Recently, I was called a slut by someone I was once very close with and in that moment, every ounce of respect I had for that person flew out the window.

As a sexually active single college student who dresses for her body and has a high self-esteem, it wasn’t the first time I’d been called a slut. Women like myself have been infuriating men for generations. It was the first time, however, that I’d heard it and rather than provoke sadness and anger it provoked thought.

While I pondered over the question of why some feel the need to demean a person based on the number of sexual experiences they’ve had, I dredged deeper into the way that four letter word made me feel.

It became clear that the problem existed within the person who had spoken that word to me, not within myself. However, that word wasn’t thrown on virgin ears (pun intended). I’d heard it before and became desensitized to the feeling it gave me in my gut.

For women everywhere, that feeling is all too real.

First comes self-doubt. Am I a slut? What does that even mean? How do I express myself sexually without being called a slut? Should I hide the fact that I am sexually confident? Is having safe, consensual sex wrong because I’m a girl?

Second comes the sinking feeling that perhaps, the number of partners I’ve been with has diminished my worth. Am I less valuable to people because of the number of people I’ve been intimate with? Is the value of my being, held in my virginity? Should I just buy a vibrator and stay to myself?

Third comes the long-term effects — decreased self-esteem, increased self-doubt, decreased sex drive, and reeling thoughts.

I began to think deeper into my actions and began to wonder if they were influenced by the word slut.

Is that why I resist when new partners initiate intimacy? Is that why I think so hard about who I sleep with? Is that why I contemplate the role of sex in my relationships so intensely?

But the thing is, after thinking through all these feelings they began to fade into the back of my mind because that word only has power over me if I let it. While the effects of shaming women for sex are authentic, the strength to overcome that destructive rhetoric is also very real.

It breeds intolerance and silence on a subject that should be talked about. Rape culture feeds off words like slut, whore, and tramp. Silencing women who speak out about their own sexual experiences encourages men to be aggressive toward sexually confident women and expands the idea that women shouldn’t derive pleasure from intimacy.

Women greater than me have said the same thing before and they will after, but slut-shaming has no place in progressive society. It not only diminishes the self-esteem of people who literally bring other people into the world, but it creates a devastating effect on the nature of women’s sexual culture.

In a community where sexual silence has had lasting effects, one can only hope that by allowing women to speak openly about what happens in the bedroom, the power of this word can slowly break apart and fade into the past.