I was out with some friends over the weekend. After some polite peacocking about taste in obscure music, the talk turned to women. “My sister used to be a whore in college. No judgment,” my friend B said. “She’s married now. But when she was younger she’d had every dick on campus.”
B’s sister had never charged money for sex. But making this slur seems to be the only social shorthand we have for talking about a woman who has more than a polite amount of sex with her one true boyfriend. A man who has barrel loads of sex is a “stud,” a top-tier specimen prized for his reproductive value. A woman who has had between 10 and 100 dicks inside her various parts can only be compared to a prostitute.
A sexually active male with a horsey appetite for women is something that engenders pride. The female analog is shame and social disrepute; a penile spittoon for the licentious and decrepit men in a society who must stoop so low as to pay for a hump. Some progressive men will admit that there’s nothing wrong with a woman being a “whore;” no judgment. But still, there is no easy and deliberate way for a woman to talk about her sexuality without entering the Bermuda triangle of whoredom.
This is anecdotal, but the most sexually active of my friends are women not men. Not all, but the majority. They are not whores, no matter how euphemistically the bounds of meaning might be applied to that term.
I hate the idea of pursuit in romance. It connotes an imbalance in values. If men are supposed to always be in pursuit of the mythical “lay,” then women must surely have that magical wunderbeast lurking somewhere under their skirts. Men get lucky. Women get fucked.
I am an imperfect lover, but I don’t believe what I have to offer a woman in physical terms is any more or less valuable than what any woman has to offer me. Sex is a shared experience, something two people choose to give to one another. There are physical differences, but holistically it shouldn’t be any better or worse for one side over the other.
So why is there still such an entrenched legacy of men begrudging women breadth of sexual experience? Even when there is no conscious judgment, there is a strong implication of historical immorality.
Before I moved to New York, my friend P told me stories about how hard it is to find a steady girlfriend here. Meeting women is easy, but New York is a hotbed of eligible men. I’ve never been in a place where there is a higher concentration of well-educated, well-dressed, attractive, and generally interesting men. Women have choice in partners here in ways that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It’s intimidating. What’s the incentive to settle down into a regular movie-renting habit with one guy when it comes at such an opportunity cost? It’s not hard to imagine a lot of nice men in the city pulling up the sheets over their exposed nipples in the morning, calling after the woman as she dashes out the door. “Call me!”
I’d rather imagine two people happy to share a new experience with each other, finding the momentary dilation of a new mouth, a new vessel filling the swollen ripple, pushing against one another, finding the same beats and measures. Holding onto each other while pushing apart.
Is there a need to create a separate iconography for people who like that experience? Isn’t it something that everybody likes? Who wouldn’t rather be having sex right now, instead reading these words trapped in the pixels of a thousand different monitors?
I propose that B’s sister is not a whore, judgment or not. She is a woman who would rather be doing the same exact thing that most of us would rather be doing. And at one time she did. Again and again and again. I envy her.
Previous Posts:
Date Machine: Moving to New York in Pictures
Date Machine: Old Love Letters, or Things That Got Thrown Away in the Move
Sex Machine: Talking About Sex With Your Parents
Love Machine: Willing to Relocate
Sex Machine: Checking my Oil, or the HIV Test
Date Machine: How To Pick Up a Bartender
Date Machine: Are You My Girlfriend Now?
PDA Machine: Making Out in a Bar
Sex Machine: The Cake is a Lie, or Does My Butt Show When I Walk?
Obituary Machine: Natasha Richardson, or Smoking Cigarettes on the Roof
Love Machine: Throwing Punches, or Get Your Hands Off of My Woman
Date Night: The Most Expensive Date I've Ever Been On
Sex Machine: Monogamy is for Losers
Sex Machine: I'm Not That Kind of Girl
Date Machine: Civil War and Sex on a Toliet
Date Machine: Living Like a Bachelor
Sex Machine: Chest Hair, or the Shaved Eunuch