Several weeks after Miley Cyrus’s infamous Video Music Award (VMA) performance, the Internet is still abuzz. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t call her performance well done. In fact, I would happily bleach it from my memory along with “Grease 2” and most of seventh grade.

Yet the constant flinging of words we’ve heard to describe Cyrus (like “slut”) only serve to highlight the glaring double standard we seem to have developed as a society. For example, even in the sea of criticism of Cyrus’s performance, there’s one part that seems to have stayed relatively safe from the wrath of the Internet: Robin Thicke. From the dancing and clothing to the foam finger, the entirety of the VMA performance mirrored the “Blurred Lines” music video.

From a feminist point of view, I have a problem with this. For one thing, the song is called “Blurred Lines,” and there are lines like “I know you want it / But you’re a good girl.” The entire story is about how the object of his affection never says she “wants it,” but he’s gonna go ahead and give it to her anyway in a predatory fashion.

Thicke and his posse take on very predatory roles in their treatment of the women in the video, whose voices are never even heard in the song.

All of this is rape culture: the extremely prevalent attitude in our culture that normalizes and excuses sexual violence. Slut shaming, the control society tries to place over sexuality through shaming people for it, is probably the most popular face of rape culture in our daily lives.

During trials last year for a rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, CNN Anchor Poppy Harlow lamented how hard it was to see “two young men that had such promising futures, star football players…[watch] their lives [fall] apart”, after they were convicted of rape.

This is not an issue confined to celebrities and the news, however. Here at South, I hear “slut” and similar insults flung around on a daily basis.

I recognize the benefits that come with freely using the word “slut.” It desensitizes us to the behavior that gets someone labeled as one. That’s what SlutWalks, a protest march for victim blaming and slut-shaming, do when they gather people to reclaim the word and reclaim their right to safety regardless of how they choose to express themselves.

While I personally am a huge fan of the message of safety and acceptance SlutWalks spread, I am not a fan of the word “slut” itself. We’re using it as a way to police each other’s sexuality, something that we can all agree is no one’s business. In many schools, dress codes are implemented to save boys from distraction, which only serves to worsen the divide.

If we really want to create a world of equal acceptance, we need to respect femininity as a whole, “sluts” and all. While few people still believe that women are intellectually inferior, it’s so deeply ingrained that it’s simply evolving into different forms of prejudice like slut-shaming. Just listen to yourself talk about other people for a day; you might be surprised at what you hear.