We need to end the culture of slutshaming in college

The idea that feminism is built around is simple.  As a person who does not believe that the circumstances of your birth and whether you are born into group A or Group B should effect your standing in society or the expectations as to how you lead a good and moral life.  That makes me a feminist. This is difficult for some people to grasp, and often the feminist movement is generalized towards the extreme rather than the majority.  But we no longer live in the world that baffles us on Mad Men.  Things are obviously not perfect, but for the most part where there is mistreatment of unfairness there is also a presence promoting change.  However, in one particular area we all seem to turn a blind eye: college. It should be a breeding ground for progressive values and idealistic visions for a more welcoming tomorrow, a place where young people get the opportunity to find out exactly who they are and who they want to be, and part of that is learning to control your own life.

Part of all of this does involve hook-ups.  It happens a lot, and pretty much everybody accepts it as part of the college experience. Obviously some people choose not to, but many college students can talk about their personal experiences with hook-up culture and just like everything else helps us to mature from our high school lives into a more adult understanding of ourselves. Sure, I could complain about the need to teach women how to protect themselves against unwanted advances, rather than teaching men from a young age that they should know better, but issues like that, thankfully, now are discussed a lot.  Unfortunately, often the ideas that are most harmful to the fight for equality are so toxic because they are so ingrained in our minds that we do not even notice our prejudice.  We can see numbers on sexual assault and we can understand the hurt that misogyny can cause, but we don’t look at the impossible standards we set for girls in college.

My time at Georgetown has given me the opportunity to meet many great new people, and made great friends. But as I meet new people, I’ve been able to see one pattern in the psyche of almost everyone I meet.  On more than one occasion, I have been “warned” that a girl I was interacting with had an unfavorable past.  Was it that she had a bad attitude? No.  Did she get too drunk and become hard to deal with? No.  Sure as the tide, if I became friends with a girl that had slept with other people long before I met her, I found out about it.  I never once asked for this information.  Some ugly part of the human soul seems to obsess over a girls body and her choices with it, because people who I consider good friends and trustworthy individuals still jump at the chance to dish the details on a girls hook-up history.  It is about time someone broke down why I have zero interest in you revealing someone else’s personal life to me that you probably shouldn’t know in the first place, and how putting this spotlight on only women has furthered the prejudice of our society while harming women.

Lets just accept that we are all equal, and we all should be held to the same expectations. We accept hook-up culture as long as the girls we choose to associate don’t partake as much. Of course our guy friends can have fun right?  No one has ever come up to me to warn me that my new buddy got way too many girls last semester. Just think about how ridiculous that sounds in your head.  How is it that men are so obviously given way more tolerance when it comes to hooking-up. I want to be clear, I will “let a player play” as long as we all accept that this is a coed sport.

The strangest part about the way we view this topic is that the current zeitgeist actually makes no logical sense.  To use my second corny expression, it takes two to tango.  It should be easy for us to be sexually equal – because it’s all mutual gain in the end, but we can’t accept that. We love to cheer for Barney Stinson then call the girls he finds skanks. I used to watch How I Met Your Mother and wonder to  myself,  if everyone is happy when the pick-up line works on a girl, why do we feel the need to then immediately put her down.  Amazingly, the same guys who you are likely to see hitting on girls at every party they attend will be the ones calling girls very unflattering things for doing exactly what they hope to get out of them every night.  For these people I have a suggestion, if you want to be more successful in getting girls to go home with you, stop making them feel like crap about it the next day.  Who wins when we set our female friends on a tight rope of being fun but not too fun.  Who the hell are we to judge when we hold ourselves to an incredibly different standard?   Why is it that a girl seeking the same connectedness and enjoyment that a man seeks cannot be handled by our brains.

Shouldn’t we all do what will make us the most happy in the end? We can all benefit from a world in which people are allowed to freely enjoy themselves and others. Personally, I hope that when I find my future wife I find her happy and confident. I don’t care whether she partakes in hook-up culture or not because that is none of my business. As long as it’s safe and everyone is willing she shouldn’t feel like she is any less valuable. In fact, positive experience can only lead to learning how to be a better  partner in the future.

Shaming girls for doing what we all accept that a majority of all people do is simply stupid and antiquated.  So the next time you want to talk about a girl because of decisions she made to make herself and someone else happy in a private setting, just ignore the urge.  In the cleanest language possible, if you cannot deal with women being liberated to maybe be themselves without judgement for once then you can “go love yourself”.