One of the great constants of the human condition is that women complain. If there is a heaven, we can count on women to complain about the accommodations, for it would not be heaven to them if they could not do so. Men must learn, therefore, not to take female complaints too seriously, nor treat them as evidence that women really have it all that hard. Far more important is the content of their complaints. For example, many wives complain that their husbands do not pay enough attention to them. Properly understood, this is evidence that things are in order: we want women to be wishing for more time with their husbands. If they start complaining that they would prefer the company of some other man instead—then we should start to worry.

Women’s complaints constantly change as society evolves, but they will cease only when human life on earth itself ceases. Some scribe ought to keep track of women’s ever-evolving complaints as possible raw material for the historians and philosophers of the future; a kind of cultural time-capsule, as it were.

In recent years I have been made aware of a female complaint unknown to the world of my youth and (I am inclined to think) to any previous period of recorded history. It is directed against men who engage in “slut-shaming.” The idea is that women have every right to be sluts if they please and must not be subjected to criticism or made to feel embarrassed on that account. It is a remarkable testimony to the age in which we live that women have now taken up this particular complaint, and the present essay is my attempt to analyze the phenomenon and learn what it has to teach us.

I will begin by going back four centuries to the Spain of the siglo de oro and its greatest literary monument, Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Readers of this famous tale will remember the character Maritornes, an ugly slut who works in the kitchen of an inn where the hero and his faithful companion Sancho Panza stop. At first glance, she would seem an object of pity to the reader. Extremely ill-favored by nature, she is the sort of girl people shake their heads over thinking “what a shame—what man will ever marry the poor thing?”

But closer inspection reveals that such pity would be unwarranted. Maritornes in fact has an extremely active love life, far more than most of us ever will. She has achieved this remarkable feat by the simple expedient of throwing herself at every vigorous young stable hand or peasant lad who walks through the door of the inn. Her bed has become the chief center of sport and recreation for the entire province. Every art of Venus is regularly practiced there. Through sheer pluck and determination, the girl has managed to procure for herself a copiousness and variety of sexual experience that the handsomest Don Juan in the Kingdom of Spain could only regard with stupefaction and envy.

As the reader may already have grasped, this enterprising young woman’s achievement in acquiring such a vast horde of lovers is funny. The author is inviting us to laugh at the circumstance that an unsightly scullery wench at a nondescript inn in rural Spain enjoys a more active and rewarding sex life than an oriental despot with an enormous and elaborately guarded haram. And this remarkable accomplishment obviously bears some relation to her being a woman.

Of course, another interpretation of the character would be possible. My regular readers know the frequency with which I recur to the inadequacies, as I see it, of the American conservative press in its attempts to understand and critique the sexual revolution. It is not difficult for me to imagine an American conservative pundit reading Cervantes’ novel, coming upon the story of Maritornes, and (instead of laughing) becoming indignant—not at her, of course, but at the vicious, lust-crazed stable hands who prey upon her innocence. Is it not obvious to these deeply immoral young men that they are simply ruining the poor girl, rendering her unmarriageable, and thus condemning her to a life of shame and regret? Obviously, what is needed in this situation is a robust law providing draconian punishments suitable to the magnitude of the crimes being committed by all these horny young peasant boys at the expense of poor Maritornes!

This interpretation, too, relies heavily on Maritornes being a woman, and thus presumably desirous of the security that only marriage to a man of good character can provide, a man such as everyone writing for the conservative press feels certain he himself is. It is only the failure of all these stable-hands to be such sterling moral characters that has led to the tragic downfall of Maritornes. For according to this interpretation, her story is a tragedy—rather than a comedy.

I should make clear that I am not objecting in any way to the high ideals and deep moral sense of responsibility that inspires such commentators. I merely wish to suggest that they might be a bit deficient in the sense of humor Cervantes presumes in his readers. No doubt it is wrong of all those stable hands to avail themselves of the girl’s excessively welcoming nature. But Maritornes is a volunteer, not a victim. As a practical matter, it might be more useful to urge her to place some slight check upon her own amorous and generous disposition than to try to talk every sexually desperate young stable hand in Spain into practicing monkish celibacy.

Most conservative commentators on the sexual revolution belong to an eternal human type popularly known as the “White Knight.” The White Knight is sure that all women are inherently virtuous, whereas men are disgusting, lust-addled pigs—with the curious exception of the White Knight himself. He sees it as his mission, therefore, to protect the good, innocent women from all those bad men. How fortunate the world’s women are that God in his providence has provided them with a tiny number of male advocates and protectors such as the White Knight!

And the White Knight simply hates to hear any woman called a “slut.” He disapproves of the very word. Instead, his pet term is “predator,” a word he uses constantly to refer to that overwhelming majority of his own sex who fail to be as good and virtuous as himself. Every other man, you see, seeks to use women for mere pleasure—only to abandon them along with their bastard children. The world simply needs more White Knights with plenary powers and shotguns for use against male predators and the protection of innocent, honorable women such as Maritornes.

But, of course, Maritornes is in reality neither innocent nor honorable. She is a slut, a term which—far from being a meaningless insult—has a definite denotation, viz., a woman who engages in multiple short-term amorous adventures with a variety of men, normally without any money changing hands (for there is a separate term applied to women who engage in sluttish behavior for payment). Sluttery has traditionally been regarded as socially harmful because of its incompatibility with marriage and family life. Spain was, of course, a Christian nation. Its sexual ideal was universal lifelong monogamy with an exception only for that minority of men and women who have a special calling to celibacy. Sluttish behavior in women moves society farther from this ideal, and that explains why and how the term “slut” (or its Spanish equivalent) became an insult.

