INTRODUCTION
Let’s Get Nasty
“Mommy?” A little girl looked up at her mother, eyes burning with deep, six-year-old contemplation. “Am I a nasty woman? Mommy, am I nasty? What does nasty mean?” She was probably five or six, had a head full of dark hair, and was wearing a purple dress with mismatched socks.
It was mid-election season. You know, before the world went to shit and a literal self-proclaimed sexual predator slithered into the White House like a slug.
The bb must have seen it on CNN, NBC, or (please, God, no) Fox News or something. Kids are chill as fuck these days. They watch the news. They know what’s what. (A twelve-year-old I babysat once used the word lit and had his own Instagram.) The word nasty had, by mid-2016, unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) infiltrated the mainstream. The kids wanted to know what the fuck was up. (Sidenote: Me, too, kiddo. Me, too.)
The little girl’s mother knelt down to face her, brushing a stray piece of hair from her forehead. They both wore mismatched socks. The definition of #GOALS. I stopped scrolling through my own meme-tastic Instagram feed, suddenly anxious to hear the mother’s response. Lady, what are you going to tell this girl-child about Nasty? I gots to know. The f train is comin’.
Her mother squeezed her hand and said, “It means we’re doing things better than the men. It means we’re getting stuff done.”
The train arrived, and the two were whisked away in a sea of bodies. I’d later see this exact scene immortalized in an internet meme. Well, not the same mother and daughter—that would be fucking wild—but a very similar cartoon mother and daughter on one of those ’50s-looking meme-ads. All good things become memes. I guess a lot of nasty women were explaining their nastiness to their young and impressionable children during the late summer of 2016. This all happened when there was still a lot of hope in the world. HRC was slaying, and women everywhere were starting to feel like the glass ceiling was inches away from being obliterated and the Patriarchy wasn’t the ginormous clusterfuck we all know it to be.
As I stepped onto the train, service to social media lost (thanks, tunnel system), I had to ask myself, What is a nasty woman? What is it really? Like, what are we even trying to convey here, y’all? We can’t fully identify what it means to be a nasty woman in the modern world without knowing what it means.
The definition of nasty is “highly unpleasant or nauseating.” It means “gross, disgusting, or vile.” You definitely don’t want to put something nasty in your mouth (unless you do, which in that case, do your thing, fucker). Nasty means “bad.” It means “straight-up shitty.”
Isn’t it delightful that the word would be used to describe a powerful woman running for the highest office in the land? How quaint, right? How charming.
Nasty has taken on a new meaning in our cultural lexicon. It is entirely feminized. It’s a word used by men to describe women who aren’t quietly abiding by the status quo. It’s used to label any woman who dares to open her fucking mouth and have an opinion. It describes those women who are owning their power, their fierceness, and their sexuality. It’s for women who give zero fucks about what you think and all the fucks about their own fucking. It’s a negative word that is utilized by the Patriarchy to bring down women who are making shit happen. And it won’t work. Why? Because we own that word. We may have “lost” the election, but I hate to break it to you, White Twitter, we are still fucking here.
I’m sure as hell a nasty bitch. You tend to get grouped with the nasty women when you write about blow jobs, vaginas/vulvas, and orgasms for a living. When you’re a woman with an eggplant emoji as part of her Instagram bio, when you’re a woman who speaks up about sex, shit gets real.
What I do is considered tacky, gross, and tasteless. Society does not like that I write about the taboo. Society is not a fan of sexual openness. Society is fucking scared of a sexually open woman. And society is not just out and about in the churches, steeples, and streets. Society is online and in HD.
You know what I’m talking about here, Mama. Being a woman on the internet puts you on the shitlist of every troll out in the ether. You know the drill: You tweet your opinion about, I don’t know, doing laundry or the weather or your mom’s new cat, Carl’s Jr., and then some random dude with no avatar photo calls you a dirty feminazi whore. We’re constantly subjected to harassment, threats, and emotional distress. The way the internet writes about women in general is abhorrent. 4chan, Twitter, and Reddit subthreads have transformed the World Wide Web into a garbage fire. Not that this hasn’t been happening forever. People have been spewing endless streams of verbal diarrhea since the dawn of the internet. Shout-out to AOL chat rooms (but also not, because that shit was hell). The internet is a constant deluge of insults and vitriol; a hot, steaming shitpile of every self-indulgent piece of buttcrust who believes they were wrongly deprived of a chance to speak their minds. It’s not a fun place. No one will help you. No one gives a fuck. You have to develop a thick skin to hack it. You have got to be nasty.
If you’re nasty, this book is for you. If you’re not nasty but are thinking, Hey, maybe I could be, I don’t know, this book is also for you. You are a sexual woman, but you’re even more than that. You’re a complete, incredible, and whole human being. Your sexual empowerment does not define you; it just adds to your forceful spirit. You like to fuck, but you also like to work. You like to get some and get paid. You like to run your mouth and run fuckboys out of town. Only you can define yourself. You just need the tools to learn how to make that shit happen.
This book is a guide to taking your power back. It’s for women who love sex and want that sex to be a source of strength. It’s your antidote to the misogyny you’ve experienced for your entire life (some of which you probably aren’t even aware of). It’s the manual to understanding your worth and accepting that your sexual history has no bearing on your quality as a human. You are a shining beacon of strength. If you are comfortable with who you are and aren’t afraid of that awesomeness, you can be whoever the fuck you want to be. No one can stop you, and no one can scare you into submission. You’ll be able to advocate and fight for yourself in every facet of your life—whether it be your job, relationships, friendships, hookups, or a random interaction at the local corner store with some shitbag who tells you to “smile.”
This book is for horny, badass sluts who want a raise, a raise right to the fucking top. Maybe with a dildo in hand. No judgment, Ma.
The lessons within these pages will teach you how to give yourself an orgasm and recover from an alcohol-induced shame spiral; how to tell a creepy douchebag to fuck off and how to fully explore fetishes like a dom-queen-slut-princess. You’ll be able to explain the ins and outs of sex toys and cope with heartbreak if and when it comes. We’re the future leaders of the world through our collective, insanely rad nastiness.
We have got to be like that phenomenal mother-daughter duo on the train. We’ve got to take back our lives and kick a bunch of ass so we can teach our daughters (and our sons) to do the same.
We’ve got this fire lit under our asses. We’ve got to make shit happen. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we’ve got to do this shit ourselves. Let’s get nasty.
Copyright © 2019 by Garrison Grace Engle
