Slutside
Slutside: any seat facing away from the main flow in traffic in Val, aka towards the windows/walls/corners.
Antonym, Creeperside: seating facing the traffic. A vantage point from which an individual or group of individuals can rate and discuss people walking in at any time of day.
See also, Creeper Panel – a group of people all sitting creeperside, sometimes without slutside companions.
Slutside: where sluts sit.
Slutside: where I, freshman year, sat in shame at every meal. Where I sat in fear that I would see someone I had hooked up with and my stomach would drop and I would have to flee the cafeteria for fear of literally vomiting on the table.
Slutside: a term introduced to me by my friend-with-benefits/boyfriend-on-a-good-day when he noticed that I always sat, self-consciously, facing away, shielding myself from the glaring, (seemingly) all-knowing eyes of my peers. He laughed but he wasn’t kidding. “Of course, of course you sit slutside. You would.”
Why? Because the hook up scene on this campus isn’t always so funny and neither is the drinking scene. Remember those shirts all the RCs wore during freshman orientation? “Don’t be a Hot Mess!” They told us, over and over again that we were freshman and we were dumb. Everything we did was wrong all the time and it was, mostly.
Normally, I spend my weekends at Zu, Marsh, Garman or on occasion Smith (which actually has a pretty decent crowd from time to time) but two weekends ago I made my semi-annual trek to the shitshow that is parties on campus. It reminded me of everything I hated about being a freshman, it reminded me why I was so happy, on returning to school this year that I could finally wash my hands of that stigma, make new friends, find a new scene, and move on.
I made a lot of very poor, very public choices my freshman year. I won’t go into the details (this post is already TMI) except to say that my RC felt obliged at several parties to tell me that a) there were people in the room and/or b) was I sure I was okay.
Quite simply, I wasn’t okay.
This campus, especially the socials, didn’t feel like a safe place for me to be. I don’t need to describe the feeling, do I? We all remember that casual ass-tap from a stranger and the unknown genitalia approaching you, faceless in the dark of a social suite, as if that was a totally normal way to introduce oneself. I could have avoided the socials all together and holed up in my room on weekends or, better yet, found an alternative social scene. But I was a freshman, and my friends wanted to go to the socials so I went too.
So there I was, stuck navigating my wobbly way down that steep hill from frosh quad to the socials. I was scared. I hated those nights and so… I sort of made a show out of them. And then I got a rep.
The first person to call me a slut at Amherst was a girl. I was in the line for the salad bar. I was wearing one of those wrap dresses and, yeah, it was low-cut. I knew that. That’s what made it sexy. “Sweetie, I don’t know if I would be wearing that if I were you. Especially considering what a slut you were last night.”
I had never seen this girl before, much less spoken to her. I was speechless, silenced and condemned.
Eventually, I discovered a group of senior boys who were nerdy. I figured that even though they were kind of lame, (I mean one of the boys really had a shelf of his room devoted to Magic the Gathering. And he had met his girlfriend on OKCupid when he was 19…) at least they were seniors. And they were safer than trying not to get assaulted in Stone. The nerdy seniors lived in Weiland, so I started to spend my weekends there. Which was almost better.
The fact is, though, that freshman are the lowest hanging fruit, still as skinny as they looked graduating high school and still a hint of tan from their summers in Europe.
It doesn’t really matter how you cut it, senior boys and freshman girls weren’t a good scene, in the same way that freshman girls and socials weren’t a good scene. Freshman girls, in general, just aren’t a good scene. We were shoved into heels impossible for these hills, not to mention that they made our feet bleed. We wore dresses so tight that we always felt too fat for them, so low that we spun around those sticky rooms, grazing those grasping hands and always, our sixth sense trained downwards, making sure that we hadn’t spilled out of our tops, hadn’t exposed ourselves. Checking, adjusting, always.
And then there was Val. No one ever seemed to remember that some of us came to this campus as virgins. I did. I wasn’t ready for being in this constantly hyper-sexualized environment. So when I saw a guy that I had made out with on the dance floor the night before, I couldn’t deal. It made me sick. I sat slutside.
