'Slut' at the bottom of the insult barrel

I have never liked the word slut. To me, the word slut is at the bottom of the insult barrel and throwing it up is symptomatic of a worse case of word vomit than any of the standard curses that spread the nation like wildfire. It is a word that cuts, that hurts and is used to hurt. It has no nice connotations and is never funny. But, we still use it all the time, as if it were on a par with words like player. The girls we don’t like are automatically sluts and whores and we laugh and think it’s all a funny joke that we are all mature enough to get. So, what about all the young kids that have taken these words from their adult world and thrust them face first into the playgrounds where they recite these horrible word s that they don’t understand?

Last week, I was walking home when I saw three girls that were little over ten years old. They were all hunched over a mobile phone and were giggling and laughing into the handset, mumbling the same thing over and over again. At first, I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but then I realised that they were repeating the words, ‘you’re a dirty slut with STI’s.’ My sharp intake of breath was unexpected, even to me, and the girls, on hearing it, ran off in guilt. I don’t think it was a guilt caused by using the contemptible word though. Getting caught insulting a classmate late at night was the guilt factor in this equation, but I don’t think they even stopped to consider what they were saying and what it meant. These big, horrible, adult words had somehow permeated their innocent world and they didn’t even flinch. It meant nothing.

In Ireland, cursing is like breathing. There is an expletive in practically every sentence and we use cursing as a form of explanation, expression and humour. We actually love to curse; it helps to emphasise the good bits and the bad bits. If it’s not f***ing deadly, it’s f***ing desperate and it’s a rotten c*** that would disagree. We have found ways around it if social decorum doesn’t allow for our usual slips of tongue; for milder circumstances, we have feck at least. It’s become part of our language and it’s not exactly something we can give up overnight. But these words have crossed over to the dark side by entering the world of children. And I mean, really crossed over. Since when do girls in primary school call their friends sluts, cunts and whore? Only last night, my sister, in a strop, called me a stupid whore. She is fourteen.

To a country so accustomed to bad language, this might not seem like a big deal. But when you have eight and nine year olds calling one another sluts, you are taking the mean girls mantra back ten years and dropping it into a realm where it can cause actually damage. Being called a slut when it’s actually true is one thing, but when children take to using it in their arguments, it soon becomes a normal working word that they can use as a weapon to hurt their friends. And soon, little boys that overhear this, will grow up to be big boys and think it’s fine to call their 15 year old girlfriend a whore for not texting him back. We, by laughing this off, are cultivating an atmosphere of hate and anger, which these kids will have to pay for in their tears, just because they learned, off us big mature adults, words that they didn’t understand but used anyway.

By Jennifer Bannon