The Dating Game: Sluts Don't Get to Be Happy

As a former slut, and currently HAPPILY, monogamously married person, I love this article. My husband got a lot of 'milk' before we were married, too, but he likes mine best. Also, he likes talking to me, appreciates my perspective on things, and, oh yeah, loves me for me. Everyone deserves that, and no one deserves to be made to feel shame for taking pleasure in the world (and people) around them. The world will be a better place when everyone loosens up and gets laid all they want. No shame, just (safe) sex.

"And if you had the audacity to sleep with someone else's boyfriend or someone else's husband, of course you're a tempting slut that he just couldn't resist and it's all your fault and karma will getcha and slut slut slut slut slut."

Sure, the husband/boyfriend holds his own share of the blame, but it's still a dick move to sleep with some other woman's man.

"No man would want a pre-used vagina forever when he can till that earth himself for the first time without wondering if someone else had a bigger plow or a surer hand."

I've had my earth plowed by many a man. What a slut I am! And yet, knowing that didn't stop my GIRLFRIEND from being thrilled to have me. So you can take that plowshare and suck it, slut-shamers.

slut, slut, happy slut, never felt bad about my experiences. It had no impact upon my self-esteem, I'm happy for each and every experience, all good, none bad and am now in a rockin monogomous relationship where hubby doesn't know about my past only because he's more sensitive about things of that nature. Knowing me know, he probably wouldn't care and would be appreciative of all that the experiences taught me not being timid about my body or how it feels at any given moment. If you don't want me because I've had too many partners (not that I'd tell you anyway) I don't want you because you probably haven't had enough. I really don't want a dullard in bed:-)

I agree wholeheartedly that women who have sex in or outside of a committed relationship are NOT dirty, bad, slutty people. Sex is fun. It is nice and can be great. Even doctors agree that having a happy sex life is part and parcel of well balanced (mental and physical) adult life. But just because you CAN have sex with someone's all-too-willing husband/partner does that mean we should? Is it never wrong? How many people out there have been cheated on? I have and it bloody sucks. I absolutely held him and his dick accountable for what HE did and broke up with him for it. But I don't feel like I can cheer for She Who Shall Not Be Named cuz she was simply getting her groove on. In this case she knew we were engaged and still decided to fuck my fiance.

I have been on the other side too. I could have had sex with men who were in a relationship but I didn't. I felt it was wrong and was more an act of female solidarity, feminist solidarity, not to screw other people's partners because as it has been said above, "There is no shortage of cock out there." And really, men cheat and screw us over often enough, do we really need to be screwing each other over in the bargain too?

I have to say, I am a huge fan of "The Dating Game" series and always get excited to see a new post advertised on the main page. You consistently do a terrific job of articulating the insane pressure and expectations (whether someone else's or our own) surrounding dating and relationships - all while exuding a most refreshing quality that every other commentary on the subject seems to lack : Common f'ing sense.

This post in particular really resonates with me because for the first time in my life I am experiencing the total awesomeness of dating and having sex on my own terms. For years I stayed with a partner who blatantly disrespected my ideas and values surrounding sexuality and grew to resent me for my unwillingness to feel ashamed about them. While the "why" of my staying with such a fool is a conversation best left elsewhere, I have pondered it greatly now that I am back in this little dating game.

Presently, I am seeing/sleeping with a guy who I am comfortable with and attracted to, and I don't feel any need to "get more serious" or "discuss where it's going" as more than one friend has suggested with concern. The fact that I am thoroughly enjoying myself in a zone somewhere between friends-with-benefits and potential-next-relationship seems not to make a bit of difference: their worry lies in the sheer horror that I may not be taken seriously by some dude. This concept makes my brain hurt. What if my definition of "being taken seriously" includes having my sexual needs respected and met? Or am I supposed to forget I have any of those until I've convinced said dude that "no, REALLY, I think INTELLIGENT THOUGHTS and am MORE than what's between my legs! I'm going to make you wait because I'm NOT just some SLUT!" Um, I'm already well aware of and confident in those things, thanks. I'm not looking for a validation that I am a worthy person. I am looking for a counterpart who is secure enough in his own self-worth and evolved enough to appreciate mine. This is what we call mutual respect. And it kicks ass.

