Equal everything day, every day
Today is #EqualPayDay. The day women around the world yell into the void that — believe it or not — we are worth being paid every single same coin as men. As of today, for the rest of the year, technically, I am working for free. Appalling. The pay gap here in the UK is that for every £1 a man makes, a woman makes 81p; 19.3% is the average, for those who like percentages.
Plus we also, here in Jolly ‘Ol, have the luxury tax on tampons, and we have to eke that out of our 19p less, because really, when was the last time your boyfriend or husband or any male in your life willingly went and bought tampons? Women are not having such a good run of it all. Then I started to think about the concept of slut shaming.
Friday night I went to see Ed Byrne, a great comedian, and besides being brilliantly funny, he took the men in the audience to task for slut-shaming. I am not sure when this particular turn of phrase came to be, but it is awful. In university, we used ‘walk of shame’ among us (it was an all girls uni, so if you came back in Sunday morning wearing what you went out in Saturday night, well, you didn’t spend Saturday with us lot), but that was used in a bit of a wistful manner; almost as if we were saying ‘huzzah, you escaped!’
As he said, if you go out with a girl, and she goes down on you in the car, and you are more than willing and enjoy it, and you then drop her off, go see your friends and slag her off for being a slut, WTF? You were there. You actively participated. Don’t go and bang on about what a stud you are, and what a slut she is.
Secret moment guys, so lean in: women enjoy sex too, just as much as men, and in some cases more. Oh no! Call the morality police! Women are equally entitled to want to go out and have a one-night stand, or find a partner, or try or do anything men do. ANYTHING. (Ok, obviously relationship rules apply here. I am not the relationship police.) And by doing so at no point does that make her a slut. I don’t care if in one weekend she has sex with a different guy or girl every day and night. That’s her prerogative. But why no high-fives for knowing what she wants, and being a self-confident woman, and going out and getting it? Why do guys have a ‘wing man’, but there is no equal phrase for women? (Probably because we can do it on our own, natch.)
I was just going to Google to try and figure out when this ‘slut-shaming’ phrase joined everyday language, and I was, scratch that, AM, appalled to see what the ‘suggested’ searches are — the last one. REALLY? Really?
Slut shaming is good? Looking into that search result (the iceberg of it, maybe the first 3 results), men are egging each other on to stop calling girls sluts, in case they change their behaviour and won’t have sex with them. Nice. If you read what women say online about their most traumatic slut-shaming experiences, they talk about guys dumping them because their ‘number’ was higher than the guys. Or for being called one for not sending nude photos on Snapchat or Tinder. For having a one-night stand, and god forbid, not taking his number after.
The Slut Walks that started a few years ago are much more deliberate, they protest against using any aspect of a woman’s appearance as as an excuse for rape. As as a ‘receiver’ (sorry, won’t use the word victim) of sexual violence, I applaud the Walks, and heartily. But there is a subtelty that is inherent in the joking tone people vocally ‘suggest’ by using the phrase slut / slut-shaming that is more visceral, and damaging, especially to younger women. It automatically sets a mental bar for how they believe they should act, based on some abstract societal ideal set by men who are misogynists. Actually, scratch that, again. They aren’t even misogynists. They are just dumb. Playing along with the crowd. Trying to fit in, be a stud. Society has done this. Somewhere, somehow the overall jist is that men love sex, and women deal with it. Huh?
The result is they are causing women to change how they act — and even how they think of others and themselves. That is just wrong. Especially when the guys are the ones who want girls to be sexually avant-garde dynamos, but are then scared shiteless when confronted with one. Men don’t generally like it when a woman knows what she wants sexually, and is in the driver’s seat. That is a recipe for slut-shaming right there.
The fact that a quick search on women and sex threw up HEADLINES such as ‘women enjoy sex’ (in equal typeface to ‘man lands on moon!’) is questionable enough. Amy Schumer is at the moment just knocking it out of the park consistently on why this shouldn’t be an issue — but she has to talk about it to make it a non-issue (crossing fingers). I love the line where she says to the guy ‘oh no, I am just honored to be watching your process’, which you can see in this article which unsurprisingly has the catchy title “Amy Schumer and Women Like Sex.” (it is worth clicking on the link — no panic in the office, GIFs and screen shots, no live video to give your co-workers a heart attack.)
We need more women talking like this, refusing to be called sluts for something that we were meant to enjoy, and demanding to be treated like equals. Is that so hard? Are we asking too much?
Amy Schumer has it dead to rights here:
“I will speak and share and fuck and love and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it. I stand here and I am amazing, for you. Not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. And I am all of you, and I thank you.”
No, thank you, Amy. Thank you.
So, let’s just keep going from #EqualPayDay right into #EqualEverythingDay. Who is with me? Click recommend if you are!
Kristine is Anglo-American; Brooklynite by birth, living back in England for yonks who resides in digital land. Loves talking about innovation, wine, funny, clever women and her need for sleep. Ecomm/retail geek. Sports mad. Wants to be in Cornwall, and in her next career, an F1 driver or Serena Williams. In my ideal world, I’d be working for Mercedes AMG Petronas F1. Loves feedback, so drop me a line-kristine.kirby1[at]icloud.com
