Prude Or Slut?

“Quinn, you’re being such a slut!” my best friend Emma exclaimed.

There I was, twelve-year-old Quinn, exchanging saliva with a boy named Michael, when Emma ferociously pulled me out of the basement bathroom. I was confused, unaware of what I had done to be called a slut. “You hooked up with someone else like a week ago, and not to mention you kissed Jeremy tonight too. People are going to talk about you and say that you are easy.” I still didn’t understand what was so wrong with wanting to kiss more than one boy. It was fun and made me feel like a beautiful 17 year-old I had seen in some movie. Still, I apologized. Maybe she was just being a jealous prude since she hadn’t had her first kiss yet, I thought. That night Emma told everyone in the house what she thought of me. A tear dropped down my face. In that moment, I made a promise to myself. If I was going to be called a slut, I’d be the best goddamn slut there ever was.

Five years later, I had become that seventeen-year-old girl I’d dreamt about. I was lying down in my friend Alexis’s teal bedroom. “She is such a slut!” Alexis said, as she flipped through her Instagram. The word “slut” had graduated from meaning a girl who frequently made out with boys to a girl who frequently had sex with them. Whenever we called a girl we didn’t like a slut, a whore, or a hoe, it was implied that they let just about any boy slip their hands into their panties. We called every other girl we didn’t like a prude, an abstinent freak, or a virgin.

If they were a prude, we thought they were too plain to get any boy to touch them at all. These were the types of girls I did not want to be. Yet, I found myself calling girls these names to distance myself from my own sexual reality. Although I’d been called a slut, I hadn’t exactly reached 12 year-old Quinn’s sexual expectations. In truth, I’d never done anything I thought was particularly slutty. On the other hand, I knew what the boys at school thought of me when they saw me carrying my textbooks in hand, glasses on, and hair tied hastily up. They saw a prudish virgin who wouldn’t dare spread her legs unless I was to be given an A+ on the assignment.

Deep down, I just wanted to be desirable. Young girls are brought up in a culture where the most important thing for a woman to be is pretty and seductive. This is where it gets murky. There is a fine line in our society’s eyes between being sexually attractive and being slutty. It becomes our job to find a balanced medium. This journey becomes less about us and more about trying to please the rest of the world. We grow up learning that boys want sex. So how do we appeal to them? We try to be sexy. We also grow up learning that purity is important. So we try to be pure. But how the fuck are we supposed to find a common ground?
                                                             
On a Saturday in 2017, I lost my virginity to a 21 year-old named Adam. I liked that he was older than me, that he was reserved, and that he had some mystery about him. I was the one who initiated the “relationship,” not him. He started paying more attention to me after we drunkenly kissed and I vomited in front of him—specifically, into a blender. Apparently, guys like you better after they see you puke your guts out.

After a couple weeks of flirting via iMessage, we made plans for another Saturday. I knew that I wanted to have sex with him on that partly cloudy afternoon. He was a nice guy and, more importantly, experienced. I did not want to have sex with someone who didn’t know what they were doing. The thought of a boy asking me “if that was the right hole” made me want to gag. I wanted him to know where my pussy was and how to put his dick into it.

A lot of my eagerness had to do with being horny. My sexual awakening began in 2008, when I watched Robert Pattinson portray an angelic vampire. I had my first lip-to-lip contact at eight and my first French kiss at twelve. It wasn’t until the summer before eighth grade that I began masturbating. I thought it was weird that I was so frequently self-gratifying, especially because I thought it was something only boys did. In a way, that made me like it more; I was able to get myself off just like any other guy. After my masturbation Olympics, I started to think about sex all the time. I wanted sex to be a regular thing in my life, just like brushing my teeth or eating Cheetos. I wasn’t looking for love. I was looking for sexual satisfaction.