The so-called rules women are told to abide by in regards to "giving it up" are face-palm'ingly offensive. We are more than capable of making up our minds about who we want to sleep with, when we want to sleep with them, and what we want from the experience. There is nothing wrong with waiting to have sex for whatever reason you choose, but there is also nothing wrong with NOT waiting. It isn't "thinking like a man" as pop psychologist/sexperts sensationalize, but FEELING like a human. And you know what the great thing about feeling is? There's no wrong way to do it.

Well, there are a lot of valid points here, but somehow through the wording I don't see this changing anyone's opinion. Lets face it, this is more a rant than an argument stated to sway other people.

Yes, I agree with the premise, but I don't see this as productive in the way that will help open the eyes of the "slut-shamers." It just seems like an anger article written by someone who has been targeted as a "slut."

And I just wanted to say, as to the "Why buy the cow" statement... I've also heard said , "Why buy the whole pig when you can get the little sausage for free!"

I love this post so very much. "Never judge your relationship (or lack thereof) based on other people's." It took me sooo long to realize this and just go hey...fuck everyone else. :)

And about the milk/cow line- I've always jokingly said, 'You don' t buy the cow for the milk. You buy the cow because you love the cow." I always thought that no one still believed that women should wait for their right man to have sex, because eveyone i ever told that line to laughed and agreed.

or that the person you are currently choosing to sleep with is him.

It does seem far too common that people get so caught up in "who were you with before?" "do I know them?" "do you still know them?" "were they better than me?" that they forget that she (he, they, schle, whatever) is in fact choosing to be with them, and presumably enjoying the experience if she's sticking with them.

It's not like you're the last guy (gal, whatever else) left in town she hasn't slept with and she's with you because no one's left.

Personally, when I date I really couldn't care less who the person's been with before, or how many of them there were before me. The only relevant talks on sexual history is the "you don't have anything I can catch, do you?" talk and the "what kind of things do you like?" talk.

People, on the whole, like sex, they enjoy sex - when done safely sex is even healthy - and people have sex, often with many, many people over the course of a lifetime.
Get over it.

I keep trying to get on the sex positivity wagon. I really am. But articles and comments like these leave a sour taste in my mouth. I don't want to be involved with a "slut" because I want to be involved with a man who has the same views on sex and relationships as I do. I don't want to be involved with a guy who was knowingly The Other Man as I consider that to be a serious knock on a guys character. From what I've read here today and else where that is considered judgemental. How is forcing your views of sex on other people "sex positive"?

... between a person who has sex with a lot of people, either serially or concurrently, and a person who has sex either,
A) with a person who claims to have an allegedly monogamous relationship with someone else, OR
B) with other people, after claiming to make a monogamous commitment to one particular person.

Trying to defend this kind of behaviour by calling it "slut shaming" is evasive. I would choose, instead of "slutty," for offenders male or female, words such as "dishonest," "cowardly," "disrespectful," "manipulative," and "selfish." Trying to excuse Behaviour A by whining, "well, the Other (Wo)man didn't break any promises," is disingenuous into the bargain.

And in my experience, people who are serial offenders of this kind are very rarely in the game just for the sexual pleasure of it all.

I'm all for people unabashedly gathering as much or as little metaphorical pork and dairy as they please, but I am definitely not going to excuse those who knowingly hurt others while so doing.

This article is not generalizable to homosexual relationships. Sluts come in male and female form, as well as heterosexual and homosexual.....

As a guy I can't speak for my entire gender but I generally wouldn't be scared of by a "slut." For example I once met a girl in a club and slept with her that same night and we ended up dating. I think personality is far more important if the relationship suceeds than the point at which you have sex. What is important to me is that once we start dating that she obviously doesn't sleep with other guys.

