I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (2 page)

I resolved to find other girls and women who had been similarly harassed in this manner. During the mid-1990s, I sought out and interviewed fifty girls and women, ages fourteen to sixty-six, Latina, black, and white, from twelve different states, who had been labeled “sluts” or “hos” while they were in school. Working as a freelance journalist, I wrote a series of articles for
Ms.
,
Seventeen
, and other magazines on the subject of slut-bashing. I then expanded my research and wrote
Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
, based on personal testimonies from the girls and women I had interviewed.

The book’s main point was that any adolescent girl, even if she had zero sexual experience, could become a target for being labeled a slut or ho. In
Slut!
, I described four groups of girls who were most at risk: early developers and others perceived to be sexually active; girls who were different from their peers in some way; objects of jealousy; and rape victims. I connected slut-bashing with the sexual double standard and explained why this particular form of harassment leads to the sexual policing of all females, whether or not they have been personally targeted. Above all, I showed that a girl called a slut or ho often was targeted not because she was sexually active but because she was socially vulnerable in some way.

Slut!
is now recognized as a significant contribution to feminist thought. To date, the book remains the only systematic analysis of slut-bashing. When the book was first published, I was fortunate to be invited to speak about slut-bashing on television programs such as
Oprah
,
Politically Incorrect
, and
The O’Reilly Factor
. Local radio hosts around the country who styled themselves as shock jocks mistakenly thought my book was pornographic and seemed disappointed when I revealed that it was actually about sexual harassment.

Slut-bashing hasn’t gone away, but it has taken on different forms over the last two decades. Back in the 1990s, there were no such things as sexting, tweeting, and Facebook drama. Moreover, either a woman was bullied as a slut or she wasn’t—period. Today, the Internet and mobile communication have dramatically altered expressions of sexuality for girls and young women. Usage of the words “slut” and “ho” is rampant. Many girls and young women use these words in a casual manner among peers of equal status on social media. In fact, many girls and young women
like
to identify themselves as sluts; to them, this is a
positive
word—but only when used on their terms. When others use “slut” in a negative way, they are said to be guilty of “slut-shaming.” The term “slut-shaming” has crept into the feminist vernacular during the last decade to describe a multiplicity of ways in which females are called to task for their real, presumed, or imagined sexuality. “Slut-shaming” is a useful descriptor because today much slut-labeling does not take the form of bullying or harassment. In this book, I distinguish between acts of slut-bashing and acts of slut-shaming. Although both are harmful, they should not be conflated, because, as we will see, they operate quite differently.

In this book, I uncover what girls are thinking and how they rationalize their choices. I reveal the ways in which they navigate mixed sexual messages. I tell girls and adult women that they never deserve to be called sluts or hos—and they never should call themselves sluts or hos—because in the absence of one sexual standard for everyone, the concept of “sluttiness” is grounded in sexist and specious ideas about femininity, even when “slut” or “ho” is used in a seemingly lighthearted or even defiant manner.

If you are a parent of a teenage girl or young woman, you may be desperate to know: Why does your daughter call her friends sluts on social media? Why does she insist on going out in public so scantily clad, to your eye? Why doesn’t she try to protect her reputation? You’ve heard that at high school parties, girls are drinking and then giving boys oral sex. Is your daughter doing this too? If your daughter is in college, you wonder: Is she hooking up? What does “hooking up” even mean exactly?

If you are a girl in high school or a woman in college, you may not be able to articulate the contradiction you are forced to live. You just want to know: How come it’s OK for a guy to pressure you day after day to send him a topless photo, and then when you finally break down and do it to get him to stop bugging you,
you’re
the one who’s labeled a slut and
he
gets a high five from his buddies? And why do people hate “sluts” so much if they also hate “prudes”? How come some girls manage to be “slutty” and get rewarded for it while other girls are “slutty” and get punished for it?

