Ode to being a slut

Radical acceptance has never felt better

I am a total slut.

I was 8 years old when I found my mom and sister going through my backpack. They had discovered the backdrops that my best friend and I had made for our Barbies. Inspired by her dad’s playboy magazines, we made a play photoshoot of our own. With markers and construction paper taped together and block printed words like “sexy,” “hot,” and of course, “slut” scrawled in Lisa Frank colors, we lay the Barbies out in compromising positions and pretended to take their pictures. In 1991, we didn’t have cameras or smart phones.

“I didn’t even know she knew that word,” I heard my sister tell my mom. When they caught me listening, she scowled at me from underneath her 13-year-old bangs. “You’re embarrassing.”

I am embarrassing. As a child, I was hypersexual. A catholic schoolgirl who was boy-crazy, had an absentee father and started drinking at age 12. I was the first girl in the friend group who got fingered in the backseat of someone’s car, the first to put her mouth on a boy’s you-know-what. “Slut” could never hurt me. Slut is who I am.