Scary Slut Manifesto

Why we keep sexy political

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Some of my favorite films premiered under the Hays Codes¹. I think about that more these days, in the midst of sociopolitical and self censure in the culture, I don’t fear but moreso know we’re living in analogous times. For years I’ve been the town crier, using every bit of bass in my voice to alert people that a moral sex panic was coming and that it’d be bad… really fucking bad. I’ve discussed the factors that produced this behavior a few times now: poverty, religiosity, whorephobia, a culture endeared to surveillance, younger generations raised by the internet who’ve yet to separate visibility from volume, the list goes on.

Whatever the reasons we choose to ascribe, there’s an attack on privacy and sexuality and public expressions of personhood. The efforts to enforce uniformity and pious behavior ranges across the spectrum from passive aggressive comments and public shaming to threats or acts of violence taken not to correct the behavior of the offender, but rather to show spectators they can (and oftentimes will) be next. In the colonial world, rejection of the cultural hegemony is more that an issue of likability, it’s an issue of freedom. We’re not taught to sit in the weight of that in society, it’s part of the reason we got here. Strategic messaging that relies on deep-seated biases in a world that never truly reconciled with its colonial, religiously occupied forefathers who hated sex because they hated themselves.

We see their playbook clearly today, Puritans of all varieties with scathing takes on society, one that in their aligned view is too permissive of the weird and perverse and hard to conform. For years I’ve been calling this the decency/deviancy binary.

The Decent: White (or light), thin, able-bodied, cishet, pious, child producing and capitalism loving

you can imagine what comprises of

The Deviant: Black (or brown), fat or “poorly shaped”, disabled (or unable to hide needs), areligious or the wrong kind of religious, seemingly sexually preoccupied and capitalism averse

There’s obviously movement between these two, this binary like most of them is incomplete and doesn’t speak to the totality of our existence and that’s the point. When we’re forced into the margins with this or that reasoning, a level of self denial is inherently built into the mechanism. The reason the Empire loves binaries is because it thrives on sacrifice, be it the way you can refer to partners at work or the kind of clothes you can wear to a restaurant. In the Empire, binaries serve as daily reminders that you always owe a sum and payment has to come at a cost to your personhood. It’s depressing as shit if we’re being honest.

Alas, we mustn’t despair, we grieve on the road. There are ways to combat a moral sex panic and its accompanying sex obsessed but repulsed culture. This guide has the steps I and many others should take to reclaim our personhood and combat harmful ideals for a society ill equipped to handle freedom.

Rejecting Modesty

When we look the same, it’s easier to trick us into believing we also think the same— in a moral sex panic, the people take up the mantle of regulating “anti-social” behavior, all the overlords do is build the framework. So, if you’ve been looking around, you see how the trends (and thus social priorities) have shifted to covet modesty (read: purity) again. The clean girl & corporate siren babes in their monochrome athleisure sets, slick backed hair and linen perfumes were a clear indicator of modest, almost utilitarian dress coming back into fashion. Modesty is being touted as purposeful and classy, the sensible way, which is exactly why you should reject it.

This isn’t to say you have to abandon your personal style for the sake of low necklines and backless dresses, but this is to say you shouldn’t introduce more modesty to your fashion diet because it eases the social pressure or the eyes on you. The issue of modesty is that it’s rarely sufficient, for the puritan, there’s always more you could be doing to be less noticeable which is the ultimate aim. Making you less identifiable means you're quickly subsumed into the dominant culture and its aspirations, they make you lose yourself before they disappear you altogether. Standing out challenges this, it forces people to sit in the discomfort of folks choosing to live as they were. Though change is inevitable, not all change is well intended.

Don’t let them dictate your dress, this isn’t a middle school hallway where you’re pulled to the side for pants too tight or shoulders too exposed. We’re grown fucking adults and the way that appears in our style is something we have to choose to embrace, even in the face of adversity.

Laugh at the Absurd

For the unforeseeable future, you need to laugh. a lot. Puritanism finds its legs when there’s something to be upset about, remember, they’re sex obsessed yet repulsed. It’s all they can think about or see and hear in the world around them and that promotes strong feelings of disgust and shame that instead of unpacking, they use to police the world. Whether religious or secular all Puritans share a cause: ridding the world of their personal temptations. Most contact you have with a Puritan will illuminate this quickly, the whole “every accusation is a confession” thing.

One of the many reasons they’ll make wild accusations and find sex everywhere is to prove their own preoccupation is the baseline, it’s an invitation to admit you find sex in as much as they do. Don’t give them the satisfaction. Whether it’s an animated series or updated logo for a brand, some joke stated in a podcast or the plot of a recent bestseller, you’re under no obligation to affirm this worldview.

They always say certain media couldn’t be made today because it would “get cancelled for not being woke”, we know that’s not true. In reality, some of our most beloved media couldn’t be reproduced today because puritans have hyper sexualized it. I think about something like the PowerPuff Girls, literal test tube babies with a recurring enemy such as Him. A flamboyant, feminine presenting demon who calls himself The King of Darkness; today the streets would blow their top over Him.

Him, a powerful villain and supreme bad bitch

So much of their power comes from the unsuspecting engaging in their logic in attempts to disprove it. That’s not how this shit works though. The second you step into the ring so to speak with them, they’ve already won. You’re engaging with their convoluted baseline which inherently legitimizes it as a real and valid concern, which it isn’t! The best course of action is to ignore it, make them explain, justify and stew in the nonsense by themselves. Attention is currency in culture wars, which is what this is, to be clear.

If you like me have a Grade A RBF, slow blinks and a side eye are enough, but if you really want to bring it home simply say “I don’t think well adjusted people worry about these sorta things.”, toss a laugh on the end for some extra punch. If they don’t cower away from the convo (which in my experience, they usually do), they’ll get bored at the lack of engagement and keep it pushing, mumbling the good word under their breaths.

The biggest threat to expression and freedom is an equalized audience. It’s the reason debate content is more harmful than good, platforming violent, extremist or weirdo logic signals that it’s worth considering to the folks witnessing the conversation. You gotta suck the oxygen out to subdue the flames, the oxygen in question is attention. Essentially, tap into your mean girl (non gender specific) energy, laugh in their face, flip the hair and sashay away.

Retire Self Censure

This may very well be the hardest task and its applicable to all systems seeking to dispossess you. When you hear people say “you need to kill the cop in your head”, they’re referring to preemptive policing, it’s deeply connected to the history of people complying in advance. We live in a very punitive society, one that for the commoner, consequences can be plenty; and that society relies on us doing the bulk of the work to regulate our actions and words and beliefs as much as our appearance.

However unfortunate it is, we’re prone to reproduce the circumstances most innate to us and those circumstances are full of policing. The rise in call out content and digital vigilantism (what the kids call cancel culture), is proof of this fact.

The fear of being caught committing a social faux pas is higher than ever because our digital lives have more merit than they ever have. The wrong statement or retweet or TikTok could be the difference between a normal night and being doxxed. The effects of this perversion of accountability is a bit like a boomerang, we often will do the work first to avoid having to do so in public. That’s not inherently bad, discernment is good. Knowing some things really are inside thoughts, are good. The concern is knowing what’s worth censoring and that’s much more prone to suggestion from the zeitgeist than other things.

I can think of no greater example than language used online to avoid perceived censorship. To be clear, censorship exists and is reliant on the values of the entity allowing public communication, but it’s less than people would imagine. They may manipulate an algorithm or suppress videos about incensing topics but they only have to do it sometimes, the succeeding adjustments from the population are entirely self promoted and voluntary.

Take TikTok for instance. An app where people in an attempt to avoid platform suppression, have taken to using code words to discuss sensitive topics. Suicide is unalive themselves. A gun is a pew pew. Rape is grape or SA (short for sexual assault). Pedophilia is PDF File. The list goes on if you could believe it, and the most damning thing about it is how readily people introduced it into their personal lexicon off the internet. This is the ambition of pro surveillance and censorship culture, they can step out of the room because you’ve continued the work all on your own.

this is being observed in the wild

The most effective way to combat censorship is to STOP COMPLYING. Our brains love patterns and are bias to continue them where it can get away with it to preserve brain power for other things. It’s time to manually input what language you use and where. Discernment is key, no ones saying you call your boss a cunt in the next department meeting (even though they may deserve it). All you have to do is choose, actively as often as you can to just speak plainly, to leak the power out of these alternatives; algorithmic bias is real but it’s also frequently changing. It’s all about efficiency meaning once a task is complete, they move on to the next thing and personally, I think the language of sex isn’t being tracked as much as it was. Once you’re in the middle of the panic, oversight gets more hands-off because as I’ve stated multiple times in this piece, we. are. the. police.

The only way to subvert that is to stop policing language they’ve deemed too crude or vulgar. If there’s anything you should know about puritans, it’s that they’ll always find new words to harp over, more skin to lament about, extra trends to lambast. You can’t win with them so you might as well stop speaking their language.

Marry the Taboo

This may be the most important step, and also, the most daunting. It’s not enough to regulate what is mainstream and keep further barriers to visibility if one doesn’t adhere to the dominant culture, it’s about stomping out any opposition not already cowering in fear. It’s why we’ve seen so many attacks on things such as Drag Brunches and read alongs, the smear campaigns serve as a warning: the perverted and degenerate should be invisible. If we’re thinking about this more critically, we’d recognize the goal isn’t to annihilate all “anti-social” life but rather keep it small and contained to the shadows so there’s less risk moral crusaders own activities will come into question. The more people do a thing, the easier it is to be caught doing a thing.

I think frequently about Madison Cawthorn, the conservative former representative of North Carolina’s 11th district who went on a podcast and stated this

“The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington … being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average age is probably 60 or 70 – [you] look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics. … Then all of a sudden you get invited – ‘We’re going to have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.’ … What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. … Some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you. And it’s like, this is wild.”²

These accusations are ultimately what led to the end of his political career on the Hill.

Whether or not it’s credible, I couldn’t say for sure as a civilian. As a sex worker who’s worked across the country from NYC to SEA with friends (and clients) in high places… I’d say it wasn’t a lie. They’re hypocrites, but they're strategic ones. The plan is simple and highly effective:

1. Exploit manufactured austerity and poverty

2. Offer up a scapegoat

3. Decry about the lack of moral aptitude of said group

4. Alienate the population from public life

5. Engage with and/or abuse said population in private

The formula is the same for everything that falls under the control of the ruling class. It’s very much a “right for me, not for thee” scenario with violent ends.

It surprises people how much of the social contract relies on shame and embarrassment. Humans are pro-social creatures, we’re hardwired to seek and maintain communities and that attribute is hungrily exploited by our moralistic overlords. Few people are okay being the undesirable in every room, some of us don’t have a choice (hi fellow disabled, queers and whores!) but most do and you should choose the weird, every single time.

Half the work of policing the taboo is making it seem otherworldly and sinister so people don’t even bother getting curious about what they’ve been told to condemn. Demystifying the taboo can only come from embracing the taboo. Whether it’s attending a Drag Brunch and posting it on your socials or taking an introductory shibari class and raving about it to your community, seek out what’s under fire and do so gleefully.

The dark night is scary because it’s hard to identify the unknown so pull that bitch into the light! They can’t fear monger what’s seen and easily knowable. And it’s important for people adjacent to the target of the panic to continue to engage with people, and make it seem as normal as it is.

All Roads Lead to Sluts

Pejorative's are used liberally. For some years now, the terms “slut”, “whore”, “queer” “hoe” etc. have been dulled in their violence. Their etymology is the same as most insults, a means of signifying when the wrong kind of person is around. As people began ironically using these terms, they lost a bit of currency. The power of such insults have never been felt uniformly, historically, those of us who these terms were originated to denigrate didn’t see a decrease in vitriol but rather found ourselves stuck in a crowd of half steppers. People who could take these terms and blanket themselves with it like a cape.

