"Sloots"

Belushi's "feminists say what?" face

My younger brother turned nineteen yesterday. I called him (at 11:58 - two minutes to spare!) and we had one of the most (if not the most) engaged and related conversations we've ever had.

Which is really saying something. Because, while he will always be family, and while we've had any kind of long-running animosity between us, my brother and I have never been close. We've been, compared to most other sibling pairs I know, extremely distant. We never talk on the phone, or if we do, it's short. We don't hang out when I'm home. We mostly eat dinner together, sometimes, with my parents. We live alongside each other, but we don't interact much.

I don't think it will surprise anyone to hear that I'm generally a pretty outgoing person. I often get "outspoken," or if I'm lucky, "well-spoken." Gregarious, snarky, a lover of words, a master debater: these are characteristics that live at the top of my dance card.

My brother is not like this. Not only does he not love debate or argument (which has been difficult, in terms of us figuring out how to connect with each other), but he has a hard time with it; he's got some auditory processing problems, and so a debate for him, with me, feels more like I'm bullying him than anything playful or fun. On top of this, he's just naturally quiet, and reserved, and introverted. I love him, always will, very much, but we've never been close, as siblings go.

So when I say we talked for an hour and half, and he told me about college, and his friends, and even different girls at college, and even parties, and even drinking, and asked me questions about drugs/usage/what the different M's in MDA and MDMA mean: this is a huge deal. We laughed and talked, and even exchanged pretty in-depth observations about why the Catholic Church sucks. It was incredible. I felt like a sister.

Which is why it was so hard, when we got to talking about women in college, and a woman that he'd been (in his words) "sorta messin' around with," and he sort of stopped, stumbled over his words, and said "well, I wish so many of them weren't such sloots." It sort of caught me off guard, really, to hear that word come out of his mouth. In a way, it was gentler that the traditional "sluts." I suppose. Although I'm not sure that it's really anything more than goofy pronunciation that separates the two.

It hurt to hear, but I didn't really know what to do. I was uncomfortable, flustered, standing in my kitchen. I was surprised, although when I think about it now, I guess I shouldn't have been. I assume a lot of things about my brother that simply aren't true; I assume he's like me in various ways, that we are the same in various ways, when he is, in many ways, somewhat of a stranger to me.

I asked him what he meant by the word, and he proceeded to describe these women as loud and annoying, as sleeping with lots of people. He spoke of a few of the women golfers (he's on the golf team: golf is, more so than school, what he's going to college for) as having been "passed around the team." I nodded (because you can totally hear nodding over a telephone). I understood what he was saying, and that the way that he was saying it wasn't meant to be mean, or hurtful, or misogynist. I understood that he was younger than me, and different than me, that he was sort of a frat boy, sort of a bro.

I tried to let it go. Difference of experience, difference of language, he just didn't mean it, I ran through these excuses in my head and tried to let it go. We talked about other things for a minute. About five percent of my brain was focused on what he was saying, and the rest of it was racing through ideas, questions, approaches, outrage, trying to find a way to tell him why it was upsetting to me, this ill-pronounced slur, without ruining what was turning out to be the most sisterly conversation I'd ever had with him. I didn't want to scare him, I didn't want to make him feel bad. I was trying to weigh my principals against this newly discovered siblinghood.

And so I said something. I told him, as free of confrontation as I could, that it sort of hurt to hear him use that word. I followed it up with asking him why, really why, he used that word. I asked him, again, trying to really ask, leaving the judgment out of my voice, if he thought there was anything wrong with women having a lot of sex, with different people, often, frequently, etc.

He doesn't. He told me as much in the conversation that followed, which (surprising enough) turned into a really interesting discussion about sex, and how people have sex at college, especially a big frat-esque pseudo state-school like his. It wasn't that these women were having sex with lots of different guys, but rather, he didn't like that people (not women, but people) had so much sex that they didn't seem to care about. Not that the sex was casual, or without emotional involvement, but that it was treated like something to be traded, to be kept secret (or, when drunk, to brag about). That there was animosity, a culture of throw-away people and throw-away nights surrounding sex at his school, as these frat parties, with these women he so-dubbed "sloots."

I'm paraphrasing into my own words, there, but basically I ended having a super-great sex positive conversation with my brother. I'm not sure he really understands the whole why-that-word-is-bad-and-has-a-really-shitty-history thing yet, but in terms of his attitudes about sex, they seem really excellent. I shared a tidbit with him from my OKCupid question-answering experience that he seemed to like, and sort of agree with. The answer to "do you enjoy meaningless sex," for me, is "no." And not because I need all sex to be in the context of a long term relationship, or I think sex equals love, or anything like that. But because sex isn't meaningless. It has value. It has weight - what weight you give it for yourself, what weight it has for your partner(s). Can I enjoy casual sex? Yes. But it's going to mean something.

In the quest for sexual liberation and free love, I think the pendulum can swing too far. Or that maybe there's not enough sex-positivity in the casual nature of Big State School sex culture (I mean, of course there's not: in this particular sense, I suppose). It seems like, in trying to distance ourselves from the sex-means-I-love-you narrative, we sometimes move into the once-we-have-sex-I'll-cease-to-acknowledge-you-exist-or-treat-you-like-a-human. Which is ridiculous.

I don't really expect anything of my brother, and I don't really want to reserve judgment on him. He's living in a generation and a culture where any kind of feminism or sex-positive attitudes are met with incredible scorn. But for this particular interaction, I was really happy that he could hear me, and I could hear him, and for all our differences, we sort of landed in the same place, albeit with distinctly different nomenclature, about sex.

So good job, bro. I'm going to bug you about the execution, but in general, you're coming from a good place. An honest human place. It's almost like we were raised by the same people, or something. Funny, that.