‘Being a Slut Really Means You Are Untouchable’: On Shame, Power and the Reclamation of Words

By Alekia Gill

I was watching a sweaty bouncer chase my friend as she ran down Ealing Broadway, clutching a reproduction of Banksy’s Girl with Balloon. My friends and I were nineteen and bored, and we tended to forget that our actions have consequences. In an act that could only be described as giving the art back to the city – graffiti is meant to be public, after all – she made it to the end of the road before the canvas was snatched from her hands. The bouncer, out of breath, told her she was banned. Staggering back to the bar, he passed us and pointed: ‘You too, sluts.’ 

Sluts? I looked at the others, and then down at myself. I was wearing one of my dad’s white T-shirts (discarded by him but suitably oversized on me), baggy jeans with butterfly motifs and a brown sweater vest I had found on ASOS marketplace. I called it ‘librarian-chic’, or perhaps ‘urban-intellectual’. Now, it had been branded slutty. 

Luckily, we all found the incident hilarious. That bar was never any good anyway (they took to nailing the paintings down after that), but it did get me thinking about why that word was chosen. I thought about the connotations I associated with the word ‘slut’ – sexually promiscuous or scantily clad, and only ever directed towards women. All I had been doing was standing on the street laughing at my friend, wearing an outfit that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a children’s television presenter. Perhaps ‘slut’ had been picked out of the ether. But why? 

If it were the fifteenth century, that bouncer would have been slightly closer to the truth as ‘slut’ used to mean ‘slovenly’ or ‘untidy’. At some point, the word began to relate to promiscuity, according to the Oxford Dictionary. The crux of the issue is that ‘slut’ is a word that can always be used against a woman, but rarely against a man. The same can be said for ‘whore’ or ‘bitch’.

Interestingly, in the nineteenth century, ‘slut’ was used, just like ‘bitch’, to mean ‘female dog’. The comparisons between women and animals could be dissected in an entirely separate article, but I’ll stick to the sexual connotations for now. There’s a unique sort of frustration borne from the fact that calling a man a ‘slut’ just doesn’t seem to stick. That’s not to say that men can’t be shamed for their sexual habits – everyone can – but there’s something to be said about the inability of people to comprehend and celebrate a woman being a ‘player’ in the same way they would for a man.

The trickiness of the word is also tied up with the difficulty surrounding female sexuality. Historically, we have been placed in two categories: Madonnas or Whores, but never both. A real-life example is that I often find myself torn between fashion statements that look objectively good and the fact that they could easily brand the wearer as a slut. One such example of this is the Diesel mini skirt.

First going viral in 2022, the skirt is almost belt-size and is actually designed to do both. Although not entirely practical, I’m pretty sure I’d feel absolutely amazing wearing that distressed leather skirt with a pair of matching thigh-high boots. But would it make me a slut? Well, are sluts wearing skirts worth £800 and walking down the runway at Stockholm Fashion Week? The skirt is just that – a skirt. Well, a skirt/belt. If one skirt is enough to send you sliding down the slippery slope from Madonna to Whore then surely we’re all due that ride and, if everyone is a whore, what does whore even mean? The ideology dismantles itself. 

Reclamation of the word has taken place in recent years, most significantly as part of the ‘Slutwalk’ movement that originated in Toronto in 2011 as a protest against the idea that women take partial responsibility for sexual assault via the way that they dress. In the Slutwalk, women march in bras and platform heels with ‘SLUT’ written across their chests. They make a powerful, necessary statement: how you dress should never put you in danger. Following its conception, the Slutwalk has been recreated across the world, with women annually marching the streets of India, South Korea, Iceland, Brazil, Australia and the UK.

Clearly, the sentiment crosses language barriers. Icelandic women hold signs bearing ‘Ég er drusla’, meaning ‘I am a slut’, while in Brazil the Slutwalk translates to ‘marche das vadias’, meaning ‘march of the bitches’. There are issues that may arise when we attempt to reappropriate the words that are used against us; we run the risk of continuing to benefit those who perpetuate their negative connotations.

However, put best by psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, ‘if we reclaim the word, it simply becomes an issue of “so what?”’. In more intimate settings, we tell our friends they look ‘slutty in a good way’ when they look sexy and confident. Perhaps that’s what slutty will one day come to mean. Having ‘many casual sexual partners’ can be flipped to suggest that ‘you have control over your own sexuality, and you present it as you please’. An ideal way of life, if you ask me.

Being a slut really means you are untouchable. No one has any say over your sexuality except yourself. What was previously piercing, scathing and vicious can now become a term of power and strength – one small step towards a world where female sexuality is neither shamed nor exploited.