This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement

In 2011, the first SlutWalk was held in Toronto, launching a feminist campaign to assert female sexual autonomy and reclaim the epithet ‘slut’. In a Guardian op-ed published a few weeks later (9th May 2011), Gail Dines and Wendy J. Murphy argued that the SlutWalk movement was fighting a lost cause: “The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph (12th May 2011), Germaine Greer supported the SlutWalkers, though she cautioned that it is “difficult, probably impossible, to reclaim a word that has always been an insult.” (And she should know, having attempted a similar reappropriation of the c-word in the 1970s.) Greer pointed out that, although ‘slut’ has always been a pejorative, it also refers to slovenly women rather than promiscuous ones: “Yes, I am a slut. My house could be cleaner. My sheets could be whiter. I could be without sexual fantasies too—pure as the untrodden snow—but I’m not. I’m a slut and proud.” In Womanwords, Jane Mills shows that, like many misogynist terms, it was previously a unisex pejorative.

Katharine Whitehorn was the first feminist to confront slut-shaming and reappropriate ‘slut’ as a positive term. Writing sixty years ago in The Observer (29th December 1963), she self-identified as a slut in the word’s original sense: “Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing?... Honest answers should tell you, once and for all, whether you are one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts.”

This Is What a Feminist Slut Looks Like: Perspectives on the SlutWalk Movement, edited by Alyssa Teekah, Erika Jane Scholz, May Friedman, and Andrea O’Reilly, was published in 2015. The book’s standout chapter is Dirty Talk, a scholarly cultural history of ‘slut’ by Nancy Effinger Wilson, who seeks to “dismantle the misogynist ideology on which the word’s pejorative meaning is predicated.” It also features yes i am a slut (written entirely in lower-case) by Clementine Morrigan, who proudly, but unconvincingly, proclaims herself a slut in the sexual sense: “yes i am a feminist and yes i am intelligent and yes i do choose to say yes i am a slut.”