I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (18 page)

Zeilinger sums up the anxieties of girls who automatically regard their peers as adversaries:

W
ho is this person, this perfect teenage girl? Well, she’s beautiful . . . but approachable. She’s thin but not “scary” thin. She’s funny but not funnier than guys, who all adore her. She doesn’t let people walk all over her, but she’s not strong-willed or opinionated. She’s smart, but she’s not a brainiac or a geek—and if she is, her other qualities (like beauty and willingness to party) must be pretty excellent to overcome that severe pitfall. . . . We’re all competing to be a person who doesn’t have deep, meaningful life experiences. . . . We’re competing to play her, to perform the role, because, really, nobody is that perfect girl.
¹¹³

Notice all the “buts” in Zeilinger’s description of the “perfect teenage girl.” She is this but not that, that but not this. She has to be extraordinary without being threatening to other girls. This description is reminiscent of the definition of a “good slut”—a female who is sexual but not too much so. No wonder there’s so much competition to embody this girl: no one even really knows what she’s supposed to look like.

Since performing femininity requires some measure of competition, many girls and young women possess a desire to make other females jealous. Social media enable them to get the job done. Georgiana, the doctoral student, remarks that “there’s this passive-aggressive behavior where people post pictures with the intent of making other people jealous. And look, I’ve certainly done it too. You read about all these great things your friends are doing, or you find out that they just got into a good college or graduate school, and you think, ‘Everything is going better for them; what am I doing with my life?’” She admits that when she’s hanging out with friends,
“and I know that there’s a girl who maybe should have been invited and wasn’t, and I’m glad she wasn’t invited and I want to make her feel bad, I will post a picture of us with the intent of hurting her.”

But doesn’t posting photos vindictively make Georgiana look like a vindictive person? “No, it doesn’t, actually,” she replies. “I can always deny it. Twitter and Facebook are really good for this sort of thing. It’s so easy to make other people jealous, and from my observation it’s girls who are doing this. You would think that it stops after high school, but it doesn’t. In my graduate program, some of the girls are twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, and they do it all the time. They deliberately post things to hurt other people.”

Immature online competitiveness spills over onto real-world interactions. Sharon, the twenty-year-old who was slut-bashed within the community of differently abled students at her high school, was on her high school’s volleyball team. In her sophomore year, she was about to start the game with a serve. “I was really focused and I was a decent server, and there was dead silence because it was the very start of the game,” she tells me dramatically. “And a mom stood up and screamed, ‘Number seventeen is a fucking slut!’ I lost my focus and I lost the serve.”

“Did she call you a slut because she could tell, or she knew, about your disabilities?” I aked Sharon.

“I doubt it. I don’t think she knew anything about me, and at that point there was no way to discern that I was differently abled. My best guess as to why she did that is that it was a competitive game. She wanted her daughter’s team to win, so why not make the girls on the other team feel bad? She
didn’t know who I was; she just knew that I was on the other team and she could see my last name and the number seventeen from my jersey. I couldn’t believe that an adult would do that.” When reciprocal slut-shaming is normalized—even to the point at which parents are taking part in it—it’s a short step toward harassment and bullying.

Reciprocal slut-shaming boils down to the fact that young females get the quickest and the most validation from sexual attention—not from grades, sports, community service, leadership roles, or participation in the arts. Sexual attention, for many girls and young women, trumps all of those achievements. As a result, they compete with each other on the field of sexuality. “A lot of girls don’t like it when another girl gets sexual attention because it makes them feel worse about themselves because that’s what they value for themselves,” fifteen-year-old Stephanie explains. “They value the way they look and the way that boys feel about them. So the way they can make themselves feel better about not having guys want to have sex with them is by saying that the girls who are getting the sexual attention are doing something wrong. There’s a group of girls in my school that are very pretty, and the other girls say they’re sluts and that the only reason the junior and senior boys like them is because they will give it to anyone.”

