After a Duke University freshman was outed as a pornstar by her classmate earlier this month, she received countless solicitations for sex, admonitions for her “promiscuous” lifestyle and even rape threats.

Why do we still insist on stigmatizing female sexuality?

The celebration of male sexuality and the suppression of female sexuality are so pervasive throughout culture after culture around the globe that there must be a reason for it rooted in something besides arbitrary cultural distinctions and conventions.

Whatever the root of the discrepancy, the virgin-whore dichotomy in the United States is the end result of the gulf between the way we view male sexuality and the way we view female sexuality. The “whore” is the ultimate price we pay for our pearl-clutching and catcalling. Since men display their sexuality so outwardly and women are encouraged to repress theirs so thoroughly, men’s desire must be projected onto the whore, and the whore must be shamed for succumbing to her own desire.

Even though in modern times we no longer really expect women to be virgins at marriage, we still maintain a taboo on the free expression of female sexuality. Miley Cyrus, Rihanna and the rest of the usual retinue of “provocative” pop stars trotted out as examples of sexually liberated women encapsulate this dynamic perfectly – we’ve driven women to sell us on their sex appeal before anything else, but we still spend an inordinate amount of time chastising them for their overtly sexual behavior.

We may roll our eyes at a promiscuous man, but it’s a moment of passing humor. We still judge him predominantly by his other qualities, but not so with a promiscuous woman. Women judged “loose” by an arbitrary standard, unique to each individual, are called sluts, whores, hussies and scores of other, equally demeaning names.

Even when we feign momentary shock at a man’s indiscretion, we still distinguish him from the actual whores by gendering the insult, thus trivializing it. The fact that their male counterparts are glancingly dismissed as “man-whores” or celebrated as studs says it all. He’s not an actual whore. Being an actual whore is exclusive the domain of women, according to our vernacular.

Men in our culture seek sex from women. They complain when women won’t “put out” but often won’t consider a serious relationship with a woman who’s known to sleep around. It goes hand in hand with the age-old paradigm embodied so perfectly by Casanova: a man overcomes a woman’s defenses to sweep her off her feet. He swoops in, she loses her head and is carried away by the passion she feels for this one man.

It’s not as simple as two people using each other for mutual satisfaction; it’s about a man overwhelming a woman, something that contributes greatly to the rape culture in our society. We romanticize feminine resistance. We expect her to play hard to get. If she doesn’t then she’s loose.

Obviously not every man or every woman feels or acts this way. Plenty of men are capable of treating women as equals and plenty of women don’t repress their sexuality. All I’m saying is that as a culture, we need to stop the slut-shaming, pearl-clutching rhetoric. After all, if men get to wear their lust on their sleeve, why shouldn’t we?
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