AFS #5: So You Want to Be A Slut…
Sent via our Advice for Sluts form submission:
Im trying to be a slut but I don't know how exactly.
How do I find people to f me? How do I tell people what I am?
How do I live a normal life and be a slut? Where do I even start to be a slut?
‘Lo child!
Oh, I love this question so much. And I love YOU, friend, for asking it, because it means that you are a little bit like me, someone who over-analyzes everything, and believes at some level that if you could just figure out how, if you could get a big enough fulcrum and a place to stand… you could solve every problem in the universe.
I love this because, as frustrating and stressful for you as I’m sure it can be, the impulse at its root is not a bad one. You are trying to solve your problem. You have decided two incredibly important and empowering things:
That your problem is one of style and approach, not of nature - you are not looking at your bad experiences and using them to tell yourself a story about how you don’t deserve to be close to other people because of who you - or they! - are as people. You’ve looked at your bad experiences and concluded that there IS a way to do this that will get you at least some of what you want.
And that you deserve to get at least some of what you want! You have not put yourself in a box labeled “slut” and allowed the society around you to tell you how much you should value yourself based on that label. This is the process of reclaiming slurs, and you’re doing it exactly right - you are examining how the label might be used in ways that are not critical and abusive, how you might use it to express things about yourself that you want others to know, and how you might respond when it’s used in a way you don’t agree with. You are not accepting the baseline societal assumption that wanting to have a lot of sex means you are lesser or should be mistreated.
All of that is great, because you’re right, and these are big, huge revelations that most people never even get around to. Most people try to ignore the dynamics in their social lives that reflect the power structures and dynamics that we pretend we’re not having to deal with every single day. Most people, when they find themselves incompatible with the established way of doing things, accept societal pressure to conform, because they’re afraid to say, “I want something different from what all of you want, and that doesn’t make me a bad person.”
You’re not a bad person because of what you want or need.
You’re not a bad person for what you want! That’s the first thing we gotta pin down here, perhaps ‘Rule Zero’ for this site: You’re not a bad person because of what you want or what you need, no matter what it is. Thoughtcrime is not a thing. No matter what you want, the wanting is not wrong. It’s a feeling! And feelings are just information, messaging from your body. It’s possible to do something destructive or abusive when we act to get the things we want and need in life, and that’s where you’ve asked for input - awesome! - but it is not possible to devalue yourself as a human being by having any feeling, desire, or need. That’s the baseline. If we don’t agree on that, we’re not gonna agree on anything.
That’s why I’m not stressing too much about where you’re located, or what gender you’re currently expressing, or what phenotypes you’d like to do slutty things with - because it doesn’t matter. You’re asking me how to be yourself and express yourself in sexual situations and the social situations that lead up to them, and that’s one of those things that is so completely different for every single person, and also so completely universal as a general experience that nobody is truly an expert at, that anyone trying to tell you their specific (cultural / traditional / gendered / branded) way is the only right one is trying to sell you something.
All of that is to say, darlin’, I love you for trying to solve this problem, and I wish I could give you a universal rubric that will work on everyone and everywhere you try it… and I can’t. What I’m going to try to give you instead is the support, courage, and perhaps even permission to go out and find out what works for you.
You asked, “How do I find people to f me? How do I tell people what I am? How do I live a normal life and be a slut? Where do I even start to be a slut?” I think your first two questions, while significant, are much easier questions to answer definitively, and they’ll get even easier if you use the latter two questions as your opportunity to figure out some stuff about what you want.
Where do I start?
So, we start with, “Where do I start?” And I think part of the problem is that you’re already trying to protect the feelings of the people you meet, at the expense of your own feelings and authenticity. Those interactions feel fraught because you’re judging yourself based on others’ reactions to you - you’re assessing your social skills based on whether or not a particular interaction “went well,” whatever that means at the time, and that makes it really hard to listen to yourself and pay attention to whether you enjoyed yourself. Your comfort and enjoyment should be your priority when you’re deciding whether to spend more time with anybody, and definitely when you’re deciding whether to have sex with them. It seems like you’re very focused on the idea that you must present yourself a certain way in order to be “allowed” to be slutty, and you come by that idea honest - capitalism has worked very hard to sell it.
