I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (5 page)

The prude/slut contradiction does not make any sense—and yet this tension is central to girls’ and young women’s lives today. It is present on every page of their gender script. “You’re going to get called either a slut or a prude no matter what you do,” confirms Kathy, a white twenty-one-year-old college student on the East Coast. Recognizing the trap of the prude/slut contradiction is essential to understanding slut-bashing and slut-shaming. If a girl accidentally crosses the invisible and ever-shifting boundary between “not a prude” and “not a slut,” she is written off as a slut who deserves to be policed and shamed. Never mind that being a “slut” is one hair away from performing in a socially acceptable manner. Once a girl is labeled a slut, the show is over: her performance is ruined; her reputation is in tatters.

Girls and young women calling other girls sluts or “hos,” I argue, is a logical, even reasonable strategy to rewrite the terrible script that’s handed to females. By pointing a finger at another female, the name-caller at least temporarily diverts attention from herself and safeguards her own status. She quite brilliantly in one stroke proves both that she’s not a slut (because the other girl, once labeled, is marked as “worse,” and when it comes to sluttiness, relativity is everything) and also that she’s not a prude (because she’s sexually sophisticated enough to be capable of parsing finely observed sexual judgments).

“I’ve noticed that lots of women call other women sluts and whores,” a twenty-two-year-old Latina woman from the West Coast, a recent college graduate who minored in gender and women’s studies, tells me. “It’s like their way of saying, ‘I’m not
that
kind of girl.’ It’s a way of saying that those girls are less valuable. Before I discovered feminism, I definitely did it too. It’s a way to feel closer to guys—not necessarily to get sexual attention but just to get them to think you’re a better person than the other girls are.”

In a warped way, slut-bashing and slut-shaming may even be seen as forms of safe sex: a girl can preserve her chastity while at the same time shoring up her sexual credentials. These behaviors also position her as more desirable than those belittled as slutty.

Image Control

The prude/slut contradiction is not new. Girls described this impossible tightrope to me twenty years ago, and it wasn’t
new then either. Why has the response of calling other girls sluts increased in frequency only now?

The answer is that social media have profoundly altered the way people evaluate themselves and others. In particular, social media place girls’ and women’s physical bodies perpetually on display. Julie Zeilinger, the founder and editor of a feminist blog for teens and young adults called
FBomb
, observes, “Everyone is constantly visible and available—including your body and everything else about you.” Moreover, many of us believe today that our bodies
should
always be visible and available. We judge other female bodies, and our female bodies are always judged. Therefore, we worry about our physical selves and our sexual identities in a newly charged way. Performance and surveillance are now central to everyone’s lives, and especially so for young females.

Social media tantalize us with the ability to control the way others see us—our image and reputation. We create online profiles, upload photos and videos, and craft an identity we want others to admire. With every keystroke, we imagine that we are shaping our identity to project the best “I” possible.

Yet the promise of controlling our image is false. Others take what we offer online and manipulate the raw material. We don’t truly control our digital persona. Our reputations are always at risk. We have to keep up the pace not only with regard to updating our own online identity but also to making sure no one else is tampering with our reputation.

It’s no wonder that slut-bashing and slut-shaming have become more commonplace. The stakes are higher than ever before in the performance of everyone’s identity, and especially
so for young females. If a girl wants to be socially relevant, she can’t opt out of the performance (as if opting out really were possible in our digitally connected world). Maneuvering to become the center of attention as one who is neither a prude nor a slut—and pointing fingers at those whose performance is wobbly—is the new normal.

Viewing online photographs of other females, together with leaving comments and “likes,” leads to insecurity and competitiveness. Invariably, judgment about girls’ “sluttines” comes into play. Cynthia, a white twenty-one-year-old college student from Pennsylvania, explains,

I
update my Facebook and check it constantly. I definitely make sure I look good in my photos. And I know it’s sad, but I definitely count up how many “likes” I get. It’s like a popularity thing, and it becomes a competition over who’s popular. You can look up anyone and see what they’re doing and what they’ve posted. You make assumptions of what they’re like based on their pictures, not based on their personality. If you stay home one night, you look at everyone’s pictures of what they’re doing that night, and you see what they’re wearing, and you think, “Oh, that person’s looking really slutty tonight.” So many assumptions go into what people are like based on the photos they’re posting, and assumptions about sluttiness are a big part of it.

As appalling as slut-bashing and slut-shaming are, they are sensible responses when one is constantly being judged and judging others. These strategies appear helpful, perhaps even necessary. Therefore, telling girls and women to stop
using the label won’t work. Why would anyone cease an activity that is logical and reasonable, and seems to get the job done?

We must instead show girls and women the ways in which these strategies are fundamentally misguided. Aside from all the harm we have seen that they cause to others, slut-bashing and slut-shaming also backfire on the name-callers.

•     When a girl slut-bashes another girl, she may think she is distancing herself from “bad” sluttiness and proving herself to be a “good slut.” In fact, she is setting up herself as a future target. Any girl who calls other girls sluts weakens her own position. If she establishes herself as a judge of sexual values, other girls may come to believe that her credentials are shaky—
Who does she think she is?
They then may decide to reveal her own sexual misdeeds, real or not.

•     If she intentionally embraces or owns the “slut” label for herself, she will discover that true ownership is not possible. In this age of social media, “slut” transforms from self-chosen badge of pride to mortifying sign of shame in the time it takes to retweet.

•     When a girl or a woman casually refers to another female as a slut or a ho, she reinforces the normalcy of the sexual double standard. As long as the sexual double standard exists, all females are at risk of being judged for their sexuality.

