I watched a video on X this morning. A short clip, a teaser — one of those slices of a full video prepared as bait for the viewer. In it, the female guest on a podcast announced, with eyes twinkling with mischief, that she was single. But that wasn’t what caught my attention.
She followed up with a declaration about how she had lots of young boys who ‘serviced’ her.
Familiar with the modus operandi of the social media mob, my chest brimming with the morbid curiosity of a peeping Tom, I hurried to the comment section. And there it was.
Comments, vile and expected. Names, unprintable and unpalatable.
It was slut-shaming at its best. And I wondered what would have happened if a man made the same comment. I didn’t have to wonder; I knew.
The man would not be vilified. He would receive a lot of back-thumping from the male folks. He would even be congratulated by a few who would tell him, with the fanatical zeal of anti-female proselytes, how he had discovered the secret of living long — breaking away from the control of one woman. Some women would even chip in their support. But a woman would never be that lucky. Like the guest on the show, she would be called a slut.
All this reminded me of another clip I once watched. In it, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, writer and feminist figure, asked this question that doubles as the title of this post:
What is the male word for slut?
I didn’t have an answer; she also didn’t. No one did. I’m sure you don’t have one either. Because, as she said, there isn’t one. The reason is simple. Slut isn’t an attack on a person’s morality; if it were, there would be a word for a male. It is an attack on a woman’s expression of sexuality.
There is “thief” for both male and female. “Liar” for both males and females. “Murderer” for males, “murderess” for females. But slut? It seems that the word was fashioned for women alone, as though women were the only ones who became immoral, a people branded with the scarlet letter once they express their sexuality.
Everywhere you look, men are free to be sexual or to be casually referenced when it comes to sex. With boys, there’s a sense of normalcy to it. From a tender age, a young boy can be teased with words such as “girls will swoon for you,” “you will be a heartbreaker,” and “this boy, you are a bad boy.” It is often said with a wink, made to seem like an endorsement.
When the lad grows up, it’s normal to even tease him, and people often do, asking him about the number of his girlfriends.
When he becomes a man. It becomes normalized. How do I know?
Here is how I know.
No one raises an eyebrow at a man with multiple wives. It’s normal, our actions and inactions seem to suggest. We praise “Yoruba demons,” Nigerian speak for suave men who have a penchant for multi-dating several women. Celebrities with baby mamas are the cool ones.
But our moral compass only swings when it comes to girls. We tell them to behave well, to not be a bad girl. We tell her to cover up, to avoid boys. Unconsciously, we program her to be second fiddle, the different gender. A gender capable of being equal in everything except matters of sex. (even this is contestable).
Am I endorsing sexual immorality? No.
This essay isn’t even about sex, sexuality, or immorality. It is about inequality. It is about the uneven tilt we have upended our world.
Here is something that troubles me. If we can be comfortable in a world where men can be free to be sexual beings and women cannot, it means we agree that men are different from women. It is obvious that men are physically different from women. But mentally, they are the same. There is enough evidence to support this claim. Both men and women have triumphed equally in various fields when placed on level playing fields.
As single parents, business leaders, creators, inventors, and innovators. Even as heads of government. As a matter of fact, evidence suggests that women do better at leadership than men. But that’s a topic for another day.
Back to slut.
This conversation is important because if we agree or keep silent about words like slut, which is biased against a gender that is fashioned against a part of the population, we are no different from racists, colourists, terrorists, or any psychopaths. We are no different from people who assume that somehow, something about them makes them better than the rest of us.
Mentalities like this are the origin of our problems, the many isms that split our worlds into uneven parts.
This conversation is so important because it’s been hardwired into the system, so much so that we now hold this falsehood as truth.
Rahab, Delilah, Jezebel. These were women who owned their sexualities and were labelled “sluts” for it in the Bible.
But there was David, who killed a husband and married his wife. There was Solomon, with his playboy tastes and harem of women.
There was the pharaoh with an appetite for other people’s wives, and Abraham had to lie to protect his wife, Sarah. There was the king who, after kicking out his queen Vashti, organized a pageant to get a queen of his choice, a fitting replacement for a woman who dared to say no.
We conveniently chuck it as boys being boys, men being men. No one looks at them the way Potiphar’s wife was looked at — the cradle snatcher, the perverted woman who didn’t mind sleeping with the help like many men who have affairs with their domestic help do today.
In Islam, there is also the story of Mohammed, who conveniently chose to take as wife an underage girl. I doubt if there are prominent female characters in the Koran, not to mention women who openly own their sexuality.
I understand context and the peculiarity of each situation mentioned. But I also understand conditioning and the power of a falsehood left to exist for too long, its ability to take the solidity of truth.
If we agree that a woman cannot own her sexuality as men do, that this is a man’s world, then we must also agree that this is a white man’s world and that people of colour are second to them. We must also agree that sexuality isn’t broad, that there’s just male and female. We must also agree that the other isms we fight against are right to exist.
If there is no word for slut, it therefore means that Chimamanda is right: being a slut isn’t a problem; being a woman is.