Today, however, women are telling us that they no longer wish to be “slut-shamed.” In other words, they are indignant over being called sluts regardless of how accurately their behavior meets the word’s definition. How seriously should men take this complaint? Must we really recognize a “right” of every woman to behave like Cervantes’ Maritornes? Would this lead to happier marriages, stronger and more loving family bonds, or better cared-for children? Would it, in the long run, even increase the happiness or well-being of the sluts themselves?

It should also be observed that shaming sluts is no easy thing to do, their comparative imperviousness to shame being precisely one of their defining characteristics. Maritornes could never have achieved the success she did with such a broad variety of peasant lads unless she was fairly insensitive to appeals to behave with appropriate feminine modesty.

By the way, many languages—German, for example—do not distinguish between shame and modesty, employing a single word for both. In English usage, shame is an emotional reaction to being discovered guilty of some socially disapproved behavior, whereas modesty is the disposition to avoid such behavior. “Slut shaming” is society’s effort to persuade sluts to behave more modestly and avoid disreputable behavior. Such shaming has always been less effective than might be desired even before women took to complaining about it. The best answer to contemporary women’s objections to slut-shaming would be that if they comported themselves with greater decency, they would not have called forth such social shaming in the first place. But that would require them to put some kind of bridle upon their lusts, something much of contemporary Western womanhood is simply unwilling to do. They will accept nothing less than the right to do exactly as they please with no interference from anyone trying to persuade them to greater self-control. It is men and men alone who are responsible for the harmful consequences of female sluttery through their own failure to practice perfect chastity—just as White Knights have always said. Women’s adroitness at shifting responsibility for their own behavior onto men is matched only by the White Knight’s eagerness to allow them to do so.

As noted above, there are also women who engage in sluttish behavior not out of lust but for financial compensation. Today, such women also have plenty of complaints about the hardness of their lot in life. They admonish us that “sex work is work”—i.e., real work, rather than all fun and games. And no doubt there is some truth to this. Posing under a bunch of Klieg lights while getting your ass drilled by some fellow you hardly know is probably not the pleasantest way of earning one’s living. I personally would not want to do it. But how seriously should we take the complaints of porn whores that their honest and diligent labors in front of the camera are not being repaid with sufficient public respect and esteem? Do they really expect to be honored by society on a par with faithful wives who have raised ten children? Apparently, many of them now do.

These women have White Knights defending them as well, for whom they are merely innocent, naïve girls lured into a life of shame by male pornographers in order to satisfy criminal male lusts. I recently read a comment on the internet about women “getting sucked” into the world of porn like inert pieces of flotsam. No, sir. In pornography it is the men who get sucked—often into a serious addiction—and the women who do the sucking. The motive for their career choice, obviously, is the easy money it offers.

Now the gallant male defenders of whores have devised the new crime of “sex trafficking.” All the contemporary whore has to do to avoid being held responsible for her own actions is to claim she has been “trafficked.” So, of course, this is what all of them have learned to say: they did not decide to become whores, it was men who made whores of them by “trafficking” them.

One difficulty with this interpretation is the emergence of websites such as OnlyFans where women can act as their own freelance pornographers, requiring no male assistance to upload smutty videos of themselves for the titillation of lonely men who pay them for the sterile pleasure of being teased. Some of these young, female entrepreneurs apparently make quite a good living at it. But we must not criticize them for this, because “sex work is work.”

How did sluts and whores become so common in American society? It all began back in the late 1960s with a female complaint. This complaint, which can be heard from time to time even today, concerned what the ladies called a “double standard”, namely, that women who engage in many sexual encounters are unfairly maligned as “sluts” whereas men who do the very same thing are admired as “studs.”

But a woman fornicating with many men and a man fornicating with many women are not, in fact, doing the same thing. The two behaviors would be equivalent only if women and men were interchangeable, which they are not. Biology puts the female in the stronger sexual position, since eggs are a scarcer commodity than sperm. It is, therefore, easy for a woman to find mates, as Maritornes’ success—despite her meagre natural endowments—so vividly demonstrates. Finding mates is much harder for men, so a man who succeeds in mating with many women has overcome a natural difficulty. From a purely biological rather than a moral point of view, seducing many women is something of an achievement, and can be managed only by exceptionally attractive men, whether their attractiveness be due to looks or social status. Of course, this achievement also results in abandoned women and fatherless children, so it is not morally admirable at all, and no sane society approves or even tolerates such behavior from its men. Only women themselves could be foolish enough to admire “studs.”

Nevertheless, ever since the sexual revolution, women have been trying desperately to become the female equivalent of studs. They have only succeeded in becoming sluts whom even Maritornes would blush to associate with. Perhaps shaming is the appropriate response to shameful behavior.

The latest female complaint is that men are not “stepping up” to ply them with wedding rings, a circumstance which just might have something to do with their own sluttish behavior (along with a well-justified fear of divorce). It is almost as if women are returning to the complaint that they do not get to spend enough time with their husbands—except that now the husbands have never come into existence in the first place.

The sexual revolution began in female promiscuity and it will end in male chastity. Eventually, every woman in America will be a whore, but none will be able to land a customer. Remember: you heard it here first.

https://counter-currents.com/2025/07/on-sluts-shame-and-slut-shaming