I don't like demonizing women, or men, but to say that no women are whores and no one deserves to be ostracized for behaving badly is childish. My husband loves me, I am sure of that, and I don't believe he would ever cheat. But if some girl pursued him, whether they did anything or not, I would call her every name in the book and do whatever I could to shame her. Because, fuck that. Anyone who tries to act like sluts don't exist and don't deserve to be defined as what they probably are (attention seeking girls with no self-esteem and no decent relationships) is an idiot. I'll call a girl a slut if I damn well please and I'll do what I can to get in her way if she attacks my marriage.

Girls everywhere and all you emasculated "men" who are trying so hard to be politically correct at the expense of your masculinity, listen up.

Men and women are equals. This does not mean that they are equal in every single thing they do. For example, men are, on average, physically stronger than women. It is much easier for a semi attractive (even a 6/10) woman to go out and get laid. The same cannot be said about men. Men have to work at it, have some skill (game) and thereby get a woman to sleep with them. It is a LOT harder for an equally attractive man to get women than it is the other way around. This is one of reasons behind why we, as a society, naturally celebrate men who are successful in bedding multiple women; while at the same time shame women who bed multiple men.

Let us briefly visit the topic of virginity from both perspectives. Virginity in a man is not a desirable state or label when it comes to an attribute that the opposite sex wants. This is because he has obviously not been preselected by other women. However, female virginity is not looked at negatively in the least by men. If she looks decent, no man cares if the girl is a virgin or not. In fact, a female virgin is often wanted more.

Now don't get me wrong, men LOVE sluts. We will never turn down an opportunity to sleep with a good looking slut. Partly because she's good in bed, partly because it's sex. But any decently intelligent, self-respecting man will know that it is a terrible idea to emotionally involve himself (i.e. date) a slutty girl. That would be a very dumb move. Why would any man want to get emotionally involved with a girl who's had 15+ sexual partners? We would just be setting ourselves up for failure. There are many nice worthy girls out there who don't have daddy issues and haven't slept with an entire fraternity house. But, by all means, fvck the brains out of sluts in the meanwhile.

Most guys can detect when a girl is a slut by the first few dates and by what he hears about the girl from other people and from the girl herlself. We put this information together and figure out if she is dating material or not. If not, I like most guys, will still go in for the prize but have no intention of following through with dating the dirty little tart.

To put it simply, a lock that can be opened by many keys is a useless lock and of little worth. But a key that can open many locks is a master key and is valuable.

Women complain about how unfair it is that men are called studs when they sleep around, yet women get called sluts for the exact same behavior. It’s actually not a double standard though, because both scenarios are pretty different in terms of circumstances and consequences. I can think of at least four crucial differences:

First, sleeping around is easier for women. Regardless of how you feel about promiscuity, we can all agree that a guy who manages to rack up a lot of sexual partners has to have some skills. It’s challenging for men to rack up partners, even for men with low standards. A man needs social intelligence, interpersonal skills, persistence, thick skin, and plain old dumb luck. For women, though, a vagina and a pulse is often enough. Whenever an accomplishment requires absolutely no challenge, no one respects it. It’s just viewed as a lack of self-discipline. People respect those who accomplish challenging feats, while they consider those who overindulge in easily obtained feats as weak, untrustworthy or flawed.

Second, women have potential to do more harm by sleeping around than men do. Say a man sleeps around with a bunch of different women. He’s definitely doing harm to these women if he pretends to be monogamous while sleeping around. He may cause them emotional pain by his promiscuity. He may cause unwanted pregnancy. He may spread VD. When women sleep around, however, they can cause not only all these same ill effects but one additional crucial ill effect: the risk of unknown parentage.

If one guy sleeps around with five women, each of whom is monogamous to him, and they all get pregnant, it’s a safe bet as to who the father is. If you reverse genders and have one woman who sleeps around with five men who are monogamous to her, and she gets pregnant, the father could be any of the five men. And if one of those men is tricked into raising a baby that isn’t his, he’s investing time, money, estate and property to provide for a child that isn’t carrying his DNA into the next generations, a costly mistake from an evolutionary standpoint.

