I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (31 page)

The YouTube entertainer Jenna Mourey, twenty-six, known as Jenna Marbles—“the woman with a billion clicks,” according to the
New York Times
—reiterated this narrative in her nine-minute video titled “Things I Don’t Understand About Girls Part 2: Slut Edition,” released in December 2012. According to Mourey, as noted in chapter 2, being a slut is a choice, and any “slut” who chooses to have risky sex with random guys deserves to be judged. She excoriates “sluts” for making “bad slutty decisions,” linking the “slut” label with a woman’s active choice to be “slutty.” It’s not difficult to watch her video and conclude that a “slut” who’s been raped invited the rape.

In her video, which has been seen by over five million
people, Mourey looks right into the camera and delivers her monologue. She says,

A
slut is someone that has a lot of casual sex, and unfortunately I can’t completely define “a lot,” because it’s different in different people’s minds. . . . I want you to understand that I think that being a slut is a choice, so maybe I’m not making fun of you personally, I’m just making fun of your slutty choices, because I still love you, no matter what. . . . The next thing I want to talk about are stupid sluts, and I’m not using this lightly, OK. . . . Many girls go to school because they’re like, I’m going to be a slut. That’s cool, that’s great. These are facts. And I’m going to use one particular slut that I know as a reference, one girl in particular justified sleeping with so many dudes, because she only did it in the butt. So they didn’t actually count. I’m just going to take a second here to like let that sink in. . . .

Dear girls, when you’re out and you see another girl that’s like blackout drunk, and some dude is trying to take her home. . . . Just be a fellow vagina partner in life, go up to her and be like, Are you all right? That’s all you have to say, and then all of a sudden you start to see the drunk gears turning in there just like, Oh, yeah, I don’t know, I just met him, I’m not going home with them. I’m going to get a cab. Help them, help the sluts of the world makes less bad slutty decisions. . . .

Mourey expresses empathy for “sluts” and instructs her viewers to help “sluts,” especially when they’re drunk.
However, her definition of a slut is a woman who chooses to have “a lot of casual sex.” Although she concedes that “a lot of casual sex” is a relative thing, implying that different people have different opinions about what number of sexual partners constitutes “a lot,” she can just tell when a woman is really a slut: “It’s the girl that you’re like, Yeah, yeah she is a slut, yeah that girl.” You know a slut when you see her.

Mourey goes on to parse a category of “sluts”—“stupid sluts”—who are particularly open about their desire to have sex with multiple partners. (Mourey’s denunciation of “stupid sluts” is similar to Nicki Minaj’s judgment of “stupid hoes.” In 2012, Minaj released “Stupid Hoe,” singing, “Stupid hoes is my enemy, stupid hoes is so wack . . . You a stupid hoe, you a stupid hoe, you a stupid hoe / And I ain’t hit that note but fuck a stupid hoe / I said fuck a stupid hoe and fuck a stupid hoe.”) “Stupid sluts” are defensive about their desire, so they “justify” their actions through faulty logic (anal sex doesn’t count as “real” sex). These “sluts” have a tendency to have sex while drunk, Mourey continues. She encourages her viewers to intervene if they see a man taking home a drunk woman who appears to be unable to give sexual consent. Yet after this monologue, will her viewers really want to help a drunken woman who may be targeted for sexual violence? Or will they judge her the way Mourey has—as someone who, if she ends up being raped, brought the rape on herself because of her “slutty” and “stupid” decisions?

Framing the issue of sexual violence within a rhetoric of choice puts the blame on the victim and renders her unsympathetic and, worse, not credible. I think that Mourey would agree that no one chooses to become a victim of sexual
violence. But she opens the door to questioning the validity of rape victims’ claims.

