’s personal lives?
Life is hard enough for just about everyone.
Why make it harder?