Our two basic primal drives are to survive and to reproduce, and promiscuous women traditionally make it hard for a man to know for sure whether he is truly reproducing or is secretly raising another man’s child. Men stand a lot more to lose from promiscuous women than the other way around. And it’s no picnic for the child to not know who his real father is either. And it’s a mess for the women carrying on the deception as well. Or just look at any random episode of the Maury show if you don’t believe me.

Since the DNA test and the birth control pill didn’t exist until recently, there were no reliable ways to prevent pregnancy or prove parentage for most of human history. For this reason society developed a vested interest in preventing promiscuity among women, and society accomplished this by creating the slut stigma. And even though the creation of birth control and DNA tests have made this less of a risk than the past, longstanding traditions and customs are not easy for society to break so the slut stigma remains.

Third, men have evolutionary reasons to be programmed to sleep around more. A lot of women roll their eyes when they hear that men are “hard-wired” to sleep around. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes total sense. If the two primal drives of humans are to survive and to reproduce, nothing leads to maximum reproduction like one man sleeping with multiple women. If one women sleeps with many men in a nine month period, she can only get pregnant just once. Nine months of rampant promiscuity would give the same result as nine months of highly sexed monogamy: one pregnancy. Now if one man sleeps with many women during a nine month period, you can get many pregnancies during that period. The more women he sleeps with, the more possible pregnancies.

So from an evolutionary standpoint, there are concrete advantages to men being promiscuous compared to women being promiscuous. This doesn’t mean that women have evolved to be strictly monogamous. Women have evolved to be somewhat promiscuous too, something men badly underestimate. However they haven’t evolved to be as rampantly promiscuous as men.

Fourth, promiscuity poses more risk to women than to men. A woman has more to lose from choosing bad sex partners than a man does. She’s the one who gets stuck with going through a pregnancy and taking care of a baby alone if she chooses a deadbeat. For this reason, promiscuous women throughout history have historically been viewed as being a vastly more irresponsible risk takers than promiscuous men, who rightly or wrongly could always run away from the consequences of unwanted pregnancies easier than women could.

These four reasons explain why the longstanding tradition came about of men being rewarded for multiple partners while women get socially punished for similar promiscuity. Of course all this is gradually changing, but we’re up against millenia of evolutionary and cultural conditioning here, so don’t expect any dramatic overnight reversals.

Understand that I’m just explaining why the double standard came into existence and not condoning or condemning it. This is not an attempt to pass judgment or be self-righteous in any way. It’s just an explanation of why the two conditions are treated differently.

More slutsplaining from sluts, being a slut shows what kind of person you are it isn't seperate from your personality, and what kind of woman would want a slut hating man, maybe one who likes there men to have standards that go beyond a woman's sexual capabilities and how she exploits her own sexuality for personal gain, and instead looks at her from a an actual substantive view. Sluts are women who have little to offer but sex which is why they offer it so much. As far as sex out of a relationship it all correlates with the success of marriage but maybe men shouldn't protect themselves from selfish slutty women. So go ahead test the waters fuck all the men you can in the end you realized you wanted to be with guy #16 but hes gone and now you're thirty something and no one sees the value in your body anymore and all the substance you lack shows up like your god damned crows feet. Enjoy sluts, everyday more and more women who abused their sexuality at a young age grow old alone and they always blame men never themselves as if they were entitled to love.

More slutsplaining from sluts, being a slut shows what kind of person you are it isn't seperate from your personality, and what kind of woman would want a slut hating man, maybe one who likes there men to have standards that go beyond a woman's sexual capabilities and how she exploits her own sexuality for personal gain, and instead looks at her from a an actual substantive view. Sluts are women who have little to offer but sex which is why they offer it so much. As far as sex out of a relationship it all correlates with the success of marriage but maybe men shouldn't protect themselves from selfish slutty women. So go ahead test the waters fuck all the men you can in the end you realized you wanted to be with guy #16 but hes gone and now you're thirty something and no one sees the value in your body anymore and all the substance you lack shows up like your god damned crows feet. Enjoy sluts, everyday more and more women who abused their sexuality at a young age grow old alone and they always blame men never themselves as if they were entitled to love.