The young woman who says “Hey, slut” is doing the only thing a young woman can actively do to potentially elevate herself when she’s being sexually monitored, sexually policed, and sexually rated in comparison with her peers every moment of every day. But this behavior wreaks havoc not only on oneself and on one’s friends but on every female within
one’s social milieu, including those in the generation to follow. Twenty-one-year-old Erica tells me that on Facebook, she used to regularly write comments such as “What’s up, bitch? What’s up, slut?” She also began to refer to herself as a bitch and a slut. To Erica, there was nothing wrong with doing this. But one day her mother saw her Facebook and scolded her, saying, “You shouldn’t call yourself that.” Erica told her that it was OK because it was just with her girlfriends.

B
ut during my senior year, my feelings changed. The little sister of my boyfriend, who was in the seventh grade, asked one of her friends who went to my school if she knew me. And the other girl, who was also in seventh grade and didn’t know me at all, said, “Oh yeah, she’s one of the sluts of the school.” I felt bad that I was projecting this image to younger girls who didn’t know me. This girl had an image of a slut that looked like me! That’s when I started to think, “What image was I projecting?”

CHAPTER 5

“Good Slut” Containment Strategies

You want to be known as a “good slut” so that you can be socially relevant, but you don’t want to actually hook up or have sex. You want to be sexual and asexual simultaneously. Or maybe you do want to hook up or have sex. Regardless of what you actually want, you’re terrified that you will get a reputation as a “bad slut,” the kind who gets slut-bashed. What do you do?

One strategy, as we’ve seen, is reciprocal slut-shaming. Calling another female a slut in a pseudofriendly way, with the expectation of being called a slut in return in an amicable manner, is a survival strategy. But it’s a big risk. The outcome may be positive; it may be negative. Reciprocal slut-shaming backfires frequently, and a girl could end up labeled a “bad slut.”

Therefore, to prove they’re not prudes but also not “bad sluts,” to be sexual but not “too sexual,” girls and young women turn to additional strategies:

•     Wearing sexy clothes—tight leggings, bras revealed intentionally, supershort skirts and shorts.

•     Sending guys they barely know sexually suggestive texts, photos, and videos.

•     Hooking up with a guy, but only after getting wasted and being unable to control their behavior, which shows everyone that they’re not
really
hooking up—they’re not
that
kind of slut.

These are containment strategies—attempts to be sexually assertive while also establishing a threshold of how far one is willing to go sexually. Essentially, they are methods of exerting limited agency. These strategies nearly always fail. As with reciprocal slut-shaming, they are far riskier and fragile than young women realize.

To many adults, these behaviors indicate something gone horribly wrong. Depending on one’s point of view, an adolescent girl who uses her phone to take a photo of her breasts and then hits the Send button, or a young woman who gets drunk at a frat party and then goes back to some guy’s dorm room, is the product of bad parenting, a “pornified” world, feminism gone amok, stupidity, or a diseased “raunch culture.”

It’s true that something
is
horribly wrong. But hand-wringing, clucking, and lecturing girls to behave “appropriately” or “modestly” is as ineffective as a “Do Not Track” app. Even suggesting, as the American Psychological Association
Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls did in 2007, that “we need to replace [the plethora of] sexualized images [in television, music videos, music lyrics, magazines, movies, video games, and the Internet] with ones showing girls in positive settings—ones that show the uniqueness and competence of girls,” is laughably naive.
¹¹⁴
If only the solution were so simple. The problem isn’t that girls and young women have never learned how to dress without showing off their bodies, and it’s not that they are simply mimicking media images of hypersexual females. Rather, they are making deliberate, careful decisions in an attempt to shape how others perceive them. The real problem is that they don’t realize that they can’t control how others perceive them: what to them appears to be self-evidently slutty in a “good” way is read as slutty in a “bad” way by others. Moreover, many believe that if they pretend they don’t really care about their sexuality, even while they clearly are exhibiting their sexual allure, they won’t face any consequences.

