It is always fascinating to look at the words society uses to police sexuality, because they almost never started out that way. Today, the word slut carries an immense amount of weight and is often weaponised to shame people - usually women - for how they choose to navigate their own desire. But if you rewind the clock a few hundred years, the original meaning had absolutely nothing to do with who you were taking to bed.
The term first popped up in Middle English around the early 1400s as slutte. Back then, it was simply an insult for someone who was a bit of a mess. It meant a dirty or untidy person. It was intensely classed and gendered right from the start, mostly aimed at working-class women and kitchen maids who were seen as having low standards of cleanliness. If you did a bad job sweeping and left a layer of dust on the floorboards, people literally referred to that dust as sluts wool. If you didn't knead your bread properly, the hard, unbaked lumps left in the dough were called sluts pennies.
For centuries, the insult stayed firmly tied to domestic chores. Samuel Pepys even used it affectionately in his 1660s diary to describe his incredibly hardworking maid. But the underlying idea of a woman being messy with her housekeeping gradually began to morph into the idea of a woman being messy with her morals.
The real shift into the sexually charged slur we know today happened surprisingly recently. It wasn't until the mid-20th century - right around the time the contraceptive pill arrived and the sexual revolution kicked off in the 1960s - that the definition fully hardened into meaning a woman who enjoys sex to a degree society considers excessive. As soon as women gained the biological tools to explore intimacy without the fear of pregnancy, the culture suddenly needed a new linguistic tool to keep everyone in check. The word shifted from policing domestic labour to policing our bodies.
The modern turn came when people started questioning why enjoying sex or dressing a certain way was treated as something to hide in the first place.
In 2011, a Toronto police officer casually told a university class that women should avoid dressing like sluts if they wanted to keep themselves safe. The response was immediate. Within weeks, thousands of people took to the streets for the first SlutWalk, protesting the idea that a person's clothing or sexual history could ever make them responsible for someone else’s behaviour.
What started as a protest against victim blaming quickly turned into a broader cultural reclamation. Over the last decade, writers, activists, and sex-positive communities have systematically disarmed the word by taking ownership of it.
It is a brilliant reminder that words only hold the power we agree to give them, and knowing the history makes it a whole lot easier to take the sting out of the label.
