#sluttygirlfears is the hashtag tackling women’s sex taboos

When was the last time you had a completely honest and open conversation about sex with the person you're currently fucking? Or even your best mates? It's hard right? And especially as a woman, revealing any kinks – like wanting to be spanked, or enjoying anal, or even the fact that you like sleeping with more than one person at a time – immediately becomes laced in age-old prudish ideas about sex, plus your own conceptions of feminism.

This is why I'm quite into a new viral hashtag coined by British sex and relationships blogger Oloni, #SluttyGirlFears. It's usually hard for me to engage with Twitter trends, but this hashtag, started on Thursday, spoke to a lot of the young women on my timeline, and certainly to myself.

“I wanted women to have the conversation, so they could see that a lot of our sexual situations are very relatable,” Oloni tells me. “#SluttyGirlFears is about reclaiming the word 'slut' or 'hoe' and allowing people to see that we don't give a fuck anymore. We like sex and perhaps maybe more than men. It's weird, because we're still being lead to believe that women are incapable of being extremely sexually active with kinks and fetishes, which is a lie. The hashtag shows you that.”

It's true. A recent study, published in August, found that it was an outdated stereotype that men are more into sex than women, with almost 60 per cent of women wanting more sex than their male partners. My first thought when I saw the hashtag was that while it was perfectly acceptable for boys to talk about sex and wanking while I was growing up, it's only been in recent years my female friends have started doing the same; sharing tips on vibrators and discussing how penetrative sex doesn't always make us orgasm.

There is such a sense of shame embedded into being a woman who is even open to talking about sex, let alone having a lot of it regularly, or with lots of people, that it doesn't surprise me that it's taken years for these conversations amongst my friends to happen. And, as it turns out, I think more of us have kinks and fetishes than don't – at least in my close friendship group. Another study from 2013 found that in America more than 50 per cent of people had not discussed any sexual topics with their dating partners – and 25 per cent hadn't discussed with their best friends. People really do struggle.

So it was refreshing that this week, women – mainly black and British, as they make up the majority of Oloni's following – started sharing their experiences of “wanting to have sex during the first encounter but not wanting him to think you're easy”, “when you just start talking to him but you already trying to see how thick and long his dick is” and “when you like to be choked to the point of near death but you don't want to die”. It's been jokes.

But the trajectory of the hashtag has been an interesting one to watch from another perspective. As Oloni says, “It's ironic because the fear aspect had been eliminated the monent women openly began discussing their ‘slut girl fears’”. It was such an instant and easy way to reclaim that fearfulness of being deemed a “slut” and to highlight the discrepancy between the way men and women get to behave in the bedroom without being judged. It's a conversation we've had before, but we all know that to this day a man could go about his life boning left right and centre without anyone thinking much of it. But he'll be the first to turn on a woman who does the same.

What made the hashtag meta was when other women chimed in with the fact that they wanted to get involved with the hashtag but felt they couldn't because they didn't want to be judged as a “slut”. One user wrote: “wen u wanna like/rt half of the tweets but u dont want ur mutuals to kno u a freak so u just gotta agree to them in silence” and another, “Watching all the relatable tweets go by in silence because you can’t retweet them but they accurate asf”. 

Even for women who, for legit reasons, couldn't post about their own experiences, the hashtag was able to be used to express their frustration with the current era of sexuality we're living in. As Oloni says: “I really enjoyed seeing women take full ownership of the hashtag and use it however they felt like. We are now in an age where women are becoming less and less afraid to be seen as ‘less of a woman’ because of their natural urges. We are stepping into our more confident selves and being all the way open about it, as we should be able to.”