I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (9 page)

RULE 1
   Females must attract the sexual attention of many unattached guys, but they may have sexual activity only with one guy, who is a boyfriend or potential boyfriend.

“Marriage is still the goal and norm of most young women—look at the lionization of Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge,” notes Jaclyn Geller, author of the book
Here Comes the Bride
, alluding to the fact that the Duchess of Cambridge has a university degree, yet she is lauded for spending all her time fulfilling the roles of wife and mother. “The ultimate expression of sexuality is still supposed to be with one’s husband, and that’s what society rewards us for.” Girls and young women are preferably expected to seek out sexual relationships within a romantic framework. But girls recognize that boyfriends can be scarce or undesirable. Therefore, depending on the values of her peer group, a girl or woman might be able to hook up occasionally with different partners, so long as she allows some time to lapse in between each encounter.

RULE 2
   Females must never act as if they are trying too hard.

They must hide the tracks of their performance of femininity. They can’t expose their effort. The girl or woman perceived to be “trying too hard” to capture male sexual attention is a potential target for slut-bashing. To avoid this fate, she must
display her sexuality in a low-key, understudied way—the way a “good slut” is supposed to.

The combination of rules 1 and 2 results in this principle:

You will do everything you can to invite unattached males to think you’re sexy, but only because you’re looking for a boyfriend. You may not have sex with anyone except with a boyfriend. All the while, you will pretend that you aren’t really trying, and that you don’t really care.

Min admits that when she was in the eighth grade, she called several girls “sluts” to her friends. “Those girls wore shirts that were low-cut, and everything was tight. Actually, it took me a while to realize it, but I was jealous of them. I actually wanted to be their friend. They were pretty, they went out to parties, and they dressed well. I would make fun of their profile pictures because to me, they seemed attention-seeking and flirtatious.”

“What made you choose the word ‘slut’ when you were putting them down?” I asked Min.

“To me, sluttiness is trying too hard to get attention. It’s not necessarily about having lots of sex. It’s just considered bad to be too attention-seeking if you’re a girl. I’m a feminist now, and I know it was wrong for me to use the word. I also think that there’s nothing wrong with having sex. But the problem is that the word is used to describe an attitude. Being slutty is about being unfeminine in an amplified way. People also put an adjective in front of ‘slut.’ They say ‘fat slut’—that’s a prevalent one. It means that a girl’s too fat to wear
revealing clothes, that she shouldn’t be wearing what she’s wearing. So again it’s connected with her attitude.”

“‘Slut’ portrays a woman who gains attention by throwing herself at men,” agrees twenty-two-year-old Diana, a white college senior in California. “It makes you seem disgusting. With Instagram and Facebook, a slutty girl is the one uploading photos to compete with other girls for male attention. She’s uploading photos to steal your boyfriend.”

The notion that sluttiness is about agency or an attitude extends beyond the college years. Daniela, a thirty-two-year-old Latina bartender in Texas, says that the slut is “the girl who gets on the bar dancing, even if she’s in a monogamous romantic relationship. And she’s probably wearing a short skirt. Or every night a different guy walks her home from the bar, and everyone sees, and even though she’s not having sex with any of them, she looks kind of skanky.”

Parents today raise their daughters to take ownership of their actions—to be assertive, to go after what they want. In short, parents teach their daughters agency, an essential ingredient for equality. But often agency is mistranslated and misunderstood. Today, girls in financially comfortable communities grow up hearing endlessly that they have “girl power,” that they can “do anything they set their minds to.” This bland message of empowerment is often understood as: Girls
must
do it all. Although no one can possibly be high-achieving in every area—academics, sports, student government, community service, the arts—the girls who try and then stumble feel like failures. To save face, they pretend they aren’t trying. They absorb the lesson that they must hide how hard they are working to do it all.

