Macho Sluts by Patrick Califia

could marry. Some women never left the temple. These priestesses did not simply perform rituals to guarantee the fertility of people, their herds and fields. They taught the receiving and giving of pleasure.
    I don’t know if I believe this. But I do believe the flesh should not be despised. If the flesh is not sacred, holy, then we are trapped in the muck of the profane, because the body is all we have. All knowledge, reason, truth, beauty, it is all reducible to physical sensation and actions performed by the agency of the flesh. Now that the goddess has no more temples, now that prostitutes are defiled women who represent the epitome of the patriarchy’s power instead of sacred women who represent the power of the Triune Goddess, it is surely ironic that it is someone who resembles nothing so much as the Venus of Willendorf in overalls, who rises up to rebuke us.
    It’s a feminist cliché that women are divided into virgins and whores, and set against each other. There is no mention in anti-porn rhetoric of how much the hatred voiced by “respectable” women puts the slut in danger, how much “nice” women’s jealousy and fear of being identified with her isolates the slut and makes it possible for her to be exploited and abused.
    Some of us hate this polarization, and would like other choices, something in between virgin and whore. Sexual exploration would be so much easier if this were not such a highly charged arena. But it is, so even if we ask for “just a little freedom,” even the lightest bit of sexual agency, experience, desire, or speech, we are going to be branded sluts and whores. And so most women remain identified with the virgin, the woman who looks on and suffers, who refrains from action, who always forgives, who heals wounds and gives birth, but will do nothing to halt violence or murder. It’s too frightening to be the brazen hussy, the woman who travels, who wants to go where men go and see what they see, who wears their clothes and appropriates their pleasures and mannerisms, who carries a razor, who has a hustle of her own going, who dresses to attract attention to herself, who will take care of her friends and stab her enemies in the back. She is not free, but she deserves to be.
    Ironically, the word “virgin” originally didn’t mean sexually inexperienced; it meant a woman who was consecrated to divine service, and therefore unmarried. Some sacred virgins probably had ritual sex with a representative of the god or with men who visited the temple to make an offering. They were, therefore, prostitutes. Today, a woman’s will, her self-image, her integrity mean so little that all it takes is violence to turn her into something that is despised—a slut, albeit a victimized one. There is no safety in virginity, actual or feigned.
    Macho sluts are supposedly a contradiction in terms, like virgins and whores. The slut is, in Dworkin’s parlance, male property—a victim of male violence—a woman who accepts male definitions of her sexuality. Instead, I believe that she is someone men hate because she is potentially beyond their control. If she has to pleasure many men briefly to escape belonging permanently to one particular man, she will. Whores are always accused of being lesbians because they get men to part with some of their property instead of becoming property themselves, and because they are more interested in how thick a man’s wallet is than the length of his dick. The whore does not sell her body. She sells her time. So she has time that is not for sale, that belongs to no one but herself. Domesticated women don’t dare put a price on their time. They wind up with no demarcation between business and pleasure, public and private, so they have no time and space of their own. They do everything for love, but nobody gives them the same care they lavish on others. If they are used and despised, they can’t