Even as I try to avoid the dreaded senior spring waves of self-reflection, no period of my college life has stood out to me more than my self-proclaimed slut era. The online discourse surrounding “slut eras” highlights their intentionality: the choice to lean into an aura of sluttiness and an influx of casual sex. My own slut era began, as many do, after a breakup. Coming back from winter break and the end of my high-school-turned-long-distance relationship, my exploration of the borders of singleness would define my sophomore spring semester. I embraced my first foray into fun, meaningless sex head-on. There were a host of characters: a Swedish MBA student, a man in Ithaca for a conference, a guy visiting his friend at Cornell, two sons of professors, a boy who came over an hour after my Covid quarantine ended and my Perfect Match.
A notes app list from that semester reminds me of some of their quirks: I outsourced memories to my phone instead of the loops of my overthinking brain. This is the point of a slut era, I think — to take what you need and move on. The hookups are stories for a rainy day, remnants of another time.
Some of my slut era sex was bad, and some was great. Most fell somewhere in the middle. The quality of the sex didn’t define the era, however. What did was the way that my sexual spontaneity bled into my everyday posture. I felt more fun, more at ease and more confident. It’s hard to tell whether that was because I felt like I was accomplishing some classic college trope or if the slut-era mindset was shifting my whole mental state.
My friends can attest to the frequency with which I describe things as “silly.” And no point of my life has been as silly as my slut era. In my current era, the levity of silliness is conspicuously missing. Silliness is easy to find in sex and meaningless hookups, and harder to find elsewhere. I’m trying harder to be silly without the slut reclamation.
I don’t want to give the slut era too much power, and I push away the fond memories I associate with it. Now firmly in a committed girlfriend era, I resent the twinges of longing I feel for the slut era, none of which has to do with the sex itself. This longing, I have realized, is about changing the structure of my everyday life. Spontaneity is not my strong suit, but I was good at spontaneous sex. I miss the thrilling possibility of the unknown made simple through Tinder. Being intimate with a total stranger was a test of my ability to have fun with the unknown; it was about throwing spaghetti at the wall, my full self at another person, and seeing what happened. My notes app descriptions don’t describe the sex but rather the personalities, hair colors and defining memories of these slut era figures.
A slut era is a powerful, but potentially misleading mindset. Online culture makes entering an era a predefined epoch rather than one created from the expansive purview of hindsight. When we are historians of our own lives, we don’t need hindsight to create eras but fashion them as we go. Announcing the beginning of a slut era was announcing my intention to try out a new version of myself. When I miss this time, I miss how easy it was for every week to include the possibility of meeting a person with whom I could effortlessly collide and easily cast away.
In the chapter of my life’s autobiography on my slut era, there will be no portraits of the men whose beds I graced and who gained the privilege to enter mine. Instead, there will be photos of me, headphones on, walking home from a hookup and feeling the stability of spontaneity, the assuredness of the awkward hookup, and the ultimate silliness of the slut era.
Whorat is a student at Cornell University. Her fortnightly column Cowgirl Chronicles is a discussion and exploration of sexual norms and cultural quirks with a dash of feminist theory.
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