Pornosophy: What's It Like to Be a Slut?

What’s it like to be a slut? It's probably an easier question to answer than that asked by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his famous essay, "What It Like to Be a Bat?"A slut used to be defined as a promiscuous girl or woman, but anyone who knows anything about human sexuality or life realizes that the word "slut" observes no gender lines. A while back there was even a site for book lovers called “Bookslut.” In general everyone are sluts to the extent that they're caught in the grip of obsessions. Warmongering nations could easily be called war sluts. The real qualifier and what separates "the men from the boys" when it comes to slutdom however is shame. The thrill of the transgression is accompanied by a delicious feeling of embarrassment. Back in the 60’s in the age of sexual freedom, free love was trumpeted. At Woodstock it looked like mud wrestling, but many people who partook in successions of couplings in which the idea of attachment or feeling played second fiddle to an interest in sexual synecdoche, or body parts, started to feel something was missing. If you, for instance, enjoyed sex with lots of people and felt that it didn’t involve some sort of use and abuse you were probably not a real slut. Today the same rituals pertain in the world of “hooking up” where people make arrangements on dating sites which are sometimes just limited to specific forms of physical gratification. A porn slut is someone for whom the use of certain sex sites is a compulsive act that's no longer freely chosen. Thus it’s actually not hard to get into the head of the old-fashioned slut who sleeps with anyone, when you’re someone who's routinely gangbanged by ice cream parlors--which are a tormenting temptation to sugar addicts.