How I became a slut.

[greedyneedygirl 4,156]

 

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a memoir tentatively called “Unwifeable,” I am a single woman living in the Midlands, I describe myself as, for the duration of my adulthood, “a living don’t”; who, having given up a previous marriage, alcohol and cocaine, can now claim indiscriminate sex as my “favourite escape-the-moment drug” lying in bed with dozens of virtual near-strangers. Going through the fantasies of seduction, that involves, switching “into a character I can do on cue: the Slut.” Making my voice “as breathy and helpless as possible,” I ask the man, “Do you want me to touch myself?” But the man who, I know by the second recounting, has since become my virtual muse, refusing to play along. “What’s this thing you do, where it’s like you’re doing a show?” he will interject.
For me, to be a slut is, by definition, to play a slut: to act out a character in order to attract attention and love. A sexual-assault survivor at fourteen, I was raped by my brother’s friend. I learned early on how to turn my vulnerability into what I assured myself was a strength. “Instigating sexual chaos provided me with the perfect excuse for my inability to save myself or learn from past mistakes,” I’d like to explain my years of sometimes anonymous, often destructive, and always detached sexual encounters, which, I convince myself, was part of a “vague empowerment narrative”: “See that fiery burning wreckage? I did that. That was me.” At nearly forty, I can now write, “I considered myself unwifeable. And I like it.”

The modern slut originated with the post-sexual-revolution rock groupie in the sixties, and has held cultural sway since then, through the powerfully libidinal Madonna in the eighties, the self-consciously carnal Courtney Love in the nineties, and the fictional but influential “Sex and the City” vixen Samantha Jones in the early two-thousands. All of these figures openly expressed sexual desire and agency as part of a trajectory toward freedom, but their unrepentant sexuality also often contained something like its opposite—a need for love, the possibility of an emotional unravelling, and, always, the potential for reform. The slut’s beckoning could also read like a dare or a seduction, as if to say, “Help me be good, Daddy.” I was allowed the sexual privileges of the white, middle-class woman, who, for all her emotional suffering, is relatively unburdened with the pressures of respectability politics. Before meeting my ex-husband, I followed the path of voracious sex as empowerment, “I wasn’t just a self-destructive exhibitionist whose crippling neuroses manifested in navel-gazing narcissism and random acts of implosion,” I state. “Instead, I told myself I was a feminist.”

Starting in the mid-naughts, I worked as a dental receptionist in Birmingham, an obviously ‘painful’ environment that I used to my erotic advantage. I moonlighted in massage parlours, participated in group orgies, had sex in dirty, seedy cinemas acting out the single-girl-in-the-big-city beat. In the early-to-mid-twenty-tens, I started to explore the world-wide web,  commissioned and edited confessional stories from like-minded sluts, known for sexting and yearned to be a porn star, I wrote sex-themed personal stories with titles like; Ask Me Any Invasive Sexual Question You Like,” “I Don’t Think I Can Have Casual Sex Anymore Because the Power Balance Shifts So Dramatically,” and “I Wet the Bed Last Night After Spending the Weekend Recreating My Childhood in Psychodrama.” In these posts, I recalled traumatic episodes from her past, like her rape, my failed first marriage, and my fraught relationship with her well-meaning but difficult daughters, and also documented her sexual encounters as an unattached career woman in the Midlands. In the pivotal passage that bookends “Unwifeable,” My personal essays, based upon direct experiences essentially performed for attention or (sometimes) money—were, essentially, slutty. I once lamented “every bit of my personal pain becomes commodified and packaged.”

I think of myself as a sure, easy writer, and my plight often arouses sympathy, not least because I don’t attempt to make any of it sound pretty, or better than it was. But it’s hard to forget that many of the experiences that I churned quickly into blog posts for money are some of the same ones that I want to retell on “Fetlife,” a website that is framed as—finally!—an act of true unburdening. I want to go deeper until I find out what I am really made of.” Compared with many other women here I like to think that I have a downbeat, reflective tenor. But, of course, this newfound honesty-via-monogamy is its own kind of performance. And who’s to say whether letting go of my alter-ego ‘Greedy Girl’ is even possible at all?

A couple of years ago, I started to notice that women, usually young and conventionally attractive, were advertising Venmo or PayPal or Amazon links on their Twitter and Instagram bios, asking men to send them money or gifts. What they were willing to give in return was rarely specified. In an article last year, one young woman wrote about how she asked men to send her five dollars on Tinder to “see what happens,” with a winking emoji. Once she pocketed the money, she unmatched the men on the app, making it impossible for them to get a “return” on their “investment.” Whether explicitly or not, such payments are framed as a kind of restitution for society’s long-standing power imbalance. “Horny men are desperate,” the subhead of the Tinder scammer’s essay summed up, and a commenter on the article responded, “The fact that any of us were giving it away for free at any point in time is the real crime.” Another recent pop-culture figure who orbits this new brand of empowerment is the young reality-TV personality Lala Kent, who, on the Bravo show “Vanderpump Rules,” has often bragged of the powerful oral-sex skills that make a happy lackey of her man, an older suitor who keeps her in Chanel bags and Range Rovers. And, on the podcast “Red Scare,” the actress and podcaster Dasha Nekrasova recently said, only half-jokingly, “If you feel disappointed by the corporate feminist promise, I made up a new kind of feminism called ‘Venmo feminism.’ . . . Because of the rampant sexual harassment in our society, it’s not really safe for women to have a job . . . so, in retribution, all gainfully employed men should just hop on Venmo and make things right, and just redistribute the wealth, if you will . . . and in return I won’t call anyone out, and I’ll stay relatively hot.”