That’s why I spent so long talking around how different this is for every person - because I don’t think you actually are unskilled in this area, and I don’t think your approach is actually that off-base. You didn’t say if the question is arising because of general societal messaging around being a slut and slutty behavior, or because you’ve gotten some personal negative feedback from other humans about this, so I’m not going to assume either way, but in my experience, the people who spend a lot of time stressing about how they come across to others and trying to improve their own social skills… they’re not the assholes. Assholes don’t do that.
So I think you might actually be pretty okay at this whole social interaction thing - as pretty okay as any of us are at it, which is more than good enough - and I think mainly it’s the intersection between impostor syndrome and a non-mainstream desire that is making you feel like you’re not doing it right. It’s easy to feel like you’re doing something wrong when what you want isn’t something most people are into, because people feel intensely vulnerable around sex in general, and when someone disagrees even in a mild or neutral way when we’re feeling super-vulnerable, we can react with powerful defensiveness, which can come out as cruelty toward the person with the less-common preference.
It’s worth understanding this dynamic because it can let you have compassion toward other people and toward yourself for not reacting perfectly in vulnerable moments. I think if you can see other people’s weird reactions not as censure of you and your needs, but as their own poor emotional regulation in the moment, you will feel less hurt in the moment when people react badly to your perfectly reasonable desires. You will also feel less afraid of making mistakes yourself, because you will not be subconsciously reinforcing this underlying rule you’re afraid others will enforce on you: “behaving awkwardly or inexpertly in sexual situations results in the awkward person or their desires being ridiculed, shamed, or rejected.”
So that’s the shitty way to react - you’ve seen it, I’m sure, in media if not in person - someone feels vulnerable and uncomfortable, so they shame you for what you’re into so they can feel more secure. We can contextualize this under the heading of “People Unworthy of Your Sluttiness”. These people are not up to your level yet, and not ready for your jelly. They are still struggling in the paddling pool you jumped over at the beginning there, the one marked “I agree with society that having Weird Needs makes me a bad person.” It doesn’t matter how hot any of the people in that kiddie pool are - it’s too shallow for you. Don’t dive in there.
So that’s where you start to be a slut - you create a perspective for yourself that you then share with others, a perspective that allows everyone to want what they want without judgment:
Assume the other person is also vulnerable, nervous, and just wants to make a good impression on you and see if you might be compatible.
Model receiving vulnerable information for the other person by doing it compassionately yourself - when they share something weird with you, you tackle the part of you that wants to make a skeptical face and you SIT ON IT. You remind yourself that there is no desire, need or interest a person can have that will tell you anything definitive about them as a person. And…
You say, “Ah, that thing, fascinating! What do you like about it?”
That’s the deal. No matter what interest someone expresses to you, try to understand it not as a recruitment attempt, but as an attempt to make a connection with you by telling you something true and important to them. So respond to it as such! Ask them about the things they offered to share - how they connect with the thing they’re talking about, what it means to them, why they enjoy it. In many cases, they’ll take the cue from you and respond similarly when you share yourself with them. If they don’t? That’s not something you did. That’s just another person who belongs in the kiddie pool, not between your legs.
#SlutLife
You asked “How do I live a normal life and be a slut?” and a lot of my words here have been focused on convincing you that a normal life is not incompatible with sluthood. I’ve been trying to suggest that when you do tell other people about yourself, you don’t have to do it in a way that apologizes for who you are or what you want. You don’t have to start from the expectation that people will think less of you if you show them who you really are. You absolutely get to expect and demand that the world treat you with basic human decency and respect for your autonomy regardless of your sexual or gendered feelings.
That’s actually a stunningly radical perspective in our world today, so I’m going to say it again in big text for the bigots in the back:
EXPECT AND DEMAND TO BE TREATED WITH BASIC HUMAN DECENCY AND RESPECT REGARDLESS OF YOUR SEXUAL OR GENDERED FEELINGS
It has to start in your heart, with you believing you are worthy of love and respect. I mean it. You have to go out there with this baseline, and you have to enforce it, because you’re the only one who can.
That stuff - Questions Three and Four stuff - is actually the harder part. Being a slut, the active “getting around and around the block” part, that’s easy once you’ve got started. Being a slut while enduring and ignoring the ongoing nonsense from the world and insecure kiddie pool enthusiasts who will try to convince you you’re still Doing It wrong? That will be the work of the rest of your life. You’ll still be figuring out new ways of treating people ethically, navigating fraught social situations, and maintaining your integrity and self-worth against assault when you’re 85, and so will I. Come back and see me now and then, we’ll compare notes!
“How do I find people to f me?”