Makeout with the same sex tipsy at a party? Queer

Have too many hookups sophomore year of college? Slut

Openly discuss your love for anal? Whore

The Scarlet Letter meant to cast you into permanent social exile and shame, except the streets started to gamify it. There’s a larger conversation about how voyeuristic civilians and cishets are about cultures (and their accompanied struggles) they themselves aren’t apart of, but that’s for another day. All that needs to be stated now is that this isn’t the time to slink back from language that was gleefully co-opted, this is the time to put the foot to the gas.

The Puritans have won this round and thus, have sharpened the blade that is incendiary language. These pejoratives will no longer be for play/play, when people spew these words, you have to reasonably assume they mean it. In which case the best course of action is to just eat it. Different from racial epithets, accusations of sexual deviancy rely on continued participation of the accused. The longer you defend yourself agains the stain of “slut”, “whore”, “hoe”, “hussy”, the more you affirm there’s a group or people within a group that the language is appropriate to use on.

The more distance you attempt to create between the meaning of these words and yourself, the more you alienate the people who could never argue their way out of such a title. If like me you’re a literal whore, then there’s no bargaining to get away from the disdain and I don’t think that should be intention.

To be a good conspirator with folks trying to survive a time intent on class, race and social cleansing, you have to be willing to take some shit on the chin for the communities most impacted. Instead of arguing with the person who just called you a hoe, say “Okay.” and go about your business. You’re not required to engage with the why’s or what’s, they’re inconsequential and we’ve already established that in order to snuff out the social capital of hatred, you have to stop speaking its language.

If rejecting modesty, laughing at the absurd, patronizing the taboo and refusing self-censure makes you a slut, then be the slut! You’ve likely been calling yourself one playfully for years, might as well live up to the title.

In Sum

We’re in for a long road ahead. I’ve stated publicly given the current sociopolitical climate that it’s not giving 1930’s as some have suggested, but rather, the 1890’s. The Gilded Age where the world felt like it was on the precipice of something, and that something included a shit ton of strife.

I think back to those old films I love. Notorious (46’) where Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman found a way to produce passion in longing pecks due to 3 second kiss limit rules under the Hay’s Codes.

Cary Grant & Ingrid Bergman in Notorious

I recall Virni Lisi busting out of a cake wearing only a whipped cream bikini in How to Murder Your Wife (65’)

Virni Lisi popping out of the cake in How to Murder Your Wife

Or Some Like It Hot! (59’) when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dressed in drag and were flirted with by men on camera.

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag for Some Like It Hot!

In the face of suppression, surveillance and censorship, we, those of us who care, tend to find a way to rebel. To cause an uproar and laugh at outrage. To assert our presence, whether it’s celebrated or not.

Sex is so deeply rooted in my life. It’s been my companion in ways I find difficult to put to words, in full transparency I genuinely think I was born for sex; my relationship to it, the capital it’s produced for me over the years, the education I provide using it as a vehicle for conversation and my fervent belief that sex could shepherd in the revolution. Sex host the best and worst parts of me. I’m afforded full personhood when that’s understood and respected.

In times of great upheaval, sex is among the first things attacked. The need to control the masses starts in the bedroom oftentimes but the goal is never to end there, there’s always someone or something up next on the chopping block. If we let the puritans cleanse society of sex, then we’re consenting to the loss of culture and diversity and actual human life.

No one cares already when a whore goes missing, what do you think will happen when it’s decided anyone can be disappeared as long as you “prove” they’re a whore as well? It’s bigger than social media deplatforming and doxxing campaigns, it’s bigger than banning Drag Brunches and creating further barriers to gender affirming care. It’s bigger than attempts to abolish porn and thus those of us who make our income producing it.

It’s about trying to rewrite the terms for a dignified life and we can’t let that slide. At the same time discretion and privacy leaked from the culture, paranoia and shame rose in it. This is the panopticon and sex is the watchtower’s first target, rejecting that could very well be the keys to free ourselves we’ve been looking for.

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In the spirit of fucking for the revolution, I’m resharing a pleasure resolution page I made years ago, you can print it out and fill it in or just use it for reference for some creation of your own. On it are some ideas to get you started and as always,

Stay thoughty. Stay Thotty.

Until next time.

1. https://www.britannica.com/art/Hays-Code

2. https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/28/politics/madison-cawthorn-orgy-invite-cocaine-claim/index.html