Thinking like a slut

So I recently received an email in which my suitor let me know that he likes a girl that thinks "slutty". I think on first reading this, I had that knee-jerk reaction of reading it as him calling me slutty. But apparently I wasn't actually being accused of being slutty, just thinking that way. I found myself feeling perplexed by this, afterall what was it about my profile and writing that would lead this dude to write that I “think slutty”?

Slutty is such a loaded term inherent with lots of judgment. So, I am actually struggling to see slutty as a compliment. I also began to wonder what it actually means to think slutty. Does it have to do with the amount of times someone thinks about sex? According to the Kinsey Institute as well as every man I know, a guy thinks about sex just about every 2 minutes. Does it seem that I think about sex more than the average male and that defines slutty? Using that logic than why don’t we hear of more men being told they think slutty? This is one of those great double standards. It’s not only considered “normal” for a guy to think about sex, but it’s just as normal if he thinks about it even more often than every 2 minutes. But somehow if a woman is thinking about sex every 2 minutes, she thinks slutty? Or was there something about my profile that would suggest I think about sex more often and that somehow I have crossed the line into the realm of “thinking slutty?” While I do think about sex, I would say that I probably think about it far less than the average male. Certainly if I am getting ready for a rendez-vous, I am thinking about sex every second as I get ready, but while at work, not so much. Realistically, I work in a pretty gnarly neighborhood and usually have to walk over passed-out people with their bagged bottles still in their hand on the way to work. So not much eye candy. I am thinking that defining thinking slutty by time, I wouldn’t qualify.

Or perhaps it’s because I have written about about casual encounters, so therefore I have slutty thoughts. This hypothesis is more difficult for me to understand. So writing about “casual encounters” and looking for that type of companionship must mean that I think slutty? Is wanting to meet someone for the sole purpose of sex, thinking slutty? Or is this perhaps one of those little double standard situations? It’s not often we hear of a guy being accused of thinking slutty because he is going to go meet a woman for the specific purpose of fornication. Frankly I am happy when any of my friends have that going for them. Good for them… they are about to get laid. Slutty doesn’t seem appropriate as a descriptive term for what they are thinking and what is about to happen. And realistically, all I have to show for my “thinking slutty” is a blog.

Is the mere fact that I actually have had a casual encounter enough to qualify as thinking slutty? Or is there another threshold I am not aware of? I felt compelled to look up the word “slut” and actually found that it literally means “a woman considered sexually promiscuous.” Hmmm… so that explains why we don’t hear about men being called sluts. But it doesn’t help me to understand why dude thinks that telling me I think slutty is somehow a compliment.

Cross-Trainers

I was starting to wonder if these were simply delusions. It had been so long since someone had taken me by the hand, but perhaps that’s my mind playing tricks on me as I reached out and felt his warm calloused hand in mine. I remember as a child waiting for my father to pick me up from pre-school. He never came. I remember telling the teacher he would arrive, after all, he had promised. But there I stood on the curb refusing to return to the warmth of the classroom. I truly believed he would show. Even as the lady with the lipstick on her teeth arrived and told me I would have to go with her. I sat on the curb and began to cry. What would he think if I wasn’t where he told me to wait?

She gripped my wrist hard and dragged me away. I knew if I were gone he wouldn’t know where to look. Somehow it never occurred to me that he wouldn’t look anyhow. And as I sat in the back of her car, I was sure I saw him and yelled for her to stop. She slowed the vehicle while looking back at me and curtly said, “he’s not there and he is not coming.”

I found myself questioning my reality today, so unsure of my inner voice since it had betrayed me before. Actually that’s not entirely true either. I had hand-selected all of them, as if I needed to replicate all that I had known. I instinctively was drawn to the ones in the cross-trainers. First there was the beautiful boy who kissed me sweetly with one foot in another bed. How naïve I was to think I needed to change. Then there was the angry man from the east who had promised to never let me go even as he kissed me goodbye on his way to work with his suitcase neatly packed in the car. I called no one as I waited day after day with no hint as to where to find him. Then there was the monkey man who didn’t run but rather shoved. Even as I clung to him after tripping and falling, he smacked my hands away leaving me to fall even harder and giving him a bigger headstart. And now I wondered as I felt the warmth of the Viking’s skin against my palm how long would it be before he made the same promise to return even as he let go and walked away.

I found myself whispering this morning unable to find my voice. I sometimes wondered if the in-between time created the distance or perhaps it was the time together that pulled him away. What else could I think when left with my own assumptions? I experimented last week with words I had not spoken before in years. I was perplexed by how much the silence hurt. This was no longer grade school, so I couldn’t ask anyone to pass him a note in class. Remember those notes, the ones with the check boxes with names and questions such as “who do you have a crush on” or “will you go steady with me.” I was always passing those notes for others secretly hoping one of them would be for me. But there was no note, just a change in topic.

I began to look at my note, the email that I had written weeks before sitting patiently as a draft. I stopped myself as the cursor rested on send. I had always clicked send in the past and found myself much like the same little girl in the back of the sedan driving away from my nursery school. The difference is that I knew he wouldn’t be coming if I pushed send. There would be no tears, no betrayal, or abandonment. Just like the rest, I could give him the out I had convinced myself he needed just as I had imagined my father felt watching me being taken away.