“The first message” teenage girls get in Newtown, Mas
sachusetts, reports Sara Rimer of the
New York Times
, is: “Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college.” The second message is: “Don’t work too hard.”
²⁹
Well, of course doing “everything” requires hard work. How could it not? The second message isn’t really “Don’t work too hard”; it is actually “Never let them see you sweat.”

Femininity entails, in the words of a Duke University sophomore, “effortless perfection.” In 2002, Duke undertook a large-scale research project called the Women’s Initiative to evaluate the status of women on its campus. For undergraduate women, the study revealed, the goal of “effortless perfection” was oppressive. Women reported that they faced a constant burden of proving themselves academically successful, ambitious, thin, pretty, well-dressed, and fashionable—all simultaneously, all without visible effort.
³⁰
Meeting this goal is simply not possible. As Jessica Ringrose puts it, the demands of femininity establish the concept of femininity “as a site of perpetual failure.”
³¹
No one can avoid failure.

“It used to be that people said, ‘You look pretty’ or ‘You look beautiful,’” observes Elizabeth Semmelhack, the chief curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. “Now it’s ‘You look hot’ or ‘You look sexy.’”
³²
Being “pretty” or “beautiful” is a passive stance. If you don’t have at least some genetic luck, all the makeup and hair dye in the world won’t make you gorgeous. But being “hot” or “sexy” can be achieved through effort—the right clothes, makeup, hair, posture, attitude. Being “hot” or “sexy” is the product of effort, and all females know it. Yet as one Newtown student, who scored a perfect 2400 on her SAT, told Rimer, “It is more important to be hot than smart. Effortlessly hot.”
³³

The “bad slut” is the girl or woman who exposes the effort behind being hot. She ruins the charade for everyone else. She turns inside out the farce of femininity.
Of course
being feminine requires effort! Helena Rubinstein famously said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”
³⁴
But being feminine also requires
pretending
that it doesn’t require effort. Many females despise the “slut” for revealing their secret.

We have seen that “slut” is used in myriad ways—positive and negative; about sexually active females and not sexually active females; to describe those who have “too much sex” and with “too many partners” and those with clothes that are “too revealing”; to refer to females who are confident and unapologetic about their sexual desires and those who reek of desperate neediness for male attention. What is the bottom line?

A “good slut” is sexy yet not oversexualized. Preferably she has only one sexual partner, although her peers reserve the right to set a standard allowing her more than one, or none at all, provided that she’s low-key about it. She knows how to present herself as sexually knowing, yet she does not appear needy or desperate.

On the other hand, a “bad slut” violates expectations of feminine norms. She exercises sexual agency. She has sex outside the permitted boundaries established by her peers. She actively provokes male sexual attention, including that of guys with other girlfriends or hookup partners. She exposes the reality that being sexy is a deliberate performance that is unnatural, difficult, and requires serious effort.

For her sins, she must be punished.

CHAPTER 3

Slut-Bashing: Face-to-Face and in Cyberspace

“My best friend had a slut reputation in high school,” Sharon, a twenty-year-old Italian American woman who grew up in Queens, New York, is telling me. We are in the lounge of her college’s student center, sunk into club chairs. It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day; the new semester begins a few days later, and we are the only people in the lounge. Still, Sharon has lowered her voice. I lean forward so that I don’t miss a word.

“How did it start?” I ask. Every slut narrative has an identifiable beginning.

“She liked a guy, but the problem was that he had a girlfriend,” Sharon remembers. She’s wearing green pants, the color bouncing off her hazel eyes, and a black knit scoop-neck top and black Converse sneakers. “But he liked my friend
too,” she continues. “He broke up with his girlfriend so that he could start dating my friend. He didn’t cheat on her. The girlfriend did not take it very well. She seemed to think that my friend had ‘stolen’ her boyfriend, and she wanted revenge. So she and her friends started spreading stories that my friend had slept with ten guys that year. They never said anything bad about the guy. That’s what was flying around Facebook.”

“Was the name-calling only online, or was it in person too?” I asked.

