When he called me a frigid slut, I nearly laughed.
I nearly laughed because, as insults went, this was a weak blow. Frigid and a slut? How does that work? The phrase carried so much venom and yet made so little sense – like a King Cobra with a low IQ. Menacing, but not particularly effective.
“What are we talking about here?” I wanted to ask him. “An asexual jezebel? A temptress who prefers just to cuddle?”
I’d been out with this guy on a few dates during our first term at university. I was young. I’d never had a proper boyfriend. I didn’t know what I wanted. We’d gone through the motions with long country walks and cinema trips (irony of ironies: we saw Dr. Strangelove). Soon enough I realised that we weren’t right for each other.
When I told him that I just wanted to be friends, I’d naively expected a response of cheery resignation or possibly – and here I flatter myself – agonised sorrow. Instead I was met with a torrent of anger.
“You just love leading people on,” he declared, speaking with the confidence of a trained psychoanalyst diagnosing a patient. “You love leading people on like the frigid slut you are.”
I wish I could tell you, reader, that I’d actually laughed at his oxymoronic insult. But this was me aged 19, and back then I was very susceptible to the idea of my own wickedness. I didn’t have the self-awareness, or the life experience needed, to trust my sense of morality. If someone told me I was a frigid slut, I guessed they were probably right.
So, instead of laughing, I apologised – partially to console him and partially to wipe clean my own conscience – and said that I’d never wanted to hurt him. At this he scoffed, leering more than smiling. “How could you hurt me? It’s not like I’m in love with you!”
No. It wasn’t like that at all. Love was never really the point with this guy. Or with any of the people like him, who came in their droves over the next few years. The point was disappointment and possession. Probably attraction. But never love.
Throughout university, from 2018 to 2022, I heard this same accusation levelled at me and other women: that we were leading men on. Leading men on by going on dates. Leading men on by being friendly to them. Leading men on by spending time with them. Leading men on by daring to exist. I’ve been called evil, manipulative, desperate, ugly, a jealous little virgin – all by men that I didn’t want to sleep with. Disappointingly, no one’s ever gone for harlot or succubus – but I’m still young and there’s always time.
As a matter of fact, I don’t get my kicks out of breaking men’s hearts. And as far as I know, nor do most women (N.B. Britney Spears does not speak for most women). To be honest, unless a man is very rich or well connected, I can’t really see the point of stringing him along. I’m not sadistic. I don’t like watching people get hurt. And I’m not so egotistical that I need the whole world to fall in love with me – if I was, I’d try harder with my makeup.
Actually, I find the whole dating business quite stressful. From early on at university, I knew what it was like to be in love (during my first year, I’d fallen hard and unrequitedly for my best friend). But feelings tend to creep up on me. They can appear after weeks or months of indifference. And so, short of ringing up my favourite clairvoyant phone line or consulting my horoscope, I have no way to tell whether a good first date will lead to long-term romance. Unless I’m dating somebody I’m already crazy about – and I could count on one finger the number of times that’s happened – I can’t promise that my feelings will develop. Can anyone?
Three years after the ‘frigid slut’ comment, I was asked out by someone I’d met a few weeks earlier. We got on very well. He was a warm person, with a good sense of humour and a rare tolerance for my marmite personality. After he asked me out, I told him that I did really like him but I didn’t know how I felt romantically. I said that I wanted to see where things went. He said that he felt the same way.
A few weeks later, when no romantic feelings emerged, I decided to call it quits on our trial run. We’d never slept together, never even kissed. Our mutual agreement had always been this: that neither of us was sure how we felt. We were going to see how things went. But when I said that I’d prefer to stay friends, he accused me of messing him around. He told me I was a liar. He told me I’d manipulated him. He told me that his mother had warned him against me. “Girls without a father can’t be trusted,” she’d said. “They’re just trying to fill up the gap.”
Well OK then.
But the story didn’t end with this man and his mother. Overnight, a large male contingent from our college stopped speaking to me. People I barely knew began to glare at me on the street. One guy even unfriended me on Facebook, which would have been the ultimate insult if we were… like… thirteen.
I can understand a person being hurt and angry at romantic rejection. What I experienced was far more toxic than one individual’s spite. This was a group of men who collectively decided that I was a tease, based on one side of a complicated story – despite the fact that I had always been honest with my friend, despite the fact that the exact point of dating is to work out how you feel about a person.
This was the same group of (adult…) men who created hot-or-not lists about the female students in our year group. This was the same group of men who cheated on their girlfriends and happily flirted their hearts out. Yet, I was the one with a scarlet letter branded across my reputation.
Throughout all of this, I felt alone. But in the couple of years since I finished my masters, speaking with other women and reading about similar situations has helped me realise that my experiences were far from unique. Despite their overt egalitarianism, UK universities are still blighted by an unequal dating culture. Instead of improving as history moves on, the problem is set to get worse, with the younger generation becoming more sceptical of feminism and resentful towards women’s liberation.
Earlier in 2024, a study by King’s College London revealed that 26% of men aged 16-29 think it’s harder to be a man today than a woman, compared to just 17% of men over 60. Women have the right to work, don’t they? And the right to vote? So what else could they possibly want? Against the backdrop of Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson (the latter of whom gave a talk at my university in 2022), an unnerving number of young men believe that we no longer need feminism.
But looking at my experiences at university, I have to disagree. Misogynistic young men are still judging women by completely different standards from themselves – standards which reflect male possessiveness and entitlement. It goes without saying that there are lots of fair-minded men out there. And I don’t wish to claim that no woman has ever led someone on, or lied, or cheated, or ghosted, or whatever.
But why should men be able to go on dates and take women on test runs without accountability, and not the other way round? Men allow themselves to date. They allow themselves to have “friends who are girls”. They allow themselves to see where a relationship might go. They allow themselves to get women’s hopes up and then turn them down. Meanwhile, women have to shoulder the brunt of guilt for unrequited love.
So, what do these guys expect us gals to do? State explicitly to every man we meet, whether or not we’re planning to fall in love with him? Join a nunnery? Even then, they’d probably say we were playing “hard to get”.
Female students, at the start of their adult lives, shouldn’t be villainised for going on dates or having male friends. My time at university was tainted by the feelings of guilt and social isolation that come from tease-shaming – exactly how the men involved wanted me to feel. But young women deserve so much better.
