It’s that time to pick out a costume for free burritos at Chipotle come Halloween. My friends and I will head to the Halloween store on Skyland Boulevard to spend hours freaking each other out and laughing at the terrible choice of costumes for women.
“Oh, because they’re so slutty!” No, because they’re cheaply made and the selection is redundant. I don’t care about slutty costumes because there’s no such thing as a slut in the first place. Before you clutch your pearls, put the smelling salts down and consider: what makes a person a slut?
Having a lot of sex? Having more sex than you? Having sex with your crush? Serial monogamy? Casual sex? Skimpy clothes? Reveling in one’s good looks? Sexual arousal? Swiping one’s v-card? Buying Plan B? Pregnancy? A devilish twinkle in one’s eye?
There are a lot of reasons why somebody might have a lot of sex, or any of it – including coercion, boredom and actually liking it – and sometimes people have sex irresponsibly. That doesn’t make them sluts, though. If you have a problem with someone’s sexual activity, the problem doesn’t lie with them.
Your designating them a slut has everything to do with your own insecurities – your belief that you’re entitled to someone’s body and sexuality, or that you “deserve” someone “pure,” or that you’re doubting your own sexual prowess and personal self-worth. It has absolutely nothing to do with them having sex. They aren’t sluts, and their having sex might have nothing to do with them not respecting themselves. For that matter, if someone is having sex to meet some emotional need, sex still isn’t the problem.
It does, however, have everything to do with you placing someone’s intrinsic value as a person in their sexuality and how they choose to express that, and you deciding that they’re unworthy of respect because they don’t meet your arbitrary standards. Shaming sexuality doesn’t improve absolutely anything in this world, but it does create and encourage unhealthy sexual behaviors and attitudes, including rape apologetics, not using birth control and the lack of proper access to it and feeding racist stereotypes about people of color. Ultimately, the only value of sex is what the person having sex chooses to give it, and they don’t owe you an explanation.
A public service announcement: someone’s “sluttiness” is never a green light for a person sexually assaulting them. No one is ever entitled to anyone sexually without their explicit permission. I don’t care if you bought them dinner, they “teased” you all night or you married them. There’s no situation in which forcing or manipulating someone into having sex is justified. So when somebody walks in with an itty-bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get… their verbal permission to do anything more. If somebody were asking for it, they would, you know, ask. And if they can’t ask, they can’t give consent. No one is owed sex. Period.
As for the sad state of women’s costumes, the problems don’t necessarily have anything to do with “sluttiness.” One, it’s the lack of choice involved, which doesn’t leave anyone the freedom of deciding whether or how they will express their sexuality in any particular way. Two, it’s the rampant racism prevalent in the selection that condones violent sexual histories, ethno-cultural abuses and misrepresentation of certain groups of people. See: “Sexy Pocahontas” and “Ghetto Gangster.” But if I want to be the sexy strawberry in my friend’s sexy fruit salad costume ensemble, I will be. Deal with it.
Samaria Johnson is a junior majoring in history. Her column runs biweekly on Mondays.
