Delete "slut"

Gayle Barron, who won the Boston Marathon for women in 1978, once said that she struggled with being a pioneer. Not so much because of men’s attitudes, but because her women friends thought she ought to be at home with her family, in “a woman’s place,” in other words. Her friends didn’t celebrate her successes. Worse still, they disapproved. She wonders how much she held back from achieving her true potential, for the sake of keeping her friends.

Yes, that was 1978. Have things really changed that much, or enough?

Sometimes the harshest critics, the hardest judges, are women about other women. Why are we so hard on each other? Is it because we're hard on ourselves? We ought to stick up for each other a little more.

Here's one of my Tristram Shandy hobby horses on that issue: Why do we allow the word “slut” to persist in our lexicon? The word characterizes all that is damaging about the double standards that exist between men and women. “Slut,” after all, is a word that is rarely ever used to describe a man, and when used in such a context, generally carries a certain bravado; whereas, when applied to women, the word is ugly and judgmental, about things that are, in most cases, none of our business. I am, by no means, saying that women ought to sleep around. I am saying that how we express our sexuality (assuming the sexual expression is voluntary, consensual, does not harm others and gives us pleasure) is up to us to define. And yet, too often, women refer to other women as “sluts,” riding high on their horses of righteousness. We are not so different from Gayle’s friends when we do so, deeming certain behaviors “unfeminine.” Gayle’s friends were threatened by her strength. What are we threatened by when another woman exerts her sexuality? Let’s eliminate the word “slut” from our personal dictionary. And I haven’t even gotten to the word “spinster” yet.

Things have changed. While there are certainly still women out there like Gayle’s late-seventies friends, there are many who are not. There’s so much we can go out into the world and do and be, when we aren’t holding ourselves or other women back.