Whore.

I used that word liberally until people starting calling me that. And they’ve used it on me a lot.

I was able to train myself to treat it like any other word, like it wasn’t dripping with spite. Now it no longer affects me, though there was a point in time during which I could have named every single person who had ever used that word on me.

Only women have called me a whore.

Whores aren’t raised. There was nothing that my mother, who was unwavering in her aspiration that my hymen would remain intact until my wedding night, did that made me approach sex so callously. When I was a child, I hated being needlessly touched – poking, tickling, even hugs – and I know that my mother found some solace in that, hoping that it would hold over into my adolescence and adulthood.

It did; I still hate to be needlessly touched, except that my definition has grown from tickling and hugs to include cuddling, be it pre-, post- or non-coital.

Sex has a purpose, so the only touching that I could tolerate was in order to obtain sex. You could say that it was the only poking that I’d deal with.

Whores can have decidedly unwhorelike beginnings. Like me – kind of. I lost my virginity when I was 18 to my first boyfriend, two weeks before I left home for freshman year orientation. It was fast, unremarkable and sadly funny in retrospect. “Barbie Girl” was playing in the background and the song lasted longer than the sex. It was in the back seat of the car that he borrowed from his uncle. Oh, and even better – the holder of my virginity was someone that I was dating for the summer. He returned to the Midwest the day after and I was relieved.

From the start, sex was never about being in love or expressing love. I never had a boyfriend in high school because everyone (including me) just hooked up. Yet in hooking up, I got hurt a lot. My feelings were always inconvenient, were never returned and ultimately became a burden.

But after the first sex, I was dangerous. Because for the first time, I felt like I was impervious to developing feelings for anyone and therefore able to keep myself from feeling any sort of pain. There would be no sense of rejection or longing or heartache if I was emotion-less.

Whores don’t exactly realize that they’re being whores. I developed an interesting reputation during the first few months of school. Because I was four hours away from my hometown, I knew that I was free of any preconceived notions about who I was or who I was supposed to be – which allowed me to finally express myself in ways that I couldn’t in high school.

I was virtually invisible in high school and in college, there was nowhere for me or what I never realized was my overt sexuality to hide. I flirted with everyone, boys, professors, sometimes even girls. Because I was unaware of it, I thought that I could feign innocence, but once I was attuned to it, I knew that I was trouble.

Since those days, people have always told me that they admired me. That they wished that they could let themselves be more like me because I didn’t live my life ‘safely’. A friend said that she actually wondered what it was like to have my sex life. The girls who weren’t calling me a whore (to my face at least) told me with wide-eyed awe that I had sex “like a man.” I still don’t know what that even means.

Maybe because I had conquests; because I unapologetically broke hearts; because I answered to no one.

These girls watched me approach sex and treat other people’s feelings with such recklessness and impulsivity and seemed to believe that my sex was the fun everyone should be having. Sometimes as I was doing whatever I did, or even before, I’d wonder what the hell I was doing to myself. But afterward, I always knew that what I did, what I’d always done, was act on impulse. I knew who and what I wanted, albeit fleetingly, and there was no pretense – I took it because I could. I took it because it was mine to have.

So once the word whore lost its painful edge, I actually didn’t care that it got hurtled at me a few too many times. I wasn’t sleeping with their boyfriends; I wasn’t sleeping with their exes; I wasn’t sleeping with their brothers. I just made no secret that I was doing exactly what I wanted.

What did bother me: If I was having the ‘fun’ to be experienced by all, why was I the only one having it? I became pretty tired of letting people learn from my mistakes; I wanted to watch them make mistakes and learn from theirs instead.

But I’m not one to let other people live while I hold back and observe.

So maybe I have sex like a man.

Would you call me a whore for that?

I don’t care.