Now for the practical stuff. Questions One and Two were exceedingly practical: “How do I find people to f me? How do I tell people what I am?” And the concrete, definitive answers to those questions are pretty consistent regardless of where you are or who you are.
As far as finding people, an abundance of services exist for this purpose, and each of them has a general “culture” that tends to prevail there, which might make some of them better for your purposes than others. (Note that I do not currently use any of these services and most of them I have never used; your mileage may vary, please experiment before investing any money or emotional weight in these things.)
The online route has the benefit of allowing you to specifically select people who are into what you’re into, and that can soothe the anxiety of having a nonstandard desire somewhat. On the other hand, it’s easy online to fall into that Geek Social Fallacy of “we are the only members of our species,” the idea that this ONE person is the ONLY person who will ever share your very specific desires, and so you MUST take what is surely the only chance you’ll ever have! Trust that this is not and never will be the truth.
But you want to f, so you’re gonna have to get together in meatspace eventually. There are sites geared toward this kind of thing also - if Meetup.com is active in your area, you might find the initial getting-to-know-you stages of the kind of community you’re looking for on there. In the context of many kink communities, a “munch” is a meetup of people with interest in the scene to talk about boundaries, form connections and make plans, and these gatherings tend to be very relaxed and generally family-friendly in their level of explicit discussion - you’re able to maintain boundaries as much as you wish and feel comfortable with. You may be able to make contact with some like-minded people in your local area by searching Meetup, Facebook, or other social media for “munches.”
If you’re not finding much on the internet, remember that the internet is actually a vanishingly tiny subset of all the humans that exist, and most of the people that exist
Are not online, and
Are filling their days, making connections with other humans, and keeping themselves amused somehow, without the internet’s help.
So how are they doing that? I don’t know your local area, but I do know that if my internet went down and I were desperate to find something to do in my town, I could go look at the actual physical bulletin board at the library, and it would be covered in flyers for weird, fun things I could go do. There’s one up there this month for learning to bind miniature books! Seriously! My town also sends round this little newsletter every month with your junk mail, where they list events at all kinds of local venues, new classes available at the nearby colleges, people advertising their own services and activities - perhaps your town has something similar?
Skulk off to the Fuck Dungeon
It’s easy to look at these kinds of options and assume that because what you’re actually out for is someone to fuck, that you should only look for venues and activities focused on that specific goal. And frankly? I think that’s a bit of a problematic perspective, because it suggests that while it’s perfectly normal for people to want to connect with other humans, if there’s even the possibility that they might get horny around those people, they should skulk off to the Fuck Dungeon where the weird perverts dwell. I think it’s part of the negative societal messaging that is making you want to starkly divide “being a slut” from “living a normal life” in your mind.
Does it help any to know that that voice is also the voice of the bigots in this world? Does it help in dismissing that narrative to know it’s exactly the same perspective as the people who say, “Gawsh, those gays, they just shove their sexuality in everyone’s face, don’t they; can’t they just, y’know, keep it to themselves?” This idea that the Default White Anglo-Saxon Christian Experience and way of being is entirely universal, inoffensive to share and discuss at all times, because of its utter universality, but all other experiences, desires, forms of expression, are shameful and disgusting and really should be hidden away where normal people don’t have to see them… yeah, that’s bigotry. It’s no less bigotry when someone abuses you with the word “slut” than when someone abuses me with the word “faggot.”
You see “slut” as a useful label that you can carry with you into a world where people will not judge you negatively for using it, and I endorse that. I really, really do, and I will be out there with you trying to do the same. All I want you to understand is that you’re jumping into an ongoing fight, and that is not a safe thing to do. Questions of who is allowed to choose to have sex, who is allowed to want sex, who is allowed to express their sexual desires in public, who is allowed to seek sexual partners openly and who must do so in the back pages of the newspapers that no longer exist… they’re questions we’re fighting over with guns right now, all over the world.
That’s not your fault, and it’s not how it should be - you should be able to explore your own sexuality and make connections with other people in safety and comfort regardless of your gendered or sexual feelings, we covered that in big bold text above, yeah? It is horrible and it genuinely breaks my heart that you are required to figure yourself out in a society that is currently holding a gun to its own head and screaming, “IF YOU MAKE ME CONSIDER ANYONE BUT ME I WILL FUCKING KILL MYSELF.”
But here we are. If you want to be a slut, what you have to do is go out into the world to make connections with other humans with an open heart, with vulnerability and honesty. You have to make yourself available without hiding, and approach people without fear, and trust that the people who don’t want what you want will be kind and compassionate toward you anyway, will have done enough of their own work to not take out their own insecurities on you. You have to be the opposite of the people who would treat you like shit, in every possible way, while moving through a world where those people are incentivized and rewarded for acting like that.
Stretch your lovely limbs
Where they are afraid, and angry, and shrunken, and small… you have to be brave and hopeful. You have to stretch your lovely limbs, and raise your head, and stand up straight, and be as big and beautiful and extra and out-there as you possibly can be, and dare those who would flinch at the sight of you to try out their new shades.
At that point, the advice I have is all pretty straightforward dating stuff that I’m sure you’ve heard:
Have a low-stakes interaction in a public place as your first meeting. Group gatherings can take some pressure off any one-on-one interaction, and make you feel less anxious, if groups of people don’t make you nervous. If they do, by all means avoid them!
Choose a cheap activity that allows you both an easy endpoint if you’re not feeling it. People love coffee shops and lunch places for this very reason - you don’t have to overthink it. If you’re really clicking, you can always parlay that coffee into five to six hours of chatting on a park bench; that’s been basically all my first dates, and if I liked talking to the person, that was all I wanted.
You don’t say what kind of slutty business you’d like to get up to, but there are lots of communities that welcome that kind of behavior. Perhaps you feel slightly nonmonogamous? Some reading on polyamory, or a polyamory-related meetup or group, might give you some idea of whether it’s for you.
BDSM and kink scenes also tend to be more open to activities outside of committed partnerships. It’s possible that your route to comfortable sluthood is as simple as, “Hey, I don’t know anything about that, but you make it sound great - is there an event coming up that I could check out? Do y’all coordinate on Facebook, or…? When you first came here, what helped you meet people and get involved?” It’s not shameful to be new; most people actually love to show off their favorite people, places and things. Go ahead and ask!
Remember that any outing where you don’t end up in bed is not a failure. Putting too much pressure on these interactions can make you nervous and other people uncomfortable, and going into things with the mission of: “I’m going to find someone to fuck me!” or even “I’m going to make a friend!” sets you up for disappointment if you don’t nail it the very first time.
Listen to yourself a lot, and prioritize your own safety and enjoyment. Prioritize having fun over being fun. Make sure you have the independent ability to leave (funds for transport, your own vehicle) and give yourself that option if you feel at all unsafe, even if you can’t articulate why. Your gut is good at identifying threats, but your brain isn’t always great at translating those feelings into logical arguments. Fortunately, you don’t need logical arguments - you don’t need to convince anyone, as long as YOU know that you get to leave the second you aren’t enjoying yourself.
So these are the kinds of thoughts you want to hold onto when you’re trying to make contact with other people, no matter what venue you choose, and they feed on each other. If you’re not carrying shame about yourself and your desires into every interaction, you won’t feel as insecure and afraid around other people. You’ll be more okay with rejection, because you’ll be more okay with yourself, with the idea that this exact person doesn’t have to like you for you to be good enough, because you’re already good enough. If you’re more okay with rejection, and less ashamed of who you are, you’ll be more okay with people being different from you, and you won’t be presenting your uniqueness as a negative that they’ll need to kindly overlook, or as a pugnacious assertion that makes them feel as if they’re doing something wrong by not feeling your flavor.
And no… none of that means you will never be hurt. You will still encounter assholes, and people who are not worth your time, and you will still helplessly, hopelessly fall for people who don’t have even half of what you deserve to offer you. But if you can internalize that you are not weird, not broken, not less deserving of love or attention just because you want a lot of it, that nobody is… that armor can’t be taken from you. It exists inside you. Unlike the Heavy Spiked Plate Mail of Bigotry and Assholery, the Subtle Shield of Self-Worth is invisible and instantaneous. It will enable you to respond to assholes with grace, and boundary-pushers with firm self-respect. It will cushion the pain of failure and rejection if you carry inside you the idea that what you want is normal, you deserve to have safe opportunities to seek it, and nobody is entitled to anyone else’s time or attention.
So go thou and embrace your sluttiness, my child! You’ve got this - what you want is normal and reasonable, your heart is in the right place, and your instincts are good. Listen to yourself, treat yourself and others with compassion and respect, and you will find yourself surrounded not by people who will hurt you, but by those who will see you. You deserve that. Go get it.
