Girl on Girl: Whore Is Not a Character Reference

Dear Rebecca,

I keep coming back to the difference between your history with the word whore and mine. You were singled out as the sexual girl, even labeled “#1 whore” by other girls. Boys made you feel wanted and included for the same sexuality girls used to put you in your place. I understand how you land on taking the word back. And yes, girls can be vicious to girls. I know that firsthand. But girl, we do not have time to make women the main problem while men make laws about our bodies, churches make rules about our sexuality. While men can want us and make us answer for their wanting.

I don’t want whore to mean empowered woman any more than I want it to mean degraded woman. I want us to stop treating a woman’s sexuality like proof of her character.

I was born in Provo, Utah, and grew up in the heart of Mormondom. I inherited a moral system built on sexual shame. I knew the rules before I knew what sex was. The LDS Church handbook for teenagers taught that sexual sins were “more serious than any other sins except murder or denying the Holy Ghost.” We were warned against “passionate kissing,” lying on top of another person, touching anyone’s “private, sacred parts,” or doing anything that deliberately aroused sexual feelings, even in our own bodies. The handbook warned that “the way you dress sends messages about yourself to others and often influences the way you and others act.” A boy’s lust could become evidence against a girl’s clothes.

Boys were taught about the “power of creation” in their bodies and warned against masturbation so relentlessly that we grew up hearing advice about sleeping with a Book of Mormon in hand or even tying a hand to the bedframe to prevent mistakes. Girls were taught about menstruation and that our bodies were preparing us for motherhood.

His body contained the “power of creation.” Mine came with an assignment.

I was fourteen when I sat alone in a church office with my bishop, a middle-aged neighbor I regularly saw mowing his lawn, and confessed that a boy had put his fingers inside me. The bishop asked how far inside they had gone. He held up his hand so I could indicate the distance between his thumb and forefinger. Apparently, God needed inches.

By then, I already knew slut. I knew whore. I knew them only as words for women. My grandmother called my mother a “filthy slut” when she got pregnant at nineteen, and marrying my father was presented as the only righteous path forward. My dad used the same language against her when she began figuring out her sexuality. My brother heard those words from him, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen, he and his friends were calling me a whore.

In junior high and high school, slut and whore were everywhere, but only for girls. I don’t remember knowing an equivalent word for a boy. A girl didn’t even have to have sex to become a bad girl, a whore. She could get pregnant, dress a certain way, or simply be experienced by a boy as sexual. His desire didn’t make him a bad boy. Being desired could make her a bad girl. His desire was biology. Hers was character.

I was seventeen when I got pregnant by my first real boyfriend. He was Mormon, too, and a football star. When I told him I was pregnant, he sobbed, screamed, and punched my dashboard hard enough to partially dislodge the airbag. I calmed him down by telling him I’d just noticed the grocery store test had expired. Maybe it was a false positive, I lied. I’d get a real test at Planned Parenthood.

When Planned Parenthood confirmed I was pregnant, I called him and said the new test was negative. I discovered Utah required parental involvement for an abortion under sixteen, so I found a clinic in Grand Junction, Colorado, made the appointment, withdrew the money from my account, and planned the drive.

I wanted to drive to Colorado, have the abortion, and move on. My friends convinced me he had a right to know, so I told him the truth. I wish I had trusted the seventeen-year-old version of me who already had a plan. My deepest fear was our parents finding out and deciding I would marry him or have the baby and put it up for adoption.

At the clinic in Grand Junction, we learned our parents had been calling all morning. The clinic had refused to tell them whether we were there, but told us our parents were begging us to call home before we went through with it. So I had a decision to make: Call home and hand the whole thing over to the adults, or have the abortion and return home after the decision was no longer theirs to make.

My boyfriend asked what we were going to do. I told him we were going to do what we came there to do. Then I tossed him my car keys and told him to go to the 7-Eleven down the street, buy himself a magazine or something, and come back in an hour. I needed him out of there. So I sent him away and had the abortion on my own.

His parents blamed me. His mother called my mother over to their house and told her we could no longer see each other. Their plan was to transfer him to another school and keep him away from me, as though my presence were the dangerous part. He was the football star. My aunt and her family were moving to Idaho, so I said fine. I would go instead. He stayed at our school and kept playing football. I moved to Idaho for my senior year.

