My paternal grandmother, on her deathbed, felt she must ask my father one question: Was he a communist? He was a socialist, world federalist and cooperative communitarian but not a communist so he told her 'no.' She died relieved, he reports. This story generally was used in my family to illustrate the poisonous depth of anticommunism in the U.S., and how it affected even my grandmother, who grew up in murderously poor circumstances (she was the only child in her Irish immigrant family who survived past the age of 2.)
Your mother's cry of parental anguish seems rational to me given the prevailing atmosphere. Her son would be unemployable and, somewhat equivalently in terms of survival and comfort, her daughters unmarriagable. (I'm assuming that if, to her, screwing around in highschool made you a 'whore,' she thought that would be a negative in the marriage department.) How could she have anticipated that the family wage would be abolished as she anguished, along with the now-forgotten phrase 'premarital sex'? Not much progress on the blacklist, alas.
Miles writes:
>J's on to something here: there's also "cocksucker" as an epithet for
>men. We don't express contempt for men by talking about the number of
>sexual partners they have; the big insult is--doing what gay men or het
>women do!
It's enough to simply to designate men female. Girls, girly, buncha women, pussies. The 'slut' designation functions (where it does function) to prevent women from leaving men. If you sleep with more than one, you're a slut. So once you sleep with him, you're stuck with him, or you're risking the slut designation. Convenient for him--he has mobility, you don't. Of course, if you don't sleep with him, you're a prude. Is there a male equivalent for prude?
The only male equivalent for slut I can think of is the outdated 'rake'--which was condemnatory. But it condemns for misused power, not misspent chastity, which as Mary Wollstonecraft points out in the course of demolishing the idea, had become woman's ONLY moral coin.
Jenny Brown