I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (30 page)

Sexual assault, of course, is not new. As long as there has been sex, there has been sexual assault. What is new is that today, female bodies have no privacy. They are visible, tagged, posted, circulated, tracked, rated, judged, “liked.” They are always available—sexually available. Not only is this the reality, this is the expectation: female bodies
should
be visible; they
should
be available;
they should be sexually available
. In addition, young women are supposed to want—to choose—to make their bodies visible, available, sexually available. This is the new normal.

We girls and women no longer own our bodies, because our bodies are in the public sphere every second of every day. When we relinquished our privacy in the world of social media, we also, unwittingly, gave away our bodily autonomy. Ma’lik Richmond, one of a group of teenage boys found
guilty in 2013 of sexually assaulting a female acquaintance from West Virginia at a party in Steubenville, Ohio, told
The New Yorker
that it was acceptable for him to hook up with her, even though his friend had been physically involved with her, because she was “community property.”
¹⁹³
Richmond’s language suggests that the Steubenville High School football players felt ownership over the girl’s body, and that they believed they had license to do whatever they wanted with it. By this logic, the girl herself could not claim ownership over her own body.

Girls and women internalize the message that their bodies do not truly belong to them. As a result, they are perhaps more persuadable than ever before to do sexual things to which they do not consent. Sometimes girls and women
do
want to do these sexual things; they
do
have sexual desire, and they
do
want to act on their desire. But under these conditions, when a girl’s body is perceived as “community property,” how do they—and we—recognize where desire stops and coercion begins? Pretending to consent to one’s own sexual objectification is now part of “normal” female adolescence. As one of the teenage girls sitting on the floor with Jocelyn and Kaitlyn tells us, “You have to display a sexual personality—it’s like, ‘Are you down to fuck, or not?’” Girls and young women must express a sexual identity showing that they are eager for sexual activity they have chosen, whether or not they truly want to be sexually active. Yet behind their pretense of sexual bravado, most girls and young women do not actually want to be treated as sexual objects.

Guys must listen to what young females say, not infer consent based on their outfit or their consumption of alcohol.
Those who do not ask for, or listen to, an expression of consent come to believe that female bodies are theirs for the taking. They feel entitled to partake in “community property.” “We’ve all been affected by sexual aggression,” says one of the girls, “like when a guy at a party grabs your boobs, and you don’t want to say anything. You laugh it off and make it like it’s not a big deal, because you don’t want to be seen as a bitch or a feminist who makes things like this a big deal.” It’s not just teenage boys who go around seizing female bodies unsolicited. Elizabeth, the white twenty-nine-year-old educator who grew up in New York City and now lives in the Southeast, tells me that at dance clubs, men feel perfectly comfortable grabbing the bodies of women they encounter. She sighs, saying, “Sometimes you just want to dance and not worry that some random guy will grab you. You don’t want to have to worry about being harassed or assaulted.”

Coercion Is the Absence of Consent

Nearly one in five women in the United States has been raped or has experienced other sexual violence at some point in her life, according to an exhaustive government study called the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey.
¹⁹⁴
This statistic may shock you. You may wonder: Is it truly possible that so many women have been sexually assaulted? Yes—the answer is yes. Sexual assault really is this prevalent. Linda Degutis, the director of the government center that conducted the survey, admits that the one-in-five-women number may be “surprising” to many people. “I don’t think we’ve really
known that it was this prevalent in the population,” she said when the survey was released in 2011. Bear in mind that this number includes not only acts of forced penetration (rape) but also acts of sexual violence other than rape.
¹⁹⁵

Regarding rape specifically, the youth of the victims is striking. Forty-two percent of all female victims have been raped before they turned eighteen, and 80 percent have been raped before the age of twenty-five.
¹⁹⁶
More than half of female rape victims have been raped by an intimate partner, according to the study, and 40 percent have been raped by an acquaintance.
¹⁹⁷

Nearly half of women surveyed at a small liberal arts university (44 percent) had experienced a coerced sexual encounter (including unwanted touching, attempted rape, or completed rape) during their first three semesters, according to psychologists at Bucknell University led by William F. Flack Jr. Of these “unwanted” activities, 81 percent involved alcohol. (The researchers use the term “unwanted” rather than “coerced.”)
¹⁹⁸
The reason for rape most frequently reported (62 percent) was impaired judgment due to alcohol. The reason for unwanted fondling most frequently reported (67 percent) was that it happened before the perpetrator could be stopped.
¹⁹⁹
Despite the prevalence of coerced sexual encounters, only 3 percent of students reported these incidents to university authorities, and only 11 percent of the women who’d experienced unwanted or coerced sexual intercourse defined the incident as “rape.”
²⁰⁰

The high incidence of “unwanted” sex, Flack and his colleagues argue, “demonstrates that men often get what they want, whereas women often do not” because “the man dis
regards either the woman’s wishes or her lack of capacity to give consent; that is, some instances of unwanted sex constitute rape or assault.”
²⁰¹
Not all acts of unwanted sex, however, constitute rape or assault from a legal point of view. Flack and his colleagues point out that in other encounters, women “may feel as though they have little power (physical or social), and thus, little choice but to acquiesce”—that is, women may decide that it’s easier to go along with the sexual encounter and get it over with as quickly as possible than to protest. Thus, the researchers conclude, the sexual dynamics on campus “are largely controlled by men and dictated by blatant, if not explicit, sexist attitudes.”
²⁰²

Flack’s conclusions are confirmed by Lisa Wade and Caroline Heldman at Occidental College. In their study of hookup culture during students’ freshman year of college, they found that on college campuses, male and female students consider male sexual coercion to be utterly normal. Women constantly “need[ed] to rebuff the advances of men in whom they were not interested,” Wade and Heldman report, and many women consented to “sexual activity they did not desire, seeming to feel it was their only option, despite the absence of physical coercion, threats, or incapacitation.” Several women told Wade and Heldman that they performed fellatio to get rid of men who wouldn’t leave them alone. The researchers found that for many students, sexual coercion “seemed normal or inevitable.”
²⁰³
Many men on campus believe it’s normal to sexually take, even without the woman’s consent. Many women believe it’s normal to be sexually taken from.

