Her walk is loose, as if her joint sockets have been recently greased, her lipstick looks as if it wants to be on someone else's body. When she stands, it's too close. She does not so much sit as straddle. Her panties, if she has them, can often be found in a ball at the bottom of her purse, stuck to her Binaca blaster. And she's got at least one tattoo -- or stretch mark, depending on age -- on a part of her body that you've got every chance of unearthing before the sun rises over the parking lot.

This woman is a slut. Trampus americanus.

I know this woman because week in, week out, I field half a dozen requests to make men -- grown men! upstanding men! -- over in her image. Indeed if worse came to worst, I could probably float my entire dungeon career on the basis of this fantasy alone. The scourge of most women, the secret darling of men, you will find that wherever people are hung up on their own sexual impulses, the cult of the slut is alive and well and giving out blow jobs in the backrooms and dungeons of Anytown, USA, the hang-up capital of the universe.

But before we go any further, let's define our terms. I'm not talking about prostitutes here -- women, and men, who will suck and fuck for money -- though it's true that a certain hard-core slut faction is not averse to leasing out the pussy if it means getting a warm place to sleep from time to time. But we'll get to that later. For now, suffice it to say that if your workplace is called "the track" and there are no horses around, you, my dear, are a prostitute.

My Webster's defines slut as 1) a slovenly, dirty woman; a slattern, 2) a woman of loose morals, 3) a prostitute. In Webster's view, the word itself is a judgment. Slut is a slur.

But I think that if we were to be totally honest with ourselves, the word slut, in everyday parlance, carries more than just a whiff of jealousy. A so-called nice girl is quick to deem another woman a slut if that other woman is diverting her man's sexual attention away from her. To the nice girl, the slut is playing fast and loose -- two words commonly associated with sluthood, of course -- with her own sexual power, something the nice girl has been taught never to do.

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk