I am a slut. I carry condoms with me when I go out because I may end up having sex, unexpectedly, after an eventful night out. If I end up finding someone I’m interested in enough to take them home, I want to be prepared, and know that the conversation about safe sex isn’t going to fall entirely on them. I want there to be no excuse as to why we don’t use protection — though, if a man were to protest the use of condoms, we wouldn’t need them anyway, as I wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot-pole. In any case, all of my sexual activity has to be consensual, healthy, and safe. If this means that someone will see the edge of a condom wrapper in my purse and judge me because I have not been in a committed relationship long enough to justify it to their liking, so be it. I’m going to be protected, and they can go fuck themselves.

I am also on birth control. Aside from the risk of the condom failing being an ever-present one in every sexual encounter, I also want to regulate my period and have better skin. If I am with someone long enough that I decide we no longer need condoms, it’s also good to have a ready-to-go method of contraception which will take its place. If everything were to fail, though, and I were to accidentally become pregnant — given that it happened at a time where I wasn’t ready for a child — I would get an abortion. I would be honest with my partner about this, and hope that they will be supportive, even if I do not need their support to go through with it. I do not think of any woman as “bad” or “unworthy” because she has made a choice to end a pregnancy, and my efforts to prevent it happening do not mean that I don’t know exactly what I would do if it happened to me. Your desire to regulate and make moral judgments over my reproductive system are as disingenuous as they are exhausting — you don’t care for the welfare of a child I wasn’t ready for, you only care that you make my choices for me. I am not interested in what you have to say about my uterus.

I have had several sexual partners in my life, but I won’t tell you how many, because it doesn’t matter. It could be in the thousands, and it wouldn’t make me any less cool to go to lunch with. It wouldn’t make me any less terrible at ironing a shirt. It wouldn’t make me any less likely to love shitty reality television I know is bad for me. Who I am and what I offer to the world has nothing to do with how many sexual partners I’ve had, and I’m not interested in justifying myself to someone who will have already judged me anyway. As much as I’d like to comfort you with some notion that I’ve been impossibly chaste up until the moment I find the “right” man to “complete” me in some way, I must tell you that I haven’t been waiting for anyone. I’ve been living my life exactly as I want to since I’ve become sexually active, and my choices weren’t made to impress an arbitrary committee of judgmental assholes.

In fact, I’m not sure if I’m ever going to find the “right” person for me. I’m not even sure he exists. But I’m also not interested in spending any time waiting for a hypothetical person, or preserving my vagina in formaldehyde until he gets here. I am interested in my career, my friends, my apartment, getting a dog someday, and learning how to ice skate better. I have an entire life to attend to which does not revolve around how close I am to getting married, and I believe I am happier for it. If that means I go out on several dates that lead to nothing, just for the hell of it — I’m okay with that. If that means that I sometimes just have sex with a booty call because I want to have a good orgasm and take my mind off things for a while — I’m okay with that. My time is not spent waiting for anyone to validate me, because I am here to validate myself and my own choices. If I happen to find the love of my life along the way, great.

I am going to have sex again soon. It may not be with the kind of person you think I should be “giving my body to,” but I’m going to do it. I might be wearing a short skirt and too-dark lipstick and cleavage that screams “I’m looking to get laid.” And it might not be the best sex of my life, but if it isn’t, I’ll go home and take care of myself with one of the several vibrators I am not ashamed of owning. Because my sexuality has absolutely nothing to do with you, and where my latest orgasm comes from has nothing to do with the great things I will do with my life. So call me a slut all you like, because I already know I am one, and it’s fucking awesome.

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