It was a misunderstanding, a simple
misunderstanding, but it left me with a beer soaked t-shirt and jeans and all
of us being barred from our local pub.
Leah should have been upset with Pav not
me. I was trying to defend her honour but I suppose my 20 year old mouth was
not as eloquent as I wanted it to be and my fledgling feminism not as well
thought through as I’d hoped. I’d wanted to be Germaine Greer but ended up
covered in cheap student beer.
Pav had been going on about women who slept
around being sluts. What a fucking hypocrite. Pav was the biggest slut in the
world. He brought a different girl back to our student digs every other week.
But in his macho world it was one rule for men and another for women. So I
started having a go at him.
‘Pav,’ I said. ‘if these women weren’t sluts
then you wouldn’t have anyone to sleep with. Or do you expect to deflower a
virgin every time you bring a new girl back to the flat. For you to live your
life, there has to be sluts.’
It was at that point I felt the beer hit me. I
looked around to see Leah with smoke coming out of her ears.
‘And you’re lucky it wasn’t the glass too.’ She
hissed.
‘What?’ I said, beer dripping off my eyebrows.
‘ What did I say?’
Leah stormed out not answering my question and
the landlord advised us all to follow her and not come back for a day or two.
My mind was still ticking. It was like playing a
very stubborn amusement arcade game – I was waiting for the penny to drop.
Then the realisation hit me. I’d been trying to point out that women were entitled to be as promiscuous as men but what I’d done was called the women
Pav slept with sluts, Pav had slept with Leah ergo I’d called Leah a slut. But
I was only using that term quoting Pav. It was his word not mine, I was just
showing how ridiculous it was.
Despite living in the same digs for another 6 months, despite me apologising a million times, Leah didn’t
speak to me again for another 8 years. But that’s another story.
The definition of slut is as follows: A woman who has many casual sexual partners.
ReplyDeleteBut you don't know whether all the women that slept wit Pav had many casual sexual partners. Pav might have been the only one or one of very few partners for them (at least we don't know so you - I mean your character in the story - had no right to call these women sluts). You should have called Pav a slut. But is it the word we can use to describe a man? I am afraid the language discriminates women here. Slapper, slag tart, whore and slut are used to describe women and they are pejorative. What words do we have for men who have many casual sexual partners? womanizer? lady-killer? they are not, very pejorative, are they? (or maybe I don't know such words) It's high time we started to use slut to describe men as well or stopped using these words at all.
I think that is exactly the point the character was trying to make when he was having a go at Pav, but rather stupidly he chose to quote Pav’s words rather than use other ones.
DeleteSo my character agrees with you and wishes he was as eloquent as you have been here.
As for me, well I agree, I do not believe we should judge people on how many or how few people they chose to sleep with. It’s something that has no business being on our moral compass.
I forgive your character - he's very young after all (I've met some men twice his age who do not know how to talk to or about women). I blame the language for being discriminatory
Delete