“Both,” Sharon said. “On Facebook, people wrote that she was a whore, a slut, a boyfriend-stealer. But she didn’t steal anything and she didn’t do anything wrong. The boy liked her and they ended up dating for two years.”

One day in the middle of class, Sharon’s cell phone vibrated in her jeans pocket. As soon as she could sneak a peak, she pulled it out. “Where R U?” her friend had texted. “I need U 2 wlk w me 2 class. Grls thretnd 2 thro me dn strs.”

“Would they really have done it though?” I asked, wondering if the girls were making an empty threat just to prove a point. But Sharon is insistent. “They really would have done it if they could have. I definitely think they would have. But since they didn’t go through with it, when my friend went to the school administration the school didn’t do anything about it.”

Another school day, another act of slut-bashing. Sharon’s friend was targeted because she was believed to have been an oversexed slut who had stolen another girl’s boyfriend. But we know that although sluttiness is seemingly about sex, it’s really about something else. “In my high school,” says Sharon, “you were a whore or a slut if you ate too much and didn’t
gain a pound. You were a whore or a slut if you bought the same prom dress as the head cheerleader. You were a whore or a slut if I don’t like the way you look in that shirt, or I think your boobs are too big.”

Sharon’s friend was called a slut because she was believed to be a girl with
agency
—the capability of exerting power over a situation. Framed in this way, Sharon’s friend appeared to violate the rule of effortless perfection. Instead of radiating an aura of effortlessness, she emitted a smoke signal of desire. According to the girls who slut-bashed her, she
chose
to do something wrong and therefore
deserved
her slutty reputation. The boyfriend’s sexuality, meanwhile, was never questioned or maligned.

Agency is a critical element of the sexual double standard, in which only girls, never boys, are called to task for their real or presumed sexual aggression. In both rounds of my research, I found that not all girls so targeted are chosen because of sexual behavior. In fact, many of my interviewees—those from two decades ago as well as today—had no sexual experience at all, or no more than their peers did, at the onset of the name-calling. Nevertheless, the sexual double standard lurks in every slut-bashing story. The sexual double standard is a necessary ingredient that justifies the targeting of specific girls, and the perception of the presence of agency on the part of a female is what triggers the sexual double standard.

In schools, a girl is singled out as a slut because she deviates in some aspect from feminine norms, and she is believed to have actively caused this deviation. In addition to the girl considered to be too sexual, other categories of “sluts” are:

•     The girl regarded as “other” or different from her peers in some way.

•     The girl envied by other girls because she’s perceived to have an unfair advantage with boys.

•     The survivor of sexual assault.

Since every girl may fall into at least one of these categories, even transiently, every girl is a walking potential target.

The paradox of slut-bashing is that a girl’s sexual history or lack thereof becomes irrelevant from the moment she is labeled a slut. Once she becomes known as a slut, a girl is sexualized evermore. The narrative of the hypersexual girl takes off, becoming embroidered and bedazzled as it passes from locker room to Twitter to Instagram.

What does it feel like when the kids you see every day in school are making jokes at your expense, often right in your face; calling you vulgar names on social media sites so that everyone can see; and shunning you socially at athletic games and after-school club meetings? “All I wanted to do was go home and cry,” reports a twenty-two-year-old white woman from California, remembering her reputation when she was eighteen. “It’s degrading,” is the way a white sixteen-year-old girl describes the experience. “And the most upsetting part is that it’s not even about sex. Calling a girl a slut is about making her feel bad about herself.”

“The general perception in my high school,” adds Sharon, “is that you don’t associate with any girl labeled a slut or a whore. You avoid that person.”

“‘Slut’ is a label that falls on you and then it’s so hard to get rid of it,” comments a white twenty-one-year-old student
in Pennsylvania. “It’s not fair to label someone, because then they are stuck with it forever, and if they were having sex with lots of people before, maybe they’re not even doing that anymore. But it follows you forever anyway.”