Jacqueline Passey posts this rather tame item on the whole Washingtonienne scandal, and all of a sudden the commenters (far and away male) go off the rails on a crazy train.
Okay, sure, we can have a debate about the relative merits of exchanging money directly for sex, but it really just doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. How can anyone be shocked that a girl, only attractive by DC standards, managed to sleep with a few congresscritters and write about it? Should congresscritters be handing out staff positions to any old dame they sleep with? Probably not, but it’s really no worse than the horrible nepotism in the same arena. Hell, at least she did something other than be born a Kennedy to end up on the hill.
What really, really pisses me off, though, about the commenters is the incredible vitriol from one “Derogatory”.
She reminds me of too many girls I’ve met. While I wouldn’t sleep with a filthy whore like that, I always find their lives entertaining. Kind of like the way some people think clowns are funny. Sure, you laugh at their ridiculous behavior, but who would fuck a clown?
Wow! Why do I automatically measure a whore’s worth by if I’d sleep with her or not? Creepy. Perhaps that is how whores want people to measure their worth, and I’m just playing along?
This might just be sort of funny, in a way, but notice how this Jessica Cutler person is automatically a “filthy whore” because she slept with a bunch of folks on the hill and took money/favors for it. I’ll give you whore, sure, that’s practically the definition, but filthy? I have no idea about that and neither does the mongoloid quoted above. It’s not like I have access to her medical history, disease free for all I know. I wonder if he’d consider Andrew Sullivan* a filthy whore. After all, we all know that Andrew has a horrible STD.
The thing is, that many people (including women) consider women who sleep around to their own gratification sluts and/or whores while not really caring so much when men engage in the same sorts of behavior**. This really bothers me a lot, like women aren’t allowed to enjoy sex for the sake of it. Hell, my whole goal is to make women enjoy sex, well, in my case woman singluar as I’m currently unsingle), but you get the point. That sort of thinking goes right back to some weird puritanical cultural impluse. How dare those pesky females want to enjoy sex! How! Dare! They!
Then, there’s this bit of tripe:
If a woman isn’t getting her way, she can always play the sympathy card with another male or female. She can also play the promise-of-sexual-gratification card when dealing with a male.
Let me get this straight: some women get ahead by using their feminine charms on unsuspecting male superiors, therefore ALL women cannot be trusted and might’ve gotten ahead through cleavage? I’m sorry, no.
First of all it’s collectivist bullshit. Secondly, it’s patronizing to both men and women. Women are, under this analysis, manipulative power-hungry bimbos who’ll flash whatever skin they have to get a promotion. Men are, under the same assumption, doltish sex-driven brutes who will promote the first nice pair of breasts that wanders into the office.
I don’t know who this Deragotory person is, but it’s obvious he’s never really watched a business at work. This is akin to Becker’s thesis that discrimination isn’t rational, but how on Earth would companies remain in business if this were standard practice? Nobody, in any position, would be competent. Things would quite literally fall apart. That’s a damn stupid way to run a business, and if that were standard practice things wouldn’t run nearly as well as they do.
Furthermore, this line of reasoning is exactly the same sort of “all men are rapists” crap that the campus moonbat left has been spitting out since Andrea Dworkin became cool. Well, that bitch is dead and the corpse is getting cold, so it’s time we drop the collective-analysis generality garbage and look at folks on their individual merit. Yup, some women flash skin to get ahead, others are actually pretty damn talented. And, you know, it’s not like plenty of men don’t use whatever charming good-looks they have to get ahead. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve used what little charm I have to my own advantage in non-dating arenas in the past. Can’t blame a person for that, for shit sake.
In essence, I think it’s okay to rag on Jessica Cutler for being a talentless hack who only became famous by sleeping with a few some-what famous men, but I think it’s dishonest and rude to 1) call her a filthy whore because she apparently likes sex (yes, “whore” is technically accurate) and 2) paint all women as manipulative deviants because some women are.
*Note, I am not calling Andrew Sullivan a filthy whore, I’m only drawing an analogy.
** My personal feelings on this are that I am a big fan of solid, longer-term relationships that are sexually exclusive, but I realize this isn’t for everyone. I do certainly look down on people of either sex who sleep around a lot and aren’t careful about it, but that’s really none of my business. I’m unlikely to fuck any of these people (especially in the near future), and the main issue is likely a lack of self-esteem and a need for acceptance sought through sexual acting out…which, quite frankly, is not the sort of person I really want to date.
That said, you know, if you have sex with some folks because you want to have sex with them, everybody involved is willing, and you’re careful, I think it’s pretty hard to really jump up into the level of sluttitude (although the standard is the same for both men and women, and I’ll call men sluts just as easily as I’ll call women sluts). My working definition is something like this:
1) Many, many partners, often at random, in a very short period of time.
2) Unprotected encounters with those partners.
3) Finding sexual partners either solely or primarily under the influence of alcohol/drugs (because this is likely to lead to #2 and perhaps #1), plus its just skeezy.
4) Defining a large portion of your personal identity based on the sexual encounters described above.
Those are pretty much my criteria for sluttiness. Being a “whore” simply requires taking money and/or other non-sexual compensation in exchange for sex. Notice that being a whore does not require being a slut.
EXAMPLE: You’re an undergraduate female at pretty much any university in the country, you casually date some guys (say 20), and have sex with them. You’re careful, condoms and all that, nobody gets knocked up, nobody gets a disease. You’re neither a slut nor a whore, you’re a gal who likes sex. Nothing wrong with that.
EXAMPLE 2: You’re an undergraduate male. You go down to the bar four nights a week, get a little drunk, go home with somebody new every night, refuse to use condoms, and end up having, say, 15 sexual partners inside of a semester. You’re a slut. Perhaps a filthy gutter slut.
So, you see, it basically comes down to risk profile. Sheer number of parters doesn’t matter, nor does your gender, but your level of attention to lowering the probability that you become a walking disease vector does. I think that’s a perfectly fair set of definitions.