The concept of “choice” under the conditions of a slut-shaming culture is questionable. When you’re conditioned and pressured to present yourself as a “good slut,” what does it even mean to suggest that you are
choosing
to be a “slut”? We know that through reciprocal slut-shaming on social media, girls and women present themselves as sexually empowered—as “good sluts.” When they do choose to be a “good slut,” they are socially rewarded at first, but invariably their identity becomes interpreted as that of a “bad slut”—the kind who gets blamed for being sexually assaulted. No female ever chooses to be known as a “bad slut.” So is there a real choice here? As Kathryn Abrams, a Berkeley Law professor, points out, “Women’s agency under oppression is necessarily partial or constrained.”
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Young females are not powerless—no one is threatening them if they don’t adopt a “good slut” persona—but they are not capable of shaping their choices, either. When you listen to the stories of actual women labeled “sluts”—which Mourey does not—you hear narratives devoid of real active choice. Even when they consent, they experience no sexual desire.

Sexual Assault Is Not Ambiguous Sex

Many people confuse sexual assault with sex for which consent is murky. As a rule, women who are unsure if they gave consent do not consider themselves raped. They admit that they could have communicated protest but made a
calculation not to. They report that they engaged in unwanted sex they regretted after the fact, but they do not classify the act as assault.

Mara, the nineteen-year-old white student in California, tells me about a sexual encounter she did not want but was punished over anyway. Two years ago, when she was a high school senior, she went to her prom with a male friend, Cal. The two had no romantic connection, and the decision to attend together was made at the last minute. They went to an after party, where Mara became drunk. Cal was driving, so he remained sober. “The next thing I know,” she tells me, “we were having sex in his car. My best friend, not knowing what we were doing inside the car, came over to the car with a bunch of guys. One of the guys looked inside the window and saw everything. When Cal and I came out of the car, people were already talking. I felt ashamed because I didn’t even want to have sex with him, and I was blaming myself for having done it. I felt it was my fault. At this point, it didn’t occur to me that maybe it was his fault.”

One of Mara’s classmates posted a picture of her prom group on Facebook. One girl singled out Mara, commenting, “Nice picture except for the whore in red in the middle.” The kids at school gave her “looks and comments. They would say, ‘How’s Cal?’” Mara explains that at her high school, the prevailing opinion was that it was OK to have sex with your boyfriend, if you had one, but if you had sex with anyone else, you were a slut.

Several months later, when she was a freshman in college, Mara questioned what had occurred. She thought about the fact that she was drunk while Cal had been sober. She may
have never expressed any protest, but because she was drunk, she was pliable—and Cal, whose judgment was not impaired by alcohol, knew it. “I came to the conclusion that I had been taken advantage of. What he did was really not OK. It was not rape, and I wouldn’t call it rape. But it was unethical and immoral and it was just really not cool.”

Cynthia, the white twenty-one-year-old Pennsylvania student, relates a similar narrative of a choice that wasn’t really a choice to have sex. She classifies the incident, which took place last year, as “not rape, but not consensual.” She went to a party, got drunk, and met a guy whom she asked to walk her home. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, whom she’d been with for two and a half years, she told me, so she wasn’t used to walking home alone. “I wanted company for the walk home, but that is all I wanted. I definitely did not want to have sex with him.” Yet she did end up having sex with him. “It wasn’t rape because I never said no,” she explains. “I never actually told him to leave me alone, and then it got to the point where I realized, ‘I guess this guy is coming into my home with me.’ He did everything and I just kept quiet until he left. I felt violated. The situation was creepy and weird.”

Could Cynthia have kicked him out of her home? Yes. Then why didn’t she? Because the choice to do so did not occur to her. In part, her judgment was impaired because she was drunk. But she also realized that the quickest and possibly least painful way to get him to leave was to acquiesce and let him have sex with her. She did not actively choose to have sex, but she did not actively choose to not have sex. As twenty-two-year-old Vicki explains to me, “I think girls often
play a part in putting themselves in a bad situation. They are afraid to say no, even if having sex with the person makes them want to dry-heave. Maybe they don’t want the guy to feel bad, or maybe they don’t want him to think of them as a prude.” Mara and Cynthia faced conditions in which protest was difficult, since both had been drinking, but they interpret what occurred as a violation rather than as a rape. Their assaulters may have had no idea that they had committed a violation. They may have considered these sexual encounters completely uneventful and normal. Mara and Cynthia did not report these events to legal authorities, because they recognize ambiguity in these specific experiences; they do not believe that these experiences were completely coercive.

