Cheap Slut: A Self-Reflection
On many winter afternoons in San Diego, the air was crisp and the wind was blasting. I was lucky I had decided to layer up with my favorite blue jacket over my long sleeve. I stood and waited at the foot of the elevator to head up to my apartment. It was only 4:30 in the afternoon, but I was ready to return to the comfort of my heated room.
As I waited and shivered for the elevator to ding, my mind raced with ideas and plans about what I had to get done during the rest of the night.
Then, something caught my attention.
Cheap Slut.
I was thrown aback at the voice of an older man.
Within a split second an extensive litany of questions raced through my head.
Cheap slut? Who was this guy? Who was he calling a slut? Was it directed at me? Why is this guy even on campus?
I snapped my head towards the source of the appalling words. A middle-aged man with a backpack and cap was looking right at me with a smile on his face. He waved at me.
I questioned whether it was even he who had randomly said that.
I immediately questioned myself and the way I had presented myself to the world that day. What was I even wearing again? Was I wearing something he deemed provocative? Was I standing in a certain way to provoke him? What about me is cheap? What about me is slutty?
In a span of seconds, I began to rethink my association with this man. Surely, I did not know who he was, but I wondered if he had seen me anywhere.
Has he seen me through my apartment window before? I knew those curtains were transparent.
I shuttered in disgust at even the thought of that possibility, still shocked that any stranger — anyone for that matter — felt like he had the right to talk to anyone that way, and I could only think of one thing to say.
“Shut the fuck up!” I yelled back.
Somehow that didn’t seem enough. I wanted to express my frustration, but yelling back did nothing. I gained nothing but pride by shouting. My parents had always taught me not to take disrespect and to never let anyone treat me in such a way, but this was something I could not have prevented.
Another student walked up to the elevator and I decided I wanted to tell someone about what had happened to see if I was exaggerating my abhorrence.
My words stumbled as I pointed down the alley. “Tha-that man! He just walked by and called me a cheap slut!”
Unsurprisingly, she was also in disbelief. She yelled back at the man down the alley who must had been almost out of her sight by then.
“He just waved back at me and smiled,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s what he did to me, too.”
On the way up the elevator we ranted about him and how he had no right or reason to say those things. I was relieved there was someone else who could assure me that I wasn’t overreacting at my encounter with this man. Whether or not she had experienced the same situation before, from the start I knew she would understand my feelings.
“I hope you have a good day, despite that guy,” she said as she walked off the elevator.
As I live on a higher floor, I stayed on, and spent the remainder of my elevator ride in deep contemplation. By the time I laid myself on my bed, I had come to several conclusions.
I was going to enjoy the rest of my day, despite that guy; I wasn’t going to waste my time and energy grumping about some crazy person who lacked the logical capacity to even reason about a decent way to treat people.
I figured that he was just a foul-minded stranger who was too afraid to do any real harm, and although he had engulfed himself in the ideology that unjustifiably allowed him to treat women with disrespect, his intentions were just to piss someone off. There was nothing I could have done to stop him because I did nothing wrong.
Despite my personal inclination to move forward, I feared for the future of that man, and wondered if he was actually capable of inflicting harm on another being, though he had caused me only confusion and frustration.
I forced myself to shake the obscene man out of my head, concluding that pondering would only lead to me questioning my own self-worth. I would not give him or anyone the power to do so.
