![]() īut that boundary can almost anything: clothing, behavior, attitude or something else. “Girls are still targeted when they cross some kind of boundary,” said Eliza Price, a 16-year-old cast member in the SLUT play, which is produced by an all-girl theater group called the Arts Effect. Much in the way that Lewinsky became a kind of public symbol, said the linguist Robin Lakoff, “of all that is sexually loathsome and scary about women,” the word slut - and its linguistic sisters, ho, whore, tramp, and skank - is a stand-in for the same: used to describe women who deviate from the norm. Sure, there have been positive usages or attempts to take slut back: Kathleen Hanna famously scrawled the word across her stomach while on stage with Riot Grrrl in the 90s there is the SlutWalk movement, an effort to reclaim the word.īut by and large one definition remains: Slut is loaded. Today, the term is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a woman who “has many casual sexual partners” or one with “low standards of cleanliness” - though it’s clear that in our modern lexicon, those two might as well be one and the same. It wasn’t long before that notion was infused with sexual connotations. Chaucer (yes, that Chaucer) put it in print in the early 1300s, referring to a sloppy male character as “sluttish” in The Canterbury Tales.īut if the word was used for men more broadly it was only for a second: by the 1400s, it had morphed into a term for maids and unkempt, dirty women (like actually dirty, not sexually dirty). Slut didn’t begin as a bad word - or a word for women at all - but merely an “untidy” one. What is it about the word slut that is still so potent?
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