To add another layer of complexity, many young females also believe that presenting themselves as overtly sexual is necessary for their feminist empowerment. But if they are showing off their sexual selves to prove a point about where they stand on the prude-slut scale, how much power do they really have? It’s true that one of feminism’s central goals is sexual empowerment, but this can be achieved only within a context of sexual equality. Within the culture of slut-shaming and the sexual double standard, sexual equality does not exist and young females’ efforts to subvert the system are turned against them.

If we want to guide young females to avoid sexualizing
themselves in situations when sexualization may be inappropriate or even dangerous, we have to understand why these females make the choices they do. We need to recognize that to many young females, these behaviors
make sense
. These behaviors are
understandable
. When femininity is equated with sexuality, when women have come to believe that looking sexy is what females do best, when being sexually attractive holds the promise of validation, when females are tracked, monitored, and judged, then looking and acting “hot” while protesting that looking and acting “hot” wasn’t really their intention is
rational behavior
.

For example, one way that young women trick themselves into believing that they have their peers’ permission to act “slutty” is to attend slut-related theme parties. Many students at college campuses have long held “Pimps and Hos” parties in which guests are expected to dress up as either a pimp or a slut and to role-play at the event. Like Halloween, it’s an opportunity to dress in costume and perform, in this case as a “bad slut” with the authorization of one’s peers. Donna Freitas, the author of
The End of Sex
, has compiled an impressive list of spin-off theme parties with names such as “CEOs and Their Secretary Hos”; “Dirty Doctors and Naughty Nurses”; “Maids and Millionaires”; “Golf Pros and Tennis Hos”; and “Sex [short for Secretaries] and Execs.”
¹¹⁵
College students who regularly attended theme parties told Freitas that “they provided the only ‘legitimate’ opportunity for women to dress in revealing or sexy attire. There was a clear desire among many women students to dress in a certain manner that, outside of the ‘safety’ of a themed event, would garner them a permanent reputation as a ‘whore’ or ‘slut.’”
¹¹⁶
If you’re a female attending
a “Pimps and Hos” party,
of course
you’re going to dress up and hook up with random guys—that’s the whole point! So no one can blame you for being a “bad slut” when all you’re doing is fulfilling the raison d’être of the party.

If you’re always at risk of being labeled a “bad slut” no matter what you do sexually, even if you’ve never done anything sexual at all, why
not
sexualize yourself? You come to believe that you have nothing to lose. With this mind-set, many young females adopt several strategies to control their image as sexy but not slutty. As we will see, there are limits to their agency; the line between “sexy” and “slutty” is razor-thin; and their reputation often spins out of their control.

Strategy #1: Wear Sexy Clothes

If you walk by a club, bar, or trendy restaurant, you will likely see clusters of young women tottering in stilettos as they tug at shorts that could be mistaken for underwear. When those of us who came of age in the 1970s or 1980s wore something skimpy or outré in our youth, we imagined ourselves to be daring and scandalous, and we tended to reserve those outfits for special occasions. Young females today, however, wear revealing clothes far more often than we ever did, and many claim that their outfits are not sexualized in the least. We may respond to them, then, with disbelief. We wonder: Don’t young females today recognize that if they sexualize themselves, particularly in nonsexual contexts such as school, others will regard them as sexual objects? Are they
intentionally
courting disaster? Are they really so clueless?

“It used to be that empowered sexuality was about your subjectivity—how you feel,” Amanda Marcotte, the feminist blogger, tells me. “But now it’s about being an object—how you appear to others. You have to present yourself as a sexy virgin.” Marcotte observes that this shift from feeling sexy to presenting oneself as sexy occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of the teen star Britney Spears. “The record executives behind Britney Spears had the stroke of genius of having her grind around in a schoolgirl uniform that was half undone while advertising her virginity. This marketing ploy worked because of a preexisting fantasy of ‘defiling’ an innocent virgin.”