Beth Ashley’s Sluts: The Truth about Slutshaming and What We Can Do to Fight It, published last year, is the latest in a series of feminist books about the misogynistic term ‘slut’. It follows This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like, a 2015 account of the SlutWalk movement, and Wordslut, a 2019 guide to reclaiming sexist language.
Ashley writes about the social and linguistic stigmatisation of promiscuous women, but can ‘slut’ ever be reappropriated as a positive term? She explains that reclamation is not straightforward: “There is immense power in taking ownership of language traditionally used against you. Many people see this as an act of strength, handing it back to the people who’ve been originally hurt by the words. But it’s important to note that not everyone is there yet... ‘Slut’ is a difficult word for a lot of us. That’s no surprise. It has heavy connotations and a painful history; it’s loaded with stigma.”
Ashley writes about the social and linguistic stigmatisation of promiscuous women, but can ‘slut’ ever be reappropriated as a positive term? She explains that reclamation is not straightforward: “There is immense power in taking ownership of language traditionally used against you. Many people see this as an act of strength, handing it back to the people who’ve been originally hurt by the words. But it’s important to note that not everyone is there yet... ‘Slut’ is a difficult word for a lot of us. That’s no surprise. It has heavy connotations and a painful history; it’s loaded with stigma.”
Ultimately, Ashley concludes that reappropriating ‘slut’ is both desirable and achievable: “Personally, I want to reclaim the word... I believe that if we shout it loud enough, the term could eventually become used in the right way. For me and many others, taking back the word slut is a powerful, rebellious thing to do. It allows people to exercise freedom, release themselves from shame, cope with past trauma and celebrate their sexuality.”
Ashley cites Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, who wrote ‘SLUT’ on her stomach in the early 1990s, as a trailblazer of reclamation. But there are other women who have also self-identified as sluts. Madonna, for example, named her video company Slutco in the 1980s and, writing in The Sunday Times (24th August 2003), Kate Spicer argued: “A fashionable woman can take those phallocentric terms of abuse like slut and slag and nasty girl and turn them into labels of postfeminist fabulousness”. The issue was even covered by Sex and the City, in an episode titled Are We Sluts? (“Are we simply romantically challenged or are we sluts?”)
Germaine Greer’s pioneering 1971 article I Am a Whore, published in the underground press magazine Suck (no. 6), laid the groundwork for all subsequent feminist writing on ‘slut’ and similar pejoratives. Greer argued that, rather than using ‘whore’ as an insult, “you’ve got to come out the other way around and make whore a sacred word like it used to be and it still can be”. (Her biographer, Christine Wallace, fundamentally misread Greer’s argument, writing that “it takes a truly eccentric and bizarre kind of feminism for one to identify as a prostitute”.)
Ashley cites Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, who wrote ‘SLUT’ on her stomach in the early 1990s, as a trailblazer of reclamation. But there are other women who have also self-identified as sluts. Madonna, for example, named her video company Slutco in the 1980s and, writing in The Sunday Times (24th August 2003), Kate Spicer argued: “A fashionable woman can take those phallocentric terms of abuse like slut and slag and nasty girl and turn them into labels of postfeminist fabulousness”. The issue was even covered by Sex and the City, in an episode titled Are We Sluts? (“Are we simply romantically challenged or are we sluts?”)
Germaine Greer’s pioneering 1971 article I Am a Whore, published in the underground press magazine Suck (no. 6), laid the groundwork for all subsequent feminist writing on ‘slut’ and similar pejoratives. Greer argued that, rather than using ‘whore’ as an insult, “you’ve got to come out the other way around and make whore a sacred word like it used to be and it still can be”. (Her biographer, Christine Wallace, fundamentally misread Greer’s argument, writing that “it takes a truly eccentric and bizarre kind of feminism for one to identify as a prostitute”.)