Recently, in an interview with The Guardian, Pheobe Waller Bridge(creator of Fleabag) and all round woman god, said, "Being proper and sweet and nice and pleasing is a fucking nightmare. It’s exhausting. As women, we get the message about how to be a good girl – how to be a good, pretty girl – from such an early age. Then, at the same time, we’re told that well-behaved girls won’t change the world or ever make a splash. So it’s sort of like, well, what the fuck am I supposed to be? I’m supposed to be a really polite revolutionary?”

This is not the only dichotomy women face: we're supposed to be present, earth-mothers practising attachment parenting but also working and 'having it all'. We're supposed to be sexual and beautiful and pretty, but hey, don't sleep with too many men while you're there because that makes you a slut. On the other hand, we're supposed to be "a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.' Ok, so these may be old-fashioned ideas but they've paved the way for some serious weaponry when it comes to waging psychological warfare on women.

The word 'slut' is a perfect example. Widely agreed to be coined by Shakespeare (hey Will, you could have just left it at 'If music be the food of love...') the word has become the perfect poisoned arrow fired into the heart of every woman's dignity and freedom of choice. There's no debate over what the word means: it's an abusive term of judgement fired at women dependent entirely on their sexual activity and choices.

In 2011, there was a movement in Canada and America opposing a Toronto policeman's comment that women should try not to dress like 'sluts' to avoid rape and victimisation (please excuse me while I burn all my, "I fancy being raped" outfits). Up sprung a number of marches or, 'Slutwalks' as they were called in an attempt to 'reclaim' the word. Their thought process was that, just as the gay community have reclaimed 'queer', they could to reclaim 'slut' and take the sting out of it.

While I understand the approach, here's the problem. There are no sluts. The LGBQT comunity have reclaimed the term and many people identify with it. Queer people exist. I can't imagine a world in which anyone can identify as a 'slut' because what does it even mean?

In it's original iteration, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it referred to 'a woman of low standards of cleanliness'. Until her death, my grandmother would use the word slut but she would be referring to a woman who hadn't gotten around to Spring Cleaning on time (according to my Grandmother's calendar). Now though, the Oxford Dictionary has updated it's currently meaning as, 'A woman who has many casual sexual partners.'

But does it mean that? Really? I've had many casual sexual partners and I'm lucky - I've never been called a slut for it but I've also been sexually assaulted. Funny, isn't it, that when I've been referred to as 'slutty' or a 'slut' was in reference to the one time I was assaulted by a man and not to the many, many times I chose to sleep with one? Of course, in a court of law they'd use those many, many consensual choices against me and maybe they wouldn't use the word 'slut' but we all know they'd be thinking it. It'll be no surprise to anyone who's been sexually assaulted that I didn't press charges. Following the attack, I didn't worry about my own physical health or focus on the crime this man had committed. I hid myself away, convinced 'they' were right: I was a slut and it was my fault.

"Suggesting that our previous sexual adventures...are related to any sexual attack is like suggesting that performing lots of DIY means you deserve to get a hammer in the head while being robbed."

So to my daughters I say this: "Have sex with whoever, how many, whenever and where. Do it with love and/or fun in your heart. Trust yourself and your instincts. Know you are in control. Do it because youwant to. There is no magic number. There is your number." If, heaven forbid, she ever encounters a man who attacks her sexually, she will know and will be told that it is entirely unrelated to the sexual choices she has made previously and it certainly wasn't related to her outfit of choice. Suggesting that our previous sexual adventures (and darling, they willbe adventures) are related to any sexual attack is like suggesting that performing lots of DIY means you deserve to get a hammer in the head while being robbed.

The Oxford Dictionary is wrong. 'Slut' isn't about how many sexual partners a woman has chosen to have, it's a bullet in the patriarchal gun fired when necessary to keep a woman in her place. How many is too many? According to who? Do men get to have more sex than women? Why? At what point does someone slip from being sexually confident to sexually slutty? There's no reason for the word to exist at all because to allow it breathing space only allows the sexual domination of women to continue and that'swhat is unacceptable.

Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian