Monnie

“There’s really no point in asking what if? The only question worth asking is: what’s next?”
― Elton John, Me

“In Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary (the precursor to the Oxford English) a slut is simply a dirty woman, without any sexual connotation. In the nineteenth century, a slut also becomes a female dog, and a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle. Though in the twentieth century its meaning solidifies as an immoral woman, "a woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive."

It is a brilliant linguistic trajectory. Make the bad housekeeper a woman of poor morals. Make her maid service to men a moral duty, and every other act becomes a potentially immoral one. Make her a bitch, a dog, a pig, any kind of subservient or inferior beast. Create one word for them all. Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish her for anything. You can make her humanity monstrous. Now you can do anything you want to her.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“slut is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and to keep them in service to men.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood