Melissa Febos on the Uses of the Word “Slut”

When I teach Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl,” which I do a few times each year, I often play for the class a video of the author reading her work at the 2015 Chicago Humanities Festival. The story consists of a single long paragraph composed of imperative statements made by an implied mother character. Between instructions for domestic tasks like how to properly launder clothes and set a table are those for not behaving or appearing like “the slut you are so bent on becoming”—a phrase that recurs throughout the story. In the recording, each time Kincaid repeats this line—the word slut a glittering shard in the smooth putty of her voice—the audience laughs. There is nothing about the story or the refrain, nor in the author’s countenance, that implies humor.

“This is how you set a table for tea,” the mother explains. “This is how you sweep a whole house.” Bread, she tells the girl, should always be squeezed to ascertain its freshness, “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”

In the 18th century, “slut’s pennies” were hard nuggets in a loaf of bread that resulted from incomplete kneading. I imagine them salty and dense, soft enough to sink your tooth into, but tough enough to stick. What could a handful of slut’s pennies buy you? Nothing—a hard word, a slap in the face, a fast hand for your slow ones.

Before it carried any sexual connotation, the word slut was a term for a slovenly woman, a poor housekeeper. A slut was the maid who left dust on the floor—“slut’s wool”—or who left a corner of the room overlooked in her cleaning—a “slut’s corner”—or who let dirt collect in a sewer or hole in a ground—“a slut’s hole.” An untidy man might occasionally be referred to as “sluttish,” but for his sloppy jacket, not his unswept floor, because a slut was a doer of menial housework, a drudge, a maid, a servant—a woman.

A slut was a careless girl, hands sunk haphazardly into the dough, broom stilled against her shoulder—eyes cast out the window, mouth humming a song, always thinking of something else.

Oh, was I ever a messy child. A real slut in the making. My clothes entangled on the floor; my books splayed open and dog-eared, their bindings split. Dirty dishes on the bookshelf, sticky spoons glued to the rug. I would never have bathed if not commanded. Once my mother told me to change my underwear and caught me putting the clean underpants on over the dirty ones. I was ashamed when she laughed at me, not for my unclean habits, but because we had company and they laughed, too.

At a certain point, when I got in trouble and wanted to be seen as good again, I would clean my room. But only when I wanted to be good, not because I wanted to be clean. I already understood that goodness was something you earned, that existed only in the esteem of others. Alone in my room, I was always good. Or, I was never good. It was not a thing to care about alone in my room, unless I was thinking about the people outside and the ways I might need them to see me.

The story goes like this: in March 1838, Darwin visited the Zoological Society of London’s Zoological Gardens. The zoo had just acquired Jenny, a female orangutan. The scientist watched a zookeeper tease the ape with an apple. Jenny flung herself on the ground in frustration, “precisely like a naughty child.” Later, he watched her appraise a mirror in her cage. The visit led him to wonder about the animal’s emotional landscape. Did she have a sense of fairness to offend? Did she feel wronged, and what sense of selfhood did such a reaction imply? What did Jenny recognize in her own reflection?

More than a century later, his musings led to the mirror test, developed in 1970 by the psychologist William Gallup. It is sometimes called the mirror self-recognition test (MSR), and is used to assess an animal’s capability to visually recognize itself. In it, an animal is marked with a sticker or paint in an area it cannot normally see. Then, it is shown a mirror. If the animal subsequently investigates the mark on its own body, it is seen to perform this self-recognition. The body in the mirror is its, and the mark is unfamiliar. Great apes, the Eurasian magpie, dolphins, orcas, and one Asiatic elephant were the only animals found to pass the test, as of 2015.

Just think of all the things a woman could do rather than clean. Which is to say, think of all the pastimes that might make her a slut: reading; talking; listening; thinking; masturbating; eating; observing the sky, the ground, other people, or herself; picking a scab; smoking; painting; building something; daydreaming; sleeping; hatching a plan; conspiring; laughing; communing with animals; communing with God; imagining herself a god; imagining a future in which her time is her own.

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 19th century, a slut also becomes a female dog, and a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle. Though in the 20th century its meaning solidifies as an immoral woman, a woman with the morals of a man, it isn’t until the 1960s that a slut finally becomes a sexually promiscuous 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 a word synonymous 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.

__________________________________

Excerpted from Girlhood by Melissa Febos, copyright © 2021. Published by Bloomsbury USA. This essay was first published in the Paris Review, Winter 2021.