As slut told

I am 20, for the past year I have been in an on-again, off-again sexual relationship with a grad student at my university who is six years my senior; let's call him X. Most recently, X and I have been on-again, and he is going to graduate from his program in a few weeks. X told me he didn't want anything exclusive, so I have been with several other guys at the same time I have been with him. The problem is, X doesn't want to have sex again.

Leora Tanenbaum wants you to stop using the word "slut. Her latest book, I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet , is a deep dive into how online culture and social media have reshaped the landscape for girls and young women. Young women today, she says, are more likely than ever to be called "sluts," and to live in the gray zone of wanting to be sexy but being punished if they're seen as too slutty. And all of that is exacerbated in an environment where there's always a cellphone camera on hand, and harassment can be conducted anonymously online. Tanenbaum talked to Cosmopolitan.

Women who have slept with 10 men have been called sluts. Women who have slept with one man have been called sluts. Women who have never had sex have been called sluts.

In , two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students. The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college. On top of asking the students about GPAs and friend groups, the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.