Confused - am I a slut?

Nevyn

You do have it.
Otherwise you would not have that inner voice.
What you need to do is get the gumption to act on it and stand up for yourself
and that starts with standing up to yourself.

you would not let any one treat a person you loved in the way you treat yourself and are so down on yourself.

You have the power over you life to make choices and to act on the ones you can live with.

Seriously I think you should consider a self empowerment class and some couselling.

Talliesin

regretful wrote:

I have debased myself through it though.

No. What you did was to act out harm that had been done to your sexuality in a way that did further harm to it. You did things that continued that harm not because they were wrong in and of themselves (it may be that one-nighters are something you later decide you won't do and it may not) but because you were in a position where you could not take anything positive from them, but only more hurt.

This thread is now three pages long. It consists mainly of people saying "you are not a slut", quite a few of them including very differing definitions of the term (so differing in definition as to have no definition at all really).

You picked out one definition that you could then take to build up a way in which applied to you after a few twists (even that one didn't apply to you directly, I don't think the author of that post considers "degrade" in the same way as you).

You hang out with a twisted little pervert who seeks validation in her own sexual issues by verbally abusing you.

You are actually making quite an effort to view yourself in the worse possible light.

Now the first thing to remember is that this is very normal for someone who has been through what you've been through. So normal as to be almost indicative. Rape survivors blame ourselves - almost every time - and you have to know that because you can't see the self-blame for what it is until you do.

Accept the fact that you are inclined to be hard on yourself and to blame yourself. You are not seeking any sort of objective view on what you've been through or what you have done since - and no such objective view is possible. Rather you are in a struggle between part of you that wants to roll over, label yourself a slut and give yourself up as a bad loss and part of you that wants to pick yourself up, move on, and build an enjoyable life for yourself.

The hard part is, it's much easier to go with the part of you that wants to give up on yourself and much more difficult to pick yourself up. That's not a moral judgement - there's an implication when we say one thing is easier than another to colour the choice morally, but that's not what I'm saying at all.

Rather I'm stating that it is indeed extremely bloody hard to pick yourself up. It's extremely hard to not blame yourself. It's particularly hard to be doing it for a long time and find that it still needs continual effort. More than twelve years after I was raped I can still get myself caught up in an eddy of self-blame.

regretful wrote:

I should have just kicked him out the door.

Yeah, you should have done, but your failure here was not a moral one. You failed to do the thing that was best for you, like we all do very often, and you failed in that because to eventually do so was extremely hard - most likely as you manage to blame yourself less you'll realise that it was even harder than you now think.

We all fail to do what is best for us and most of the ways we fail are not in dealing with anything nearly as hard. You live in a country where many of us don't manage to eat enough fruit and veg. How much easier is that than what you had to do?

You should have kicked him out the door, he should have not raped you. Your failure was in self-preservation, his was moral. Your position was difficult, his was easy. It's very difficult for someone in an abusive situation, whether long-term or short-term, to get themselves out. It's very easy for a man to not rape someone; it's the easiest thing in the whole world.

Think about that when you feel yourself blaming yourself. Think about how extremely easy it is not to rape and what that means for where the blame really lies.

Now, take the part of yourself that keeps being hard on you and let it be hard on you in the right direction - pushing you about things you are doing and going to do, not what you have done. Take the part of you that finally managed to get yourself out of that situation with your ex-boyfriend and use that strength again now.

And be prepared for failures. Be prepared for backslides and foul-ups and times of bleakness, because they're going to happen. And that is deeply unfair, but they're going to happen anyway. But if you're prepared for them you can ride them out and move on again.

If you decide you don't want to have sex outside of marriage then don't have any more sex until you are married. Fretting about what can no longer be changed is just wasting energy you should be spending on what is yet to come and which can be changed. In the religion that your "friend" claims to practice the greatest sin is that of despair - because despair leads you to dwell in the belief that things are hopeless when that same religion says there is always a hope of redeeming your situation. If you are going to take her approach to sexual morality, then take the whole package - take the rule against extra-marital sex but take also the rule that you can always move forward.

If you decide you do want to just enjoy sex as much as possible, then make sure you are doing something you will actually enjoy in a time and place where you are capable of enjoying it.

However often you decide to have sex, whatever ways you decide to have it, make it something you are active in and bringing something special to yourself. It's whether or not you and your partner can bring something special to it that will make it special or not, and whatever it takes to allow you to do that is how you will find that specialness. Hopefully for your "friend" how she is living her life will allow her to bring that specialness to her life with her future husband. It doesn't have to be the same for you. It doesn't have to not be either.

In fact. Forget about right and wrong here altogether, because that's not even the point. It's not a moral issue, it's an issue of what you put in and what you take out of the rest of your life. Pointless guilt will stop you doing that.