Because the word “slut” has become so accepted and widespread in casual conversation, its sexist sting is undervalued in US youth culture. As the high school teacher played by Tina
Fey memorably told her female students in the 2004 movie
Mean Girls
, “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it OK for guys to call you sluts and whores.” The more the word is used, the more it is accepted. When women call each other sluts, even in a lighthearted manner, they lead others to believe it’s acceptable to use the term too. When this behavior is normalized, so is sexual assault. As Kaitlyn says, “I pretty much expect to be groped and touched by random guys every time I leave my home in the morning. Girls think it’s normal for a guy to grab them at a party. The word ‘slut’ creates a physically and emotionally dangerous environment for girls.”

The only way to end slut-bashing and slut-shaming is to change the environment in which these actions flourish so that the behavior no longer makes sense. This is a far more difficult task than simply instituting zero-tolerance policies for verbal and physical sexual harassment and sexual assault, although such policies are important and necessary. But let’s be honest: we are not going to achieve this feminist utopia in which the sexual double standard has been eradicated any time in the near future, although we must continue to work toward it. In the meantime, our wisest move is to demonstrate to girls and women that when they refer to themselves and others as sluts or hos, they are hurting themselves as well as others.

Slut-bashing and slut-shaming inevitably ricochet—on all of us.

CHAPTER 2

Are You a “Good Slut” or a “Bad Slut”?

Recently I attended a forum on feminism at Barnard College. Arriving a few minutes early, I scanned the auditorium, packed with women with book bags, buzzing with the discordance of dozens of simultaneous conversations. My eyes came to rest on a friend of mine, a white longtime feminist activist and writer, sitting in the front row. She was twisted around, talking with someone behind her, and when she saw me she gestured for me to come and take the seat next to her. We hugged and smiled, and she introduced me to the woman, also white, with whom she’d been chatting. The woman, I learned, was also involved in grassroots feminist work.

“This is Leora,” my friend said. “She’s the author of
Slut!
”
She added, “Leora wrote the book because she had been called a slut when she was in school.”

“Oh, you were the school slut?” asked the woman. “Congratulations!”

Congratulations . . . really? Was she being ironic? No: she was offering a genuine compliment.

I smiled politely, but my thoughts swirled in confusion. This woman’s affirmation of my reputation was intended, I recognize, as a sly in-joke, a subversive poke at the sexual double standard that denigrates women labeled as sluts. By congratulating me, she was attempting to decrease the power of the sexist belief system that classifies women either as commendable virgins or depraved whores. She was trying to transform “slut,” to turn it on its head from a source of shame to a wellspring of pride. She was attempting to suggest that a woman can occupy a category that is neither Madonna nor whore.

But I don’t feel proud of having been labeled a slut when I was in the ninth grade. I don’t feel ashamed of it either, but at the same time I prefer not to be associated with the word. After all, although I know now that I never deserved to have been called a slut, and that I had been the victim of verbal sexual harassment, the experience profoundly wounded me during a pivotal time in my life. To me, the word “slut” is not funny, and it’s not something I want to reclaim. Although this woman good-heartedly meant to connect with me as a fellow traveler on the planet of feminism, I was left feeling that my experiences had been glossed over.

This interaction crystallized that “slut” has no fixed, stable meaning. It can mean “bad slut” or it can mean “good
slut.” Most of the time, it’s the worst insult you can call a woman, signifying that she should feel ashamed of herself for her supposed promiscuity. On the other hand, a woman may embrace the term to prove a feminist point that she is confidently, unapologetically sexual. “Slut is ambiguous because it holds the connotation of being known, sexy and desirable but also excessive, dirty and wrong,” observes Jessica Ringrose, a sociologist of gender at the Institute of Education in London.
⁸
The word is remarkably confusing. And if I find it perplexing to discern its meanings, you can imagine how teenage girls and college-age women—many of whom are plagued by insecurity and the desire to fit in socially—feel.

History of the Word

To grasp how the word “slut” is understood, I began by examining its etymology in Western literature. The first usage of which we know, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, is from 1386 in
The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer. Not yet a noun, the word appears as the Middle English adjective “sluttish” in the “Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue.” The host of the traveling pilgrims asks the yeoman why his master, who the yeoman has said is very clever and successful, is dressed so poorly: “Why is thy lord so sluttish, I thee preye, / And is of power better cloth to beye, / If that his dede accorde with thy speche?” If your master has the power to buy better clothes, why has he chosen to dress in a “sluttish” manner—in dirty and untidy garments?

In 1402, the English poet Thomas Hoccleve used the
noun “slut” in “The Letter of Cupid” in much the same way Chaucer did, but with regard to a woman—a slovenly woman who did not keep her room clean (“The foulest slutte of al a tovne”). For nearly five hundred years, according to the
Oxford Engligh Dictionary
, “slut” continued to be used as a synonym for a slattern or a woman who is dirty or untidy in her appearance or habits. Shakespeare used the term this way in 1599 in
As You Like It
. Touchstone, the court jester, playfully woos the innocent country girl Audrey, who informs him that she prefers to remain chaste. Touchstone responds, “Truly, and to cast away honesty upon a foul slut were to put good meat into an unclean dish”—meaning, in effect, “It would be as wasteful for a dirty woman to remain chaste as it would be to put good meat in a dirty dish
.
” Audrey, a shepherdess, isn’t happy to be called a “slut,” but it’s clear that the meaning is not connected with her sexuality. She responds, “I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul”—meaning, “Your simile is off base because I keep myself clean, even though I’m a country girl, and therefore I’m not a slut. But I thank the gods I’m not pretty, because not being pretty enables me to remain chaste.” Here, “slut” is a derogatory word applied to a woman, but it isn’t connected with her sexuality. In the middle of the fifteenth century, “slut” also became a synonym for a kitchen maid, and it also was not used in a derogatory manner.