If you are an educator, you certainly recognize the new brutal landscape and the harm it is wreaking, but your hands are tied about what you can do to help. Should you add sexting to the sex-ed curriculum? To what extent can you enforce a dress code without being sexist? What is your responsibility if a girl is slut-shamed on Twitter and Facebook because of activities conducted outside of school, but her harassment spills over into the school environment?

This book will help you to understand the thoughts and behaviors of girls and young women by explaining their motivations. Behaviors that may
appear
counterintuitive in fact make sense when you understand the conflicting pressures that high school girls and college-age women experience. Although their behaviors are rational in the face of mixed sexual messages, they are not necessarily strategic or wise, and very often they end up causing more harm than good. Once you recognize the logic behind their actions, you will be able to help the young females in your life stay safe from physical and emotional harm. You will have the tools to provide the support and understanding they crave. If you are a young woman yourself, this book will help you make sound decisions so that you remain safe.

It’s too easy to dismiss slut-bashing or slut-shaming as the product of pathological behavior—that “mean girls” have been socially conditioned to bully, while oversexualized girls are practically asking to be bullied. Attempting to figure out what’s “wrong” with either the name-callers or the targets is not productive. Just about every girl and young woman has been on either or both sides of the coin, and clearly not every female is pathological. The problem is not that the name-callers are inherently “mean” or must vent a naturally built-up reserve of “relational aggression”—“mean” and “relational aggression” being fashionable buzzwords among well-intentioned educational administrators trying to stamp out girl-against-girl harassment. And the problem is not that the targets are behaving like out-of-control Lolitas or porn star wannabes. It bears repeating that in many cases the so-called slut’s actual sexual behavior is nonexistent or irrelevant.

No, the real problem is the sexual double standard, a bundle of sexist presuppositions that structures the behaviors of many of us in Western society. To understand how the sexual double standard operates in the surveillance-saturated theater in which we now live, I spoke at length and in depth with fifty-five girls and women in North America, primarily between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two. Each admitted to calling others sluts or being labeled a slut herself, or to having witnessed this behavior up close within her peer group. They identify as Latina, black, Asian, white, and biracial. They live within thirteen states and two provinces. They grew up poor, affluent, working-class, and upper-middle-class.
²

To avoid putting any interviewee at risk for speaking out, I promised everyone anonymity. Thus, I changed the names of all the interviewees—except for academics, journalists, and others who publicly discuss these issues—and I don’t name the actual cities and universities in which the interviewees live and attend school. However, all racial identities, ages, and nonidentifying details are left unchanged.

Everyone I spoke with knew I was writing a book on sluttiness and volunteered to participate in my research because he or she wanted to help educate others. In these pages, you will find documented example after documented example of young females labeled as sluts who have suffered harm, as well as testimonies that back up these examples from experts who follow and study the lives of young people. The young women’s voices are the most important. They are the most eloquent experts and commentators on their own lives. Their stories are raw, honest, and searing. They speak to the truth in ways that are far more compelling than charts, graphs, polls, and surveys. We cannot make sense of slut-bashing and slut-shaming without their stories.

When I first reported on the phenomenon of slut-bashing in the 1990s, I condemned the behavior of the name-callers, and many people disagreed with my critique. Repeatedly they said to me, “Given the fact that so many teenage girls are having sex and getting pregnant and sexually transmitted diseases, isn’t it a
good
thing to shame them? ‘Slut’ may be an ugly word, and unfortunately there may be some collateral damage, but if it stops girls from having sex at a young age, maybe it’s necessary.” Putting aside for now the sexism of this mind-set, in which it’s not thought necessary to shame sexually active teenage boys because their sexual activity is considered unproblematic, being labeled a slut is not a deterrent to having sex.

First, many girls labeled sluts or hos are not sexually active to begin with. In any event, the overwhelming majority of the girls and women I’ve interviewed who have been labeled sluts become more, not less, sexually active as a direct result of being so labeled. Not only is the “slut” label an ineffective deterrent, in many cases it hastens rather than delays a girl’s sexual activity.