The whore was exiled.

Ten years later, when I got married at twenty-seven, something shifted. My husband and I had already been having sex. Nothing about our bodies changed after the wedding. Nothing about what we did together changed. But I found myself thinking about the exact same sex differently. I’m having sex with my husband, God-approved sex, righteous sex. I didn’t believe in Mormonism anymore, but religious shame gets instilled so early that by the time you’re old enough to decide the rules are bullshit, they don’t feel like rules anymore. They feel like you.

If we dared disobey, we got the chewing-gum warning: Once we’d let a boy have us, who would want us afterward? Then you get married, and the assignment flips. The same sex we were taught could ruin us suddenly becomes part of being a good wife. Want sex. Provide sex. Keep your husband sexually satisfied. Men have needs. Don’t be surprised if he looks somewhere else. Somehow his desire is still our responsibility. Before marriage, we were supposed to protect him from sex. After marriage, we’re supposed to protect him from not getting enough of it.

Which brings me back to Shane Gillis. Men love to say women can’t take a joke. We can take a joke. But make a fucking joke. What he did was look at women in gym clothes, have a sexual reaction to their bodies, and call them whores for causing it.

But that reflex is bigger than him. Men are taught to treat their feelings when they look at a woman as the truth about her. The assumption is so ordinary that it masquerades as objective reality: I experienced you sexually, therefore you were being sexual. Women know what we are doing, what we intend. And we also learn what men may decide our bodies mean, because often our safety depends on knowing. We travel in both realities. Men are rarely required to learn ours.

Here’s the lesson, Shane. You see a woman at the gym. You notice her clothes, her body. Maybe you find her attractive. Maybe you get turned on. That is an experience happening inside your body. She is having an entirely separate experience inside hers. She may be thinking about her workout, whether the guy filming himself at the squat rack is ever going to finish his fucking set, whether she bought milk. Your sexual response does not become information about her intentions. It does not mean she dressed for you or invited you to look. The word whore tells us nothing about her. You got turned on and mistook that feeling for evidence about her character. But your little hard-on is not a character reference.

And spare me the comedy-needs-freedom defense. Shane Gillis is absolutely free to drag a centuries-old women are whores joke onto a stage, but getting men to laugh at an idea they’ve already been taught does not make him dangerous or brave. Whore jokes aren’t edgy. They’re about as safe as comedy gets. Bravo, Shane. Maybe your future daughter will explain it to you. I bring her up because having a daughter remains one of the culturally celebrated ways for a man to announce that he has finally learned women are human.

Men love to say having daughters changed the way they see women. Apparently some men need a woman to be half of them before they can see her as a whole person. What the fuck did you think we were before?

Maybe someday Shane Gillis’s daughter will come home angry or scared because some man looked at her body and decided what it meant about her. Maybe she’ll ask him, “Daddy, if a man looks at me and thinks something sexual, why is that something I did?”

I wonder what he’ll tell her.

My high school boyfriend went on to serve a Mormon mission and later became a bishop. Sometimes I wonder what happened to me in the Mormon version of the story he carried forward. Whether, after enough years, I really did become the problem: the girl who led him into sexual sin, instead of the girl who was right there with him, making the same choice.

Years later, a friend told me that when he brought the woman who would become his wife to meet our old group of friends, he came in alone first and told everyone, “Don’t tell her about Monica.”

He has daughters now. I wonder what he teaches them. Whether he teaches them that keeping boys righteous is part of being a good girl. Whether he warns them about boys, or warns boys about themselves. Whether he has ever looked at one of his daughters and understood what was done to me.

Maybe that’s why I can’t hear whore as a compliment, even when you mean it that way. I understand wanting to take whore back from everyone who used it to shame you. But I don’t want to rescue it by giving it a nicer definition. I don’t want sexually adventurous women elevated as powerful any more than I want them degraded as dirty. I don’t want virgins considered pure. I don’t want married sex considered righteous. I don’t want ten sexual partners to tell us any more about a woman’s character than one does. Sexual behavior tells you about sexual behavior. We keep trying to turn it into a character reference.

The women at the gym don’t need to be anyone’s daughters, wives, or mothers. They don’t need to qualify as good women or bad women, sluts or virgins, empowered whores or degraded ones. They can just wear the fucking shorts.