Want to be a slut

In , two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students. The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college. On top of asking the students about GPAs and friend groups, the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession. As Armstrong and Hamilton write in a new study published in Social Psychology Quarterly , economic inequality drove many of the differences in the ways the women talked about appropriate sexual behavior. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure.

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I am a slut. A slutty slut slut. So say a lot of people.

But in this context, the word slut feels important. Like a kind of reclaiming. In a essay published in the Wall Street Journal last week, a male academic went on at quite some length about how women giving sex up to men too easily was the reason that they were ending up unmarried. Women have sexual desire. Men have emotional needs.