Second, even girls who witness the social downfall of other girls labeled as sluts do not refrain from sexual behavior themselves. Maria, a twenty-one-year-old Latina college student, remembers that in her Miami high school there was a girl in the grade below hers who was “called a lot of names” after she’d had oral sex with a boy from school. “Having seen what happened to her,” Maria told me, “I became fearful.” And yet Maria herself became sexually active soon after the name-calling began. Slut-shaming does not motivate other girls to remain chaste.

Not a single positive result comes from labeling a girl or woman a slut or ho. An environment in which these labels are acceptable leads only to harmful consequences:

•   It suggests to girls and women that their primary value comes from being sexually desirable and available. Yet paradoxically, “slut” also signifies that being sexually desirable and available reduce a female’s worth. From every angle, females are evaluated through a sexual prism.

•     It props up a rape culture in which many people, men and women alike, believe that coercing a female to perform sexual acts she doesn’t want to do, or to which she can’t say no, is unproblematic. If a female is sexually assaulted, she is said to deserve it because she’s, well, a slut.

•     It leads girls and women to engage in self-destructive behaviors such as drug use and abuse, disordered eating, disordered sexual behavior, and suicide attempts.

•     It compromises the sexual health of girls and women because they feel inhibited from using contraceptives and even from making an appointment with a health care provider, leading to unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Yes, this one little four-letter word is a critical linchpin. To dismantle the severely dysfunctional system of the sexual double standard, we must eliminate the word. Reclaiming “slut” as a positive term, we will see, nearly always backfires. If we want to truly help young women, we need to get rid of the word entirely.

CHAPTER 1

What’s the Same, What’s Different

At a time when insults travel at warp speed, calling a girl or woman a slut or ho in US youth culture has become prevalent, casual, and normalized. This was not always so. Twenty years ago, the experience of being labeled a slut or ho was not rare, but it also was not ordinary. At that time, just about every middle school and high school seemed to have one, maybe two, girls designated a slut or ho at any given moment. Of course, that was one or two girls too many. The school “slut” was shamed, ostracized, physically harassed, pressured to have sex she didn’t want, and raped. Those who mistreated her justified their actions on the grounds that the school “slut” was “too” sexual, and therefore deserved policing or punishment. In fact, in many cases she was not
sexually active at all. The “slut” often was singled out because she was an early developer and therefore had the physique of an adult woman; others (classmates as well as adults) assumed that if she
looked
sexual, she must
be
sexual. Even when the school “slut” was sexually active, often she wasn’t any more so than her peers.

In many ways, the story is the same as it ever was. Most of the time, the word continues to be used with the intent of shaming a girl or woman. Yet three notable differences mark today’s usage of the term.

First, the Internet has made it easier than ever before for any girl or young woman to project and circulate a sexually sophisticated identity that bears no resemblance to her actual sexual experience, which may be nonexistent, and for others to respond by damaging her reputation. A generation ago, a sexually innocent girl who wanted to appear racy went crazy with mascara and eye shadow, or hiked up her skirt after she left home in the morning en route to school. Her parents generally knew who her friends were and when she was going out to see them. Today, however, a girl can take a photo of her naked breasts and email it to a guy she likes, or post a bikini shot on Facebook or Instagram, and her parents will have no idea of her having done so. Meanwhile, bullies of yesteryear had to at least show their faces when they made life miserable for others. Even if they surreptitiously spray-painted “slut” on a girl’s front porch or car or school locker, they had to make an effort that carried the risk of exposure. Today, anyone can be an anonymous bully with the touch of a finger on a slim handheld gadget. It doesn’t take guts anymore to be a bully, because you don’t have to expose yourself and take
responsibility for your actions, and it sometimes seems as though almost everyone is a bully. For the girl who is targeted, the experience of being labeled a slut is heightened and sharpened like never before. In today’s electronic age, “slut” is an identity with no escape. In the movie
The Social Network
, the character based on Mark Zuckerberg is so angry when his girlfriend rejects him that he goes back to his dorm room and posts nasty comments about her physical appearance on the Internet. Later, when she confronts him, she says, “The Internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.”