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• Sunday, December 17, 2006 11:05 PM

  duality

  Apparently there are a fair number of men in this culture who split women up into two nifty groups: Sluts, and Nice Girls. Yeah, yeah, Madonna/whore dichotomy etc etc, but let's take a look at how this plays out in real life.

  Sluts are the ones who have lots of sex all the time -- freaky sex or just plentiful sex, or whatever kind of sex the guy in question is happy to have or fantasize about himself, but disapproves of in principle. Sluts are for fucking and then forgetting about.

  Nice Girls are the ones who these men want to settle down and slay the sabre-toothed tiger in the defense of. Nice Girls must always be virgins.

  Now, these men -- and keep in mind I'm not talking about all men, or even most men, just the men like the LW's boyfriend -- get extremely confused and angry when women who they have previously assumed to be Nice Girls actually turn out to have Sluttish tendencies. I think these guys are almost more pissed off about what they perceive as their own errors in judgment, than about the fact of the sluttiness. And since sexual history is the be-all and end-all of how they judge women, why, do they have any choice but to act all huffy and disgusted?

  Fortunately -- I say with great joy and relief -- these guys are not nearly as common as they insist they are. Most people (men and women alike) might be a little weirded out by their partners' past escapades, but most people have it together enough to suck it up, get over it and not cast stones when they live in freaking greenhouses themselves.

  Also, to clarify for the guys who chortle when women say that they wish they could have all the wanton sex that men do: there's an important unspoken chunk of that sentiment missing. I absolutely promise that what your friends mean to say is "Gee, I wish I could have the kind of sex men do and not be branded a filthy whore and treated like shit for it later on." That's what men get to do, that women still don't -- a fact of which this letter, and some of the responses, are dramatic proof.

  —Anonymous
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