For years, there was one thing that I knew to be true: if things went bad for me, if people were cruel to me, it was because I was a slut. This was, very clearly, why men treated me with all the courtesy of a Kleenex, why women viewed me with suspicion. Everyone knew that I was a slut. And my sluttiness, I knew in my heart, was something I had brought on myself.
I had a long list of reasons for why I was a slut. I had, by that point, had a wide variety of sexual experiences and partners — perhaps a more than respectable number for a woman in her thirties, though it was always difficult to tell. I was an adult industry expert, and before that someone who had run a blog about sex and porn for many years. And then, of course, at the root of it all: the three or four years* I spent working as a model for a collection of indie porn sites. I had made my bed, and now I was lying in it, in all its decadent filth.
This idea was so deeply ingrained in me that it took well into my mid-thirties for me to even begin to question it. I don’t recall what it was that put the first fracture in my confident retelling of my own life history; maybe it was seeing the stats on how frequently bi women are subjected to abuse. But suddenly I found myself considering a novel question: was I treated badly because I had acted in ways that “proved” I was a slut, or was I treated badly because I was bisexual and therefore assumed to be slutty? Had my slutty history destroyed my good girl reputation — or had it simply been the confirmation of a tainted reputation that I had long been destined to have?
In her book, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, Leora Tanenbaum outlines a novel theory: sluttiness, she declares, is not about what women do or have done, but about society’s rampant appetite for sexualizing and then ostracizing a select subset of women. Yes, some sluts have colorful sexual pasts (and presents), but it’s not a requirement by any means. Virgins can be labeled sluts, and often earn this label for “crimes” as inoffensive as getting boobs before the other girls, getting asked out by another girl’s crush, or, depressingly, just being from a low income family or a woman of color. Given that you are reading this newsletter, it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that bisexuality, too, is something that can earn a girl the scarlet S.
It’s hard for me to tease out the particulars of my own bad reputation, or pin it all on one specific thing. I was an early developer whose changing body held fascination for my classmates — in the fifth grade, a boy offered me money to lift my arms for a minute so he could properly observe the curiosity that was my armpit hair (I declined, correctly assessing that I was being set up for further humiliation). I was a vocal advocate for HIV education and queer rights all the way back in middle school. And despite being a virgin until after high school — despite not even being kissed until I was sixteen — I was incredibly curious about sex and not ashamed to acknowledge that.
So there is all of that, to begin with; and maybe that’s why I was the subject of scandalous rumors, why boys would tell me that my breasts were a topic of conversation, why a high school classmate later told me that teen me had “oozed sexuality,” even when I was painfully inexperienced.
But there is also this: I was out as bi from the age of fourteen, and while I wasn’t always super vocal about that, enough people knew for it to shape my reputation.
I don’t just mean that in the “I was bi and therefore everyone thought I was a total tramp” sense, although I think that’s a part of it. What I mean, really, is that when you are out as a bi woman there is a whole set of expectations laid out for what your sex life is going to look like — one that is not necessarily set forth for your straight or lesbian peers. If you are a bi woman, of course you are going to want to explore a threesome. Of course you are going to hit the strip club. Of course you are going to be a bit of a party girl, get drunk and make out with your friends. Of course, of course, of course.
When I think back to my late teens, to the years when I started having sex in earnest, it is difficult to tease out what I wanted from what my partners wanted from me, what I wanted from what society deemed that I, as a bi woman, must necessarily want. I was open and curious, sure, but I was also desperate to please and bad at navigating the contours of my own boundaries, bad at differentiating between what felt good for me in my own body and what felt good because it was pleasing the people around me. I had threesomes — several threesomes — and to be honest I don’t know that I really enjoyed them**, but I kept having them because it had been ingrained in me that if you were a bi woman this was it, the apex of sexual desire for you.
So the question I keep asking myself is this: am I a slut*** because that’s just how I was born, or how I chose to be? Or am I a slut because as a bi girl, I didn’t stand a chance — because not only was I going to be assumed to be a slut, but there was an entire infrastructure built to encourage me to be a slut, to indoctrinate me with the belief that as a bi woman, sluttiness was simply my destiny?
It is weird to speak openly about this because this is not the stuff that many of us are comfortable discussing publicly, and even as I’m typing this there is a little voice in my head saying, “This is probably just you, you’re just revealing to everyone what a dumb slut you are, other bi girls had more self respect and retained their reputations” — and yet years of being open about the most embarrassing fears, the hardest thoughts, have taught me that whenever I hear that voice it’s usually because everyone else is, too, because we are all isolated and alone in our shame. So there it is, friends: one of my most vulnerable thoughts about my own place in society, my own worth. If it resonates for you, definitely let me know.
* Hard to say when it all definitively ended
** I feel like I should remember this better but there’s a lot of… blank spaces. What I can say is that I thought I enjoyed them at the time, and I’m sure some fun was had, but my dominant memory was of being wracked by insecurity and terrified that I was the weakest link in the triad.
*** After several years of, gulp, not getting it I’m more of slut emeritus but whatever, once a slut always a slut