(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

I am a respectable married lady.

And before I was a respectable married lady, I was a bit of a slut.

The use of the word ‘slut’ is a controversial one.

Obviously we don’t support the use of language which judges a woman who has sex. It’s a ridiculous thing to do. But in this context, the word slut feels important. Like a kind of reclaiming. After decades of being called a slut, being told not to be a slut, being warned of the dangers of being a slut, we’re finally taking the word back.


In a essay published in the Wall Street Journal last week, a male academic went on at quite some length about how women giving sex up to men too easily was the reason that they were ending up unmarried.



Deep breath.

Where to start?

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

In the first instance, language that implies men want sex and women ‘give it up’ to them is unfair to both genders. Women have sexual desire. Men have emotional needs. It’s short sighted and misinformed to rely on the ancient, out dated trope.

But let’s go further than that. Let’s look at whether this bloke’s theory holds any water. Because from where I’m sitting it’s practically the Titanic of theories.

I’m married. I got engaged at 24 and married earlier this year at 26. Before I met my husband, I was a bit of a slut.

Not as much of a slut as I wish I had been, retrospectively, but certainly not any kind of nun.

I had flings, I had one night stands, I had sex. I went to fetish clubs and sex parties and took naked pictures and posted them online. I also specialised in a lovely Catholic school girl tradition of doing ‘everything but’ because apparently giving blow jobs doesn’t matter because it doesn’t add to the total number of people you’ve slept with.

I know, I know. I don’t make the rules, I was just stupid enough to abide by them.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Anyway, when I met my husband I really liked him. I wanted him to be my boyfriend and there were several other women in my friendship group who felt similarly. So I had to make it happen.

What did I do?

I got slutty.

Really, really slutty. I wore the most obscene dress you can imagine (it was made of black spandex and power mesh and it showed about an acre of cleavage.) I flirted, I implied very strongly that I was filthy in bed, and you know what? I had sex.

I do not know where the traditional advice that having sex with a man will make him disappear came from, but I can only assume that it singularly applies to people who are extremely bad at sex.

In what world would doing something really fun and really gratifying with someone make you never want to see them again?



I have no doubt in my mind that the reason my now husband became my then boyfriend was because I decided, on the 23rd of December 2013, that I was going to screw his brains out.

Now while I would never suggest that the only way to hook a man is to have sex with him, I am saying that it’s how they did it in the Tudor court, and it’s really, really effective.

This anti sex narrative which teaches women that they’ll die alone if they have sex is complete bollocks. It’s being spun by a puritanical agenda which wants you to live a boring, sexless life.

Any man who isn’t going to call you back, or who is going to lose respect for you, just because he has already seen you naked is not someone you should be entering in to a relationship with. Decent guys, the kind who might be marriage material, do not write women off because they have had sex with them.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Any bloke who thinks you’re less of a candidate for a long-term relationship because *both* of you did the nasty, is a knob. So actually, having sex is the perfect filter. You get to have sex (a good thing) and you get an easy litmus test for whether or not the guy you’re boning is a decent person.

What’s not to like?

So please, take my advice. Slutty girls get married too. And when we do get married we’re better in bed thanks to all the practice, and we’re comfortable in the knowledge that we’re settling down having had our fun and tried a good number of the flavours on the menu.


We just don’t end up married to the kind of men who make a pseduo-moralistic judgement about a woman just because she happens to enjoy having sex.

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