As my fiftieth birthday looms, I feel myself finally growing into my lifelong fogey-dom, and it’s a comfortable fit, for me if not for anyone else. At my last cubicle farm job, one of the other girls made the mistake of asking me brightly if I ever watched Sex and the City.

“Those women are whores!” I heard myself bellow. I don’t work there, or anywhere, anymore, and we’re all so much happier for it. But even in my home office, the Internet ensures there’s no respite from “SlutWalks” and “slut-shaming” and all the other eruptions of Slut Liberation or whatever it is.

The young women who’ve embraced this “movement” can be forgiven somewhat for wanting to take their nubile, horny bodies for a spin or ten while they can. If I looked like Miley Cyrus, I’m not sure I could refrain from flaunting myself on national TV, either.

James E. Miller of Canada’s Ludwig von Mises Institute, however, was unimpressed by her “performance.”

“Slut-shaming now, slut-shaming tomorrow, slut-shaming forever,” Miller proclaimed in an article that stirred up the libertarian community (or whatever the proper collective noun is for a bunch of rugged individualists).

Miller decisively denounces sluttiness and all its pomps and works. That he’s probably about half my age gives me hope for the future.

Which reminds me”€”I was lucky in one other respect: By the time Madonna arrived on the scene, my female musical idols had already established a beachhead in my teenage brain. None of them”€”Siouxsie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Patti Smith”€”felt obligated to prance about semi-naked. Suzi Quatro’s tight jumpsuits now look almost comically chaste. The Slits accomplished the astonishing feat of posing topless and covered in mud on their first album cover and still throwing off all the sex appeal of roadkill.

These days, even the plain punky girls like P!nk jump around in their underwear. Cosmopolitan is sleazier than ever and has spawned countless imitators. Ditto Sex and the City.

And sluttiness pays, or appears to, if you”€™re a young woman watching Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton transform sex tapes into multi-million-dollar empires.

Plus I suspect today’s Catholic girls receive even fewer lessons in common sense, let alone chastity, than I did.

So I doubt they”€™ll heed an old broad like me, or even a young man like Miller. To (sort of) quote Aquinas:

To one who was a slut, no explanation is necessary. To one who is a slut, no explanation is possible.