JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>
>
> 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?
It goes back a long ways. Students in the Ancient Lit class I taught for several decades would latch on to the fact that there was no indicationin the Odyssey that Penelope had anything to complain about inOdysseus sleeping with various goddesses. But Telmachus hangs the maidservants who had slept with the suitors. There is an odd wrinkle in the Odyssey (and in the Iliad) which can be argued about endlessly by anthroplogists, classicists, etc. Helen, though certainly by the usual standards, a Whore, is sacrosanct. And there is also evidence in some of the statements in the Odyssey that Penelope's waiting for Odysseus was NOT the customary and proper thing. She should have remarried.* Later legend/myth (and Euripides based a play on this version) had it that Helen never went to Troy; that a phantom Helen was in Troy while the real Helen spent the war years in Egypt. But that version is not in the Odyssey, and Helen is treated _very_ well in the poem.
Carrol