In order to launch my discussion of this topic, I am going to present you with an observation, and I am afraid it might seem a tad cynical or cold, but it is nevertheless true, and I include it not as an act of malice or sarcasm, but to illustrate the point I wish to explore in this essay.

The observation is this :

If you want to make a whore really angry, accuse her of being a whore not as just a way to make money, but because she loves sex so much. Because then she’s not just a whore, but a slut. And there is nothing worse than being a slut.

Strong stuff, I know, but fundamentally true. So why is this? Why is it that in society’s judgement of women, the second worst category, that of “whore”, is not even one tenth of the severity of the worst label we can place on a woman, that of “slut”?

Whores, or more properly female sex workers, are looked down upon because (in part) of our highly confused and status conscious society, they have, in the public mind, the dirtiest job around. It is the same sort of thought process that causes people to look down upon janitors, plumbers, and garbage collectors, no matter how much money they make. We consider sex to be dirty and shameful, and therefore someone who has sex with people for a living bears an enormous cultural stigma, a taint unlike any other.

But the real nub of this dark side to society’s judgmental shadow is that whores, simply by existing, make plain a deep shameful aspect of women’s life : the view of all women as whores, the view that all women are expected to get as much as they can for sexual access, and a woman judges her worth, essentially, by the price she can fetch.

Think about it : if someone calls a woman cheap, what, exactly, are they saying about her? They are saying that her sexual appeal does not fetch a very high price. A cheap woman is an inexpensive date and cannot demand much for her charms, either explicitly or implicitly.

A cheap man, by extension, is a man who, by being unwilling to spend as much in order to court and seduce a woman as she thinks she is worth, implies that the women, herself, is cheap.

And this is where sluts come in, because sluts are the ultimate cheap women : free. A slut, by definition, is a woman who gives away what other women are desperately trying to sell for the best possible price, and thus is far worse than any whore, because whores at least cost money. Sluts charge nothing, and thus depress the value of all women’s sexual access.

Still don’t believe me that this is how it works? Think about the old bit of advice mother give to their daughters to encourage them to remain virgins until marriage : “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”. Imagine what this says about the perceived role of women in society.

View through this dark lens, where a woman’s worth is, essentially, her price, then a slut is not merely a devaluer of women’s wares, but a totally worthless woman. A women whose price is zero.

Also viewed this way, the difference between a “nice woman” and a “whore” is not merely price, but whether or not said price needs to be explicitly stated or not. Once a whore tells her client her price, that is it, she has established her worth, and negotiations are over. She is now obligated by the customs of her position to provide what was been bargained for. Nice girls, on the other hand, don’t have to promise anything. They can negotiate from a far stronger position, one in which the buyer has to continue to pay simply in order to keep the option of buying open, and the woman can choose the moment of sale in order to maximize purchase price before the buyer loses interest.

And this price is not merely in terms of gifts or fancy restaurants. Often, the price a “nice girl” gets is in the form of power over her suitors. The power to change them more to their liking, the power to make them “prove themselves” over and over again, the power to have their own way in all things.

Obviously, this is a profoundly wrong state of affairs, primarily for women but also for men.

For women, it not only dehumanizes both them and their male lovers, turning what might be romance into haggling, it severely penalizes desire on the part of the woman. Deep within this tragically mercantile form of human interaction is the message that nice women never actually want sex, as that would vastly weaken their bargaining position. After all, if a man figures out that the woman actually wants to have sex, suddenly, the price he is willing to pay plummets. She’s a motivated seller. He might even get it for free, or at least, no further monetary investment. And what would that make her?

You got it : a slut.

Thus, female desire is locked behind enormous walls of self-denial and hidden in a complicated labyrinth of conditions and fears and lessons learned at a deep and painful level. Women are left stranded in a world whose messages are so mixed that many women can’t even decide if they are aroused or not, and when they do get as far as consent, find they cannot enjoy the act, because deep down, they are worried about what enjoying the act would imply.

It might mean they are a slut. What if they could have gotten more? Should they have held out longer? Will he still respect me in the morning?

Luckily, social progress has been breaking down these walls for generations. Slowly but surely, women are reclaiming their own sexuality and owning it, and demanding the right to have the same sort of sexual freedom men enjoy without penalty and have done since time immemorial.

And that’s why I am writing this essay. It greatly upsets me that this horrible cultural programming interferes with women’s ability to enjoy their bodies, their sexualities, and ultimate their intimate relationships, and creates so much completely unnecessary repression, complication, and madness in the female of the species that it fills me with sorrow and wage.

Claim your sexuality, ladies. Defend your right to be horny. Have sex simply because you want to do so. It is about considerably more than just the pleasure of an evening or getting to orgasm.

It’s about refusing to see yourself as a cow looking to sell her milk for the best price.