The Return of the Slut

Yummy and slummy mummies move over.  Tiger mothers retract your claws.  It's time for the return of the slut. 

The cover of my copy -
tomoto-stained and disintegrating
with loving use.

The first cookery book I bought myself was Erin Pizzey's The Slut's Cookbook.  I mainly bought it because I am unable to resist books with line drawings.  Soon I was rolling around my undergraduate bedroom floor laughing, as I took in the principles of a life wholly different to any I had ever imagined for myself.  I still find it astonishing that the founder of the first women's refuge should also be the author of such a wickedly hilarious hymn to hedonism. 

Unfortunately Erin Pizzey is furiously opposed to feminism.  I'm not very surprised as she must have had a rough ride with earnest bra-burners in the early days, although forty years later many advanced feminists are starting to develop ideas she was banging out back then.  Nowadays, we might call The Slut's Cookbook post-feminist, although clearly anything as practical as starting a refuge for women experiencing domestic violence doesn't fit in that category. 

Erin Pizzey tells us she wrote the book in a fit of rage as she realised she would never live up to the ideal of good cook and housewife.  She prefers to "get perverse pleasure out of expending very little energy for an awful lot of praise.  If you are the sort of woman who needs callouses on your knees from scrubbing the floor, or beads of sweat on your brow from kneading dough, put this book down." 

A slut is a much maligned human being.  It is usually quite wrong to assume that a slut is promiscuous - nothing is further from the truth.  A slut is always in control of every situation she is in.  She therefore only involves herself in relationships of her own choice.  It is, alas, her poor sister the 'slag' who has given the slut a bad name.  Both in her kitchen and in her bedroom the slut calmly goes about her business of avoiding any taint of coercion from any source other than her own innate creativity.  Within every woman there is a slut dying to get out.  But our bondage is such - thanks to television, advertising and our need to compete with each other - that few women are prepared to take a stand.  Sluts of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose except your Valium.

(In spite of echoing his Workers of the world unite!, Pizzey is no Marxist, more of a champagne socialist and Bravissima-wearing feminist.) 

For Pizzey, the main point of inviting your friends round to dinner is that they and you should have a great time, not that you should be able to prove in some super-masochistic way what a perfect Stepford wife you are.  As she comments, "I never make any sauce that I can buy in a packet."  That doesn't mean she doesn't get her hands deep in and work hard at her life.  She loves food and cooking, reminiscing nostalgically about a Spanish holiday preparing meals from delicious local ingredients on a suitcase.  But she refuses to waste time doing her cooking and cleaning in line with someone-else's ideal home.  She is a girl who just wants to have fun. 

What I also like about sluttiness, is that it doesn't indisolubly link your feminine and domestic identity with motherhood.  I aspired to the full enjoyment of life as a slut when I was an undergrad, I aspire to it as a Mum, and instead of feeling that the best of my life is over when (if!) the Piglet leaves home, by then I might even finally make the slut grade.