He's a Stud, She's a Slut

As one of the hottest buzzwords ever dwelled on by feminists, the notion of the double standard has punctuated my women’s studies education. I had learned about the concept’s existence the hard way, but I had never known that it was academically recognized and analyzed until I started taking women’s studies classes. For those of you who don’t know it by its formal title, to put it plainly in the words of one of my favorite teeny-bopper train wrecks, a double standard, according to Christina Aguilera’s “Can’t Hold Us Down” is where “the guy gets all the glory, the more he can score, while a girl can do the same, and yet you call her a whore.” That about sums it up, X-tina. It’s perfectly acceptable for a guy to run around, bobbing his apple in anything with a pulse, and still come home and kiss his mamma with those lips, while we all know what would happen if a girl did the same. Whore! Slut! Skank! I became women’s studies major because I have been putting up with this double standard in one way or another ever since I bought my first bra from Limited Too and, frankly, it’s a getting a little old. You would think that with all the advances in society, that it would be a little passé by now, that everyone would just realize that, despite our differences (that I both recognize and accept), that girls can do pretty much anything as well as boys. So then what holds us back? What is preventing the double standard from disappearing?
Whenever I find myself pondering about these sorts of things, I always come back to the same problem: society is so concerned with organizing everyone and everything into neat little boxes, yet no one really fits precisely into those allotted categories. Thus, if the boxes that are designed as exemplars upon which we must map ourselves fail to incorporate that which we must map, then the problem, to me, isn’t the people who fall short of the boxes, but, rather, the boxes themselves. It’s not us, it’s the system. Patriarchy is what holds us back; the notion that we, as women, must be sexually constrained and naïve. Hence, those women who take pleasure in sex, who are in tune with their sexual needs and desires, and who—god forbid—act on them, are, as a result of their failure to fit into the pure, pious woman box, are labeled deviant—the girl that the guy would fuck, not the girl that he would take home to that very same mamma whose lips he kisses, still tasting of fornication and vodka.
I have experienced the ramifications of this double standard firsthand so many times it’s dizzying. As perhaps the most memorable of these experiences, my relationship with my previous boyfriend (for lack of a better word) serves as the quintessential example of all things contradictory. We were 20-years-old when we met. Not old, but not very young either; we had each had a sufficient amount of sexual experience under our belts (no pun intended). The only difference was that he had had a girlfriend throughout all of high school, whereas I did not. Qualitatively, we had each experienced an equal amount of sexual exposure, for we were on the same page sexually when we became involved. Quantitatively, however, I may have been ahead of the game. Even if I didn’t beat him in the numbers department (we never compared and that was probably the best move we ever made), I did beat him when it came to still keeping in touch, and even being good friends with the people with whom I had swapped spit. It was all a result of circumstances. I never had a high school boyfriend, so I experimented sexually with the people around me, those who I trusted. It just so happened (oh, my luck) that those people with whom I had experimented all went to the same school as my ex-boyfriend. He was lab partners with one of them. This killed him. This killed our relationship. He could not handle the fact that I had “hooked up with all of my friends”. It was unacceptable to him that I had been with other people before him. I tried to reason with him, to tell him that it was all a part of the past, a past he could not change. I tried to convince him, time and time again, that my sexual experiences prior to him should not matter. But, because I was trying so hard to make him see that he was all I wanted, I ended up claiming that I had regretted making out with all those people. I didn’t, and I don’t. I wanted to make him see the light so badly, so I tried, unsuccessfully, to squeeze myself into the box. I could not fit. I didn’t have the heart to make myself fit.
What shocked me the most about this ordeal was that anytime I made the argument that he should not care about my past hook-ups because he too had his fair share of one night stands, he would have none of it. It was almost as if that didn’t matter. But, it does matter. I laid awake at night, after hours and hours of saying “I love you, why cant you see that” without ever really saying it, wondering why it was okay that he had hooked up with half of New York (including my sister’s roommate. If I ever get her alone, I will kill her. I swear it), but it was unforgivable that I had played strip poker one Friday night and ended up making out with his future lab partner when I was eleventh grade. It still boggles my mind.
But I know why he thought that way. I know why they all think that way. Because society says so. Because women are supposed to be demur and pure and modest and chaste and pious and innocent and…sexually available? Whoa! That’s one tall order, and that is so not me.
What do we do to stop this? How can we change the system? How do we eradicate the double standard so we all can be free to fuck who we want, when we want, without ever having to worry that our future boyfriends will use it against us? Become an activist? Burn our bras? Write a blog?
Can we change it at all? I don’t know. Taking on the age-old system would prove to be quite a daunting task I am sure. For now, I am content with recognizing that it exists and talking about it with as many people as I can so that they recognize it too. If we talk about it, write about it, sing about it enough, then maybe someone really capable of changing something will hear it. Until then…Sing it Christina!