Coerced sex is an act in which a woman’s ability to exert power is taken from her. Three scenarios are possible:

•     She protests and the man disregards her wishes.

•     She is unable to protest because she’s incapacitated.

•     She wants to protest but chooses not to, because she perceives that protesting will not successfully stop the perpetrator and may cause him to become violent; she just wants the unwanted encounter to conclude as quickly and painlessly as possible.

In each scenario, the woman either protests or would protest if she could. She is robbed of her agency. Yet ironically, if she contends that she’s been victimized, she is denounced for being assertive; and if she’s assertive, she must be the type of girl who
invited
the unwanted sexual encounter—because that’s what assertive girls do. Even when she speaks up to report that she’s been violated, then, she is told that the sexual encounter was her choice.

Nicole, sixteen, relates the story of a friend, Leah, who was sexually assaulted when she was thirteen.

S
he had really big boobs, and she would wear tank tops. There was, like, nowhere else to look. So immediately guys were like, “Hey, wanna hang out?” She was really sweet and went with them and she let the boys touch her. It was really sad because immediately she was the slut of the school. So then she tried to become known as a prude. She hasn’t touched anyone for, like, two years. Then she was raped because an upperclassman knew she was a slut and held her head down for thirty minutes and wouldn’t let go until she gave him a blow job. You could argue that it was her choice to do it, because she put herself in the
situation even though he held down her head—although who would want to suffocate like that? But that’s what people were saying—that it was her choice and that she didn’t have to do it.

Nicole is ambivalent about Leah’s agency. On the one hand, she says that Leah “was raped” and she asks, “Who would want to suffocate like that?” Yet Nicole doesn’t seem entirely sure that Leah truly was raped, noting, “You could argue that it was her choice” to give the older boy oral sex despite the fact that the conditions were coercive. If Leah was raped, how could it have been her choice? Nicole’s uncertainty over Leah’s ability to control the incident dovetails with one of the definitions of a “bad slut”—a girl or woman who exerts agency. A “bad slut” has done something she should not have done. Although rape is an act of stripping away agency, Leah’s status as a “slut” overshadows her coercion and renders this sexual encounter wanted rather than unwanted. In the end, the story that Nicole tells is one not of coercion but of consent, of choice. Nicole leaves open the possibility that Leah initially chose to give the boy oral sex; therefore, when he held her head forcibly against his penis and did not release his grasp on her until after she had completed the act, surely that circumstance must have been her choice too.

This narrative of the slut who invites an act of rape and therefore has no right to complain about it after the fact is the dominant way people interpret reports of sexual assault. “The underlying skepticism that sexual assault survivors face when they disclose may be the single most damaging factor in our societal response,” writes Kimberly Lonsway, the director of
research at the nonprofit organization End Violence Against Women International. “It may also be the most powerful tool in the arsenal of rapists because it allows them to commit their crimes with impunity.”
²⁰⁴
Thus, when the former Missouri congressman Todd Akin said in 2012 that women who become pregnant under any circumstances should give birth, even if the pregnancy is not wanted, since it’s not possible to become pregnant from a “legitimate rape,” he suggested that “sluts” cannot truly be raped. A “legitimate rape”—according to Akin’s logic—is one in which the victim exerts no agency at all, and therefore her body mysteriously shuts down its normal physiological processes. Any woman who “chooses” to put herself in a situation in which sexual violence is a risk is a “slut” who implicitly consented to be assaulted.

The thing about rape is that people who want to protect rapists and normalize the act will look for
any
pre-rape behavior by the victim to explain how she “chose” to become victimized. Even an eleven-year-old girl who was gang-raped by at least two nineteen-year-old men, and possibly up to sixteen other males, in an abandoned trailer in Cleveland, Texas, was accused of inviting her own assault. The girl was threatened with being physically beaten if she didn’t comply with the rapists, who then recorded the attacks on their cell phones. James C. McKinley Jr. of the
New York Times
chose to include in his story about the gang-rape that residents claimed the victim “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.” He also quoted a resident who said, “It’s just destroyed our community. These boys have to live with this the rest of their
lives.”
²⁰⁵
The eleven-year-old girl, who wore makeup and sophisticated clothes and liked to hang out with boys—which eleven-year-old girls tend to do—is to blame for wrecking the lives of the men who raped her. The implication is that she is a “slut” who was not really raped because rape of a “slut” does not count as real rape.

In Billings, Montana, a male high school teacher named Stacey Dean Rambold admitted to raping a fourteen-year-old student at her school in 2008, when he was forty-nine. District Judge G. Todd Baugh sentenced the teacher to thirty days in prison; he explained his leniency by saying that the victim, Cherice Moralez, “seemed older than her chronological age” and was “as much in control of the situation” as the teacher. The girl killed herself in 2010 as the case went through the legal system.
²⁰⁶
Perhaps taking her own life was the only thing she truly could do to be “in control of the situation.”