There were many aspects of parenting that surprised me but the time my kid started asking about sluts was the most confronting.

It was in middle school, early on, when during one of our frequent father-daughter coffee house hangouts she asked: What’s a slut? What does it mean to be one? Am I one?

And because I always believe in answering all her questions with info about the world rather than just saying “You’re right,” or “They’re bad,” I did some research. The result is the story of how does a lady become a slut:

The word itself is over 600 years old. It’s first appearance in text is in Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. It was used to describe anyone who was being messy, sloppy and slovenly. Chaucer’s use was applied to a man in the passage “Why is thy lord so sluttish.” It was to bring into question the character of that man since he’d allowed himself to get dirty.

Shortly after that it became about women. It still had nothing to do with sex but rather with the fact that women were the ones who cleaned and maintained households and tackled the dirt of that chore. As their work involved keeping the sloppiness at bay it was common to call them the kitchen sluts. There was even a name for bread that hadn’t been properly kneaded by the women in kitchens, they were referred to as sluts pennies.

For a while it was a term of endearment to young girls who got messy, like a boy being a scamp it wasn’t improper to say a girl was a slut if she’d messed about.

Sex came into the picture with industrialization. Men started leaving to go to cities for work in machine shops, families were split up, there was less opportunities to work in kitchens and prostitution became the only viable space to be a part of that migration from farms to cities for women who weren’t married or well-off.

So if someone calls you a slut, I’d say ask them if they know the story of the women who have cared, cleaned and followed the paths of change.

Sluts are the unsung heroes of history and deserve to be spoken about with respect.

But, you can imagine, this was a lot to explain to a young teen. If life was a movie it would end here with this speech of female empowerment, me and my daughter would high five and probably sing into our hairbrushes and a montage signifying that all shame had been conquered would play us off into the credits.

But that’s a fairytale and if I wasn’t going to give her one why would I write one for you, dear reader?

So here’s the unfolding truth several years after this coffee shop story: she still fears the implications of that word and it being assigned to her. She’s aware of the social norms but simultaneously judges them. She’s been exposed to fear and worry but somewhere in there she carries the question, “Is there more to this story?”

We haven’t changed the world but we have created an ongoing dialogue—a dialogue where there is space for a father and daughter to talk openly about sexuality. To know that it isn’t something she needs to avoid in order to be my little girl, that although she will always be one, she will also become an autonomous woman navigating the complex paths of desire, attraction and social belonging.

It is my chosen duty as well as honor to be her support, source of information and a reminder of her worth on this life journey.

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Relephant:

Tina Fey’s prayer for her Daughter.

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Author: Orin J. Hahn

Editor: Katarina Tavčar

Photo: Spirit-Fire/Flickr