The word of the day is shouldn't be "promiscuity"

Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog says

Promiscuity is one of those words I'd happily wipe from the dictionary: its existence says more about social encoding of the idea that only 'bad' girls like sex than it does about anything else.

She said it here.

That sounds about right, doesn't it? The word "promiscuity" is rarely applied to men or boys and it's almost never applied to heterosexual men. Which, women being, like, the same species as men and therefore naturally inclined to the same spectrum of behaviors, seems a little like... denial or something.

And while we're talking about promiscuity and boys... oh wait... I should say... while we *would* be talking about promiscuity and boys *if* we had an adequate vocabulary to discuss it with, we might examine something that peeves Amber Being Amber Rhea mightily

The “make [girls --fl] do something they aren’t ready for” thing. Rootie wrote about it in passing, in a very touching post about her son’s 16th birthday. That bit stood out at me, though, as it always had; because from the time I was old enough to recognize myself as a sexual being, it always annoyed the shit out of me. And my annoyance only grew stronger as I got into my later teen years. Because, I was ready for that elusive “something.” And I was so frustrated at how girls were always cast as not being ready, and being pressured by boys who didn’t give a shit about their feelings; and boys were always cast as being ready at the drop of a hat, girls’ feelings be damned. There was nowhere that I fit in that script. The idea of a girl having active desires of her own, having agency, pursuing things she wanted, and - gasp! - at the same time being capable of recognizing others as people with feelings and desires of their own, was apparently beyond the pale. (Or, of course, girls were sluts. That was the other option. But again, it was all about them “letting” the boys “do things to them.” No agency. Always passive.)

She said it here.

So there you go. Boys who pressure girls can't be promiscuous... but girls who "give in" to those boys *are!*

And meanwhile, as Amber also mentions, when it comes to sex boys *can't* be pressured into anything they're not ready for, not pressured by girls (as if Christina Ricci and Elija Wood's basement scene in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm could happen only in fiction) and certainly not pressured by other boys...

... because if any of that was possible we'd have to give up our precious delusion that not only are men and women not the same species but from Mars and Venus (i.e. they're not even from the same *planets!*)

Anyway, the point being that since "promiscuity" almost certainly *doesn't* mean what most people seem to think it means, the word of the day (any day) should *not* be promiscuity.