Returning to campus this year, I took my rightful place at the other side of the table. The senior boys were gone and I made new friends, many of whom, incidentally, hadn’t been on campus the year before. No one I hung out with seemed to actively recall the horror that was freshman year. No one really cared anymore. Yes, there are still occasional awkward glance in Val, but they aren’t so mortifying, and they weren’t so frequent.
The weekend before last I attended Night of A Thousand Beers in Weiland. It was messy. I felt like a freshman. On Sunday morning, I regressed to my seat of shame, full of not only the embarrassment of slut-seating and running into the wrong people, but also disappointed in the elliptical nature of my behavior.
This time wasn’t the same though. Okay so I made some minor infractions on the social code at Weiland, maybe I hooked up with a rando (or two?) but… It’s 2012 now and I don’t do this every weekend anymore; I’m older now and Slut Walk happened. People poured into the streets of major cities in all around America to protest victim-blaming in sexual assault cases specifically, but more broadly to take a stand against the way women are held to a double standard: that we are simultaneously required to be sexual and then ridiculed for it. It’s okay to be a sexually explorative, experimental, sometimes kind of crazy if that’s what I want out of a night.
The morning after a stupid night out, I have just as much of a right to sit facing out, being open and social, as anyone else. That word is mine now. Just like the wonderful women of Slutwalk, I want to reclaim my seat.
Fuck slutside. Fuck my ex-sort-of-boyfriend and the girls in the salad bar line and on the [fill in the blank]X team. After all, it’s just breakfast.
xoxo featurecreature
PS If you think you know who I am, you’re wrong. If you think Im the only one who feels this way, then try to actually make it to the Women of Amherst show next year. I do not represent the views of every writer for she-bomb, or every woman at Amherst, but I do know that I am not entirely alone in the experiences and thoughts expressed herein.
4 Comments on “Slutside”
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It’s nice to hear that other people on campus feel the same complicated, confusing, sometimes shaming, sometimes totally-okay-with-it emotions that I feel whenever I see or think about that person I used to hook up with or that guy I /think/ is the guy I hooked up at my first freshman socials party. I know that a lot of women on campus share similar feelings, but it’s easy for me to forget that. The Women of Amherst show this year was incredible and has made me lean more towards the “totally-okay-with-it” feeling for the time being, but those other shaming thoughts still creep up more often than I’d like. Thank you for sharing your story and for reminding yourself, me, and I’m sure many others that we have the right to enjoy ourselves and to be proud of enjoying ourselves.
I also experienced the senior-boys scene and found it to be way above my head at the time. When I was a freshman I was all about how “mature” I was to be hanging out with older guys, but in reality I hadn’t been on campus long enough to survey the scene, or to get to know who these men really were. I wasn’t actually mature enough to defend myself against slutspeak or to stick up for myself when lines were crossed. Its particularly difficult for me to be an outsider to these relationships now between freshman girls and senior boys now, because all I want to do is scream run run run! But I suppose not everyone is as immature as I was.
I totally agree. Thanks for writing this.
People should be free to choose whether they want to experiment and hook up. And it goes the other way, too–you seem to have had a good experience, but as a freshman I went to a few frat parties just because all my friends wanted to. I had a terrible time. After I was groped by some bastard who literally ran away into the crowd before I could punch him the face, I never went back to a frat party again. And yet I didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone until sophomore year that I “didn’t like” frat parties–because that would have just labeled me as a killjoy and a prude.
And now we’re back to the old slut-prude paradox. I wish we could just learn to accept women for whatever they want to do, whether they’re into casual sex or serious dating.
And I empathize with your discomfort as a freshman with the hookup scene. I’d take it one step further. Getting touched without your permission–whether it’s having someone start grinding on you out of the blue or rape–is sadly the norm at places like frat parties. Women should be free to have as much sex as they want, but even more importantly, they should be free to do it without having to constantly guard themselves against sexual harassment and violence. Which is again, why I support SlutWalk.
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