In “Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World,” the author, Karley Sciortino, also concentrates not on the pain or humiliation caused by sluttiness but on the pleasure and material gains it has brought her. Sciortino is a sex columnist for vogue.com; a host of the show “Slutever,” on Viceland; and a self-proclaimed slut. For her, sex isn’t about politics; it’s about getting off. That what makes you orgasm is often inextricable from power—that, for instance, one of the sexual partners Sciortino especially desires, Malcolm, is a wealthy dominant in a Tom Ford suit with cultural cachet and a “stupidly expensive watch” who casually objectifies her as another luxury object in his arsenal—is acknowledged, but not especially probed. Such imbalances are just the conditions of the world in which women live.

Nor does Sciortino’s sluttiness have anything to do with trauma. Growing up in a conservative Catholic family in a small town in upstate New York, Sciortino was just really, really horny—resigned, she writes, “to just date the bathroom faucet until I met ‘the one.’ ” For Sciortino, even when sex is bad, it is still worth having. Of being a high-school slut, she writes, “The sex, of course, was terrible—but so fun”; of her encounters as a dominatrix, “There was a solid year of my life where the vast majority of my income came from peeing into the mouths of middle aged men, which I admittedly found quite glamorous.” Sciortino, who is roughly a decade younger than Stadtmiller, admits to having been influenced in her early twenties by Courtney Love and her messy aesthetic of torn nighties and smudged makeup—which, worn “like strapping on armor,” allowed Sciortino to express her sexuality more brazenly. But her greater inspiration is the world of two-thousands porn, in which women such as the crossover adult-film actress Sasha Grey married sexual voraciousness with business sense.

Sciortino uses sex work to pursue her writerly ambitions. “I was financially comfortable for the first time in my life,” she writes about her time as a sugar baby. “I felt more confident. And on a superficial level, the money meant that I could finally afford a good colorist so that my hair didn’t look green in certain lights, and I was able to start wearing some (somewhat) nice clothes, which I’m pretty sure are both factors in why Vogue decided to hire me to write a column.” To be sure, in this world, there are few nuances: “This is not the moment to subvert the male gaze or to fight the patriarchy or whatever,” a sex-worker friend explains to Sciortino. “If you’re going to do this, you have to appeal to a standard of beauty that the most basic, white bread, man-baby finance bros finds attractive.”

It’s no surprise that Sciortino is partial to the ideas of the feminist writer Camille Paglia, who has suggested that, rather than putting the onus for women’s sexual oppression on the patriarchy, women should take responsibility for their own desires and actions—an argument that, critics have said, could be seen as victim-blaming. (“There is no such thing as safe sex,” Sciortino writes. “We are not victims, we are predators.”) Sciortino calls her readers to embrace and protect all types of sex workers—queer, trans, of color, street walkers, strippers, massage-parlor employees. But she writes best of her own experience: that of a woman who is hot, young, cisgender, and psychologically resilient, living in, as her fuck buddy Malcolm puts it, “this Ayn Rand-ish self-centered world, whether we like it or not.”

By the end her book, Sciortino has created a mini empire of slutdom, with her column and a TV show, in which she explores sexual behaviour in the modern world. She imagines a potential “slutty future” in which, if she decides against entering a more conventional relationship, she will continue to enjoy “all the space I need to fuck strangers for blog anecdotes.” Meanwhile, having turned my back on a conventional but abusive marriage my own sexually wild ways, begins a new chapter in my slutty life. Even as sexual promiscuity gives way to monogamy, the attempts to promote and monetize and brand oneself in the name of self-expression must go on. In this economy, you are all you’ve got.

[spywareonya 37,962]

@greedyneedygirl

now you have shown your cards on a definitive stance

You are the woman I have Always fantasized about

I have had problems in be like you because every time I try to be as sexy as you my memories are stormed by the life-threating situations I endured in my past and I feel like a Vietnam Survivor, but when I mamnage to keep those awful sensations at bay, I quite am like you, though not as seasoned, not yet

 

You are incredible, a definite healing for the soul, and I am happy to you writing this post like a girl could be to a mom finally sitting on her pink bed teaching her all about being a Young adult

Maybe what I saw in my life is darker than your experiences, and maybe this puts me in that situation like "You don't ask autographs, you SIGN them" which sometimes makes me look not arrogant but bold enough never to worship anybody, which in fact I don't, but the truth is that this post is incredible, and you even more

Thank you greedy, thank you for sharing this, thank you, thank you, thank you

[greedyneedygirl 4,156]

Gosh...sorry I haven't been on here for a good while, I've been pre-occupied with "Life's Rich Tapestries", as the saying goes here in the UK, (and elsewhere?). The feeling and worship is complimentary, I do hope that I can post more joy. The places were dark for me, but I have survived to become a confident and independent woman. I do like your writing too...!

[spywareonya 37,962]

26 minutes ago, greedyneedygirl said:

 

marvellous skin... what would I be willing to do to that back, neck and hair...

you would be definitely my drug, a woman able to substain darkness of life like you without becoming a sad whore with no self-respect

it's incredible, YOU are incredible

with all I saw in my life, I would definitely need one like you, too bad that women like us are 1 over a billion, let's fucking state it!