The other reason why I was so committed to having sex had to do with my battle against my sexual definitions. I wanted control over my sexuality, just like I wanted control over everything else in my life. The night before meeting up with Adam, I tried to break my own hymen with my fingers, in case I decided against telling him I was a virgin. That night was also accompanied by Google searches. If you don’t tell him: he’ll figure it out once he sees the blood, he’ll never trust you again, he’ll think you’re immature for lying. Despite these warnings, I still didn’t want Adam to own any part of me. I didn’t even want to give him the title of “Quinn’s Hymen Breaker.” I had been taught by my health teachers that the state of my hymen would provide a clear answer to men about my sexual history, but this biological theory really means jack shit. The absence or presence of a hymen, really, is no bigger an indication of a woman’s sexual activity than the words prude and slut are.

This was my secret mission: to not be a virgin anymore. Personally, having sex and being called a slut seemed like a way better deal than having no sex and being seen as a prude. Sex had to be a part of my equation, and that didn’t seem unfathomable to me because girls want sex just as much as guys do. I was not born to be sexual prey. I was born like everybody else—with sexual organs and the innate biological desire to fornicate. I was not “the doorway to the devil, a creature whose burning sexual desires needed to be carefully husbanded for everyone’s safety,” (Tertullian, Christian author, 150-240 CE). I was just a harmless teenager who wanted to bang.

I got to his house around two in the afternoon. I wanted to know if it’d be weird for us to have sex while his younger brother and dad were still home. I wanted to know if he thought we were going to fuck or if a blowjob would suffice. Our arms laid loosely on top of each other, and I felt his warm skin burning against me. I knew I had to say it: “I’ve never had sex before but I want to have sex with you.” I don’t think he expected to hear that. He had somewhere to be soon, so he suggested that we could just fool around. I told him time didn’t bother me, that I was ready to have sex anyway. With my blessing, he swore off his inhibitions and said the whole ordeal (being the sex) just had to be quick.

The skin tore as he slipped into me. It killed for a solid ten seconds until it started feeling like the best thing ever—better than food, or vodka, or happiness, or weed, or Benadryl. This was the bliss I had been craving! Screw the horror stories I had read online, sex for the first time was awesome. He never asked me if it hurt or if I was okay, but I didn’t care. I didn’t think it was his job to make me happy—I could make myself happy. When we had finished or, more accurately, when he had finished, I put my underwear on as I complimented him with the widest smile on my face, “That was amazing.” And it really was. I wouldn’t have lied. I examined the bed—no blood, no visible pain. The blood was something I’d been worrying about, like he’d make me buy him new sheets if I stained his. I was so satisfied.

I left that night no longer bearing the virgin title and no longer holding the stigma of prude. So what did that make me? A slut? Adam and I weren’t dating, he wasn’t my boyfriend or some guy I was in love with. I just had sex with him. He just was. The simplicity of it all was what drew me in. I didn’t try and pretend to be one thing or another. I told him the truth, and there was nothing wrong with it. It bothers me now how nervous I was, like the truth would have been an aversion.

I don’t regret any of it like I have so often heard I would. TV shows geared towards teens with pretty girls crying because they wish they had waited. Middle school sex-ed telling me that you should be in love with your first. The Biblical teaching that premarital sex is sin and sin ushers in guilt. But I didn’t want to confess to anything except that I had succeeded. I had finally gotten what I wanted. I had finally gotten sex.

As women, we’re forced to spend most of our lives trying to find a balance between being sexually pure yet sexually appealing. We must be innocent yet mischievous, alluring but tame, willing yet pure. I thought sex was going to be the ultimate answer for me, as if having another body pressed up against mine would make me feel like I was really there. Looking back at it now, having sex really changed nothing. I’m not any more of a woman than I was before. I’m not any more of a slut despite no longer being a virgin; and despite contrary opinion, I really didn’t lose anything but a simple title.

People may think I’m a slut for sleeping with a guy I wasn’t committed to. People may look at me and think I have no intention of ever letting a dick in. I look back and think about how a girl like Emma made me cry with a single word. I think about all the times I’ve heard the word slut or prude being thrown around like they’re nothing. I think about all the times I’ve called someone else those words, too. Words like that are a tarnish to our skin. No matter how hard we try, we’ll never really be clean. But maybe the healing comes through accepting the things we cannot control, accepting that people will see us the way they want to see us. It’s about knowing that a word like prude or slut really doesn’t make you anything else than what you already are—you.