From slutty to horny.

Female horniness is an important, and missing, narrative in our culture.  We have a well-developed idea of female sluttiness, but that's a different thing.

Sluttiness, as popularly perceived, is:
•External. A woman looks slutty, she dresses slutty, she acts slutty.  Whether she feels slutty is not something we generally talk about.
•Indiscriminate.  We seem to draw very little line between "will have sex with multiple people" and "will have sex with anyone and doesn't care if it's an alley cat."
•Mysterious.  Why is a slut slutty?  There are some attempted answers out there--need for attention, trying to get something from men--but most often she just is.  It's a character flaw or something.  Just as a slut's internal experience of sluttiness doesn't get talked up much in the popular narrative, neither does her reason for choosing the slutlife.

Whereas female horniness in the popular imagination is rare.  Admittedly our idea of male horniness is pretty scrambled too, but we have some concept of it as a near-universal male experience.  On the rare occasion a woman is horny in the mainstream culture, usually it's comical or even threatening.

This is getting better over the years.  Slowly.  But it's still not an accepted thing that a woman can just plain want to get her grind on.  (Actually, seeing women as horny isn't new; it's just undoing the work of the Victorians.  In medieval Europe women were often described as lustful and desiring--the ideal of the sexless woman in Western culture is only about 200 years old.)

Here are the things about horniness that seem to make people nervous:
•Horniness is internal.  It's defined entirely in terms of a woman's experience of her own body and feelings.
•Horniness is selective.  I'm horny for some of the men but not all of the men, and that's some sort of radical statement apparently.
•Horniness is humanizing.  Women get horny just like people do!  It's impossible to get all "woman, she is a mystery" on this; if you've ever had that warm tickly feeling in your pants, you know exactly where a horny woman is coming from.
"Nervous" is an understatement.  These are the things about horniness that drive people--male and female--to completely deny that women's sexual desire exists and matters.


I don't want to make this post just about "slutty is bad and horny is good."  The behaviors commonly called "slutty" are not bad or dirty; that was the point of the Slutwalks.  But they're a painfully incomplete portion of female sexuality.  Without understanding that women can not just invite sex but actually want it, we can't make sense of any of the issues surrounding women's sex lives.

The biggest one being: Only when we accept that women can want can we accept it when they don't want.  If sex is only ever something women tolerate, then being forced to tolerate it is not so fundamentally different from tolerating it to sustain a relationship.  This isn't just about rape either.  It's also about women in the condition of tolerating sex and not expecting anything more; women who have learned to disregard their own desires.  Women are taught how to say no, and more recently how to say yes, but we're still not up to saying "I want it."


I feel sort of weird living in a society where it's radical to say that I want my good-to-rub parts rubbed, that I want to choose who does it and how, and I'm not going to apologize for this. But it is. I guess I'm a revolutionary then. Slutwalk is old news; let's have a Hornywalk.


[Programming note: I have finals this week, hence the light posting. I have a guest post about STI testing queued up next and I'll try to get things back on schedule after finals.]