But many people believe that reported rapes are similarly lacking in clarity. Indeed, many people believe that reported rapes often are false allegations. “Within the domain of rape,” writes David Lisak, a longtime researcher on campus rape, “the most highly charged area of debate concerns the issue of false allegations. For centuries, it has been asserted and assumed that women ‘cry rape,’ that a large proportion of rape allegations are maliciously concocted for purposes of revenge or other motives.”
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From one angle, it makes sense to presume that within a culture of slut-shaming, when the consequence of being labeled a slut can be disastrous, a young woman might lie about or otherwise misrepresent an act of sexual assault to protect her reputation. Lying or exaggerating may be logical when the social consequences of being perceived as slutty are so harmful. After all, we have seen that any woman who is perceived as actively choosing a sexual identity is at risk for being
labeled a bad slut. Thus, one could argue that falsely claiming to be a victim of sexual assault is a wise strategy because it enables the accuser to present herself as someone lacking in control, as someone who had no role in being victimized, as someone who was passive rather than active.

But the data do not bear out these suspicions. In fact, study after study shows that only a very small percentage of accusations of rape are false, which is consistent with the rate of false accusations of all crimes. Lisak and his colleagues systematically evaluated seven studies on false allegations. The percentage of false accusations ranged from 2.1 percent to 10.9 percent. They also designed a new study analyzing sexual assaults reported over a ten-year period, from 1998 to 2007, to a police department at Northeastern University in Boston. Of the 136 cases of sexual assault that were reported, eight (5.9 percent) were coded as “false reports,” meaning that a thorough investigation had been pursued and evidence demonstrated that the reported sexual assault had not occurred. The authors conclude, “The stereotype that false rape allegations are a common occurrence, a widely held misconception in broad swaths of society, including among police officers, has very direct and concrete consequences. It contributes to the enormous problem of underreporting by victims of rape and sexual abuse. It is estimated that between 64% and 96% of victims do not report the crimes committed against them, and a major reason for this is victims’ belief that his or her report will be met with suspicion or outright disbelief.”
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Since, as Lisak and his colleagues point out, the overwhelming majority of rapes are not reported at all, the percentage of false accusations of rape is far lower than the 2 to 10 percent range they have found among reported rapes. If
10 percent of only
reported
rapes are false accusations, the percentage of all false rape claims actually hovers between less than 1 percent to 3 percent.

Joanne Belknap, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, sums up this thorny issue succinctly: “Although false rape claims are reprehensible, it is important to acknowledge that they are also incredibly rare. Clearly, as a group, victims are very unlikely to report rapes to the police, and even less likely to make false claims.”
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According to the data, we should always be inclined to believe those who claim they have been assaulted. Sometimes women do lie; as we have seen, the culture of slut-shaming is so toxic that some women may conclude that lying about sexual assault is the only way they can salvage their reputation. But overall, lying about sexual assault is very rare. Therefore, our impulse must be to presume that accusers are reporting the truth.

Rape Culture on Campus

Many college campuses support a culture in which male sexual violence is normalized. As a result, females on many campuses conclude that being sexually assaulted is nothing out of the ordinary. After all, as the White House confirmed in its 2014 report on campus sexual assault, one in five students has been assaulted, though only 12 percent of those who have been assaulted report the violence.
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Male students at even the most elite colleges appear to believe that coercing women into having sex that they don’t want is acceptable behavior. According to Brett Sokolow, the
CEO of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, a consulting and law firm, between seven hundred and eight hundred campuses now use the term “nonconsensual sex” as a synonym for “rape” in their policies on sexual assault.
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“Nonconsensual sex” linguistically evades “rape” and sounds much less serious than “rape.” “Nonconsensual sex” sounds more normal and less criminal than “rape.” Since most people think of sex as consensual, even putting the word “nonconsensual” in front of it fails to convey that “nonconsensual sex” is in fact a crime.