I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1
What’s the Same, What’s Different

CHAPTER 2
Are You a “Good Slut” or a “Bad Slut”?

CHAPTER 3
Slut-Bashing: Face-to-Face and in Cyberspace

CHAPTER 4
Reciprocal Slut-Shaming: Sexual Identity in an Online World

CHAPTER 5
“Good Slut” Containment Strategies

CHAPTER 6
“Bad Slut” Coping Mechanisms

CHAPTER 7
The Rape of a “Slut” Is Rape

CHAPTER 8
Can “Slut” Be Reclaimed?

CHAPTER 9
Creative Solutions to Eliminate “Slut”

APPENDIX A
Dos and Don’ts for Parents of Teenagers and College-Age Children

APPENDIX B
The Slut-Shaming Self-Defense Toolkit

APPENDIX C
Resources

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Praise

Also by Leora Tanenbaum

Credits

Back Ad

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

You’re a sixteen-year-old girl flopped on the sofa, trying to vaporize anxious thoughts about the SAT prep you’re behind on and the classmate who cackled and tweeted the moment she saw your outfit this morning. With one hand, you reach over for the remote and power on the TV. With your other hand, you grab your phone and check your Instagram and Twitter. Whichever screen you look at, you come across images of women acting like stereotypical “sluts” and “hos”—and getting rewarded for their behavior. You pay attention—maybe you could learn a thing or two.

On E!, you see Miley Cyrus twerking at the MTV Video Music Awards. Is this the same girl on your old
Hannah Montana
sheets? You marvel over how raunchy and uninhibited she is—what an improvement over her boring, wholesome old Disney identity. Meanwhile, a friend has Instagrammed a paparazzi shot of Lindsay Lohan getting out of a limo, her short dress exposing the fact that she’s not wearing underwear. You wonder if she flashed the photographers on purpose—probably, you figure, because one thing she
is
wearing is a big smile. And here’s another photo—this one’s of Rihanna, braless in a see-through dress. She’s posing for photographers, looking completely relaxed, so she must know she looks amazing. A text message pops up on your phone; you’re invited to a “Pimps and Hos” party on Saturday night. You know the party is just an excuse for the girls to get away with wearing as little as possible, and you can’t deal with the pressure of figuring out a hot outfit. But if you don’t go, you’ll be missing out, so you start thinking about which shoes, top, and skirt will make you look slutty—in a good way.

You roam through the channels on TV, pausing when you find
The Bachelor
. Several women are sitting in a hot tub in string bikinis, making sexual advances and vying for the attention of a man they barely know. One of these women will “win” a ring on her finger. On another channel, you catch a scene from an old rerun of
30 Rock
. Producer Liz Lemon, played by Tina Fey, is far from a slut, yet she calls herself and her colleague Jenna “sluts” in a casual, hip way, as if to show how ironic and witty she is. Finally, you settle on
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
, even though you can’t remember why these sisters are famous—is it because they never tire of showing off their bodies? No matter. You still enjoy watching them ooze sexual confidence.

You compulsively check your Twitter for comments on that girl who got drunk on Friday night and supposedly hooked up with three different boys. OMG—there are photos and videos of her doing a drunken striptease! You can see her face clearly. Classmates are responding: “What a ho! lol!” and “Sloppy slut” and “Whore deserves to be raped!” Even though you didn’t take off any of your clothes, you also drank too much at the same party, and you don’t remember everything that went down. You’re terrified that pictures of you will surface, too. So far, you’ve been safe. Phew! The other girl didn’t come to school yesterday, but today she showed up and everyone was horrible to her. The boys kept coming up to her and asking her to send them naked pictures of herself. One of the girls went right up to her and asked why she wore such an ugly leopard-print bra, and then laughed and said maybe it was a good thing after all that she took it off. You were careful not to make eye contact with the girl, even though you feel bad for her. You want to show everyone that you disapprove of the disgusting things she supposedly did—but you don’t know exactly what she did, if anything.

All of a sudden your Twitter feed is going crazy. Everyone’s tweeting about some guy in California who went on a shooting spree, killing six college students before shooting himself in the head. Turns out he was angry that girls weren’t interested in him, and he had vowed to “slaughter every blond slut” he saw. How did he define “slut,” anyway? You wonder:
Would he have considered me a slut? Would he have murdered me?

Welcome to the homeland of teenage girls and young women, a contradictory landscape in which females are applauded for sexual audacity when they’re not being humiliated and disgraced. New ideas about female sexual liberation clash with old stereotypes about “good girls” and “sluts.”

In celebrity land, women embrace a “slutty” persona as a conscious marketing strategy. When a private sex tape with an old boyfriend surfaces, it opens up new business opportunities rather than creating a shameful scandal. No skirt for these women is too short; no blouse is too low-cut. On the surface, these women seem to be strong role models, even feminists; they tell the world that women can be as sexually liberated as men always have been.

For teenage girls in real life, “slutty” behavior is an entirely different thing. Girls who dress like Miley Cyrus are mocked and harassed. At best, their names become punch lines. At worst, they become vulnerable to acts of violence. Their reputations can become ruined, and because of the inescapability of Internet chatter, they have nowhere to hide.

What is going on? How can we make sense of this bizarre and jarring contradiction between the behavior sold to girls as good and the very bad consequences for them when they emulate their role models? This contradiction is not simply the result of celebrity culture running amok.
Reality
is running amok. Because it is in reality, not only on some Hollywood set or in the media, that “sluts” are put on a pedestal one moment and then spat upon the next. How has this happened?

The quick, blithe answer is: the Internet. But we have to dig deeper to fully understand the situation in which girls and young women find themselves. The Internet has enabled us to communicate in new ways. But it has also altered face-to-face communication. Even when we aren’t connected to any digital gadget or computer, we behave differently from the ways we did fifteen years ago. We all experience and respond to new behavioral norms. It’s not incorrect to blame “the Internet,” but we have to be clear about what we mean. Blaming “the Internet” is like blaming “culture” or “the patriarchy” for sexist behavioral norms. We need to understand all the dynamics—online and offline—in the new sexual landscape for young females.

I have been researching and tracking the subject of girls’ being labeled “sluts” and “hos” for twenty years. In the 1990s, I coined and popularized the term “slut-bashing” to describe a specific form of student-to-student verbal sexual harassment in which a preadolescent or adolescent girl is bullied because of her perceived or actual sexual behavior. The term “slut-bashing” caught on; it is now used as a matter of course by parents, school administrators, academics, and girls and women themselves. My 1999 book about slut-bashing,
Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation,
became assigned reading in many sociology and gender or women’s studies courses on college campuses nationwide.

Several years ago, I decided to update my research. My plan had been to speak with a new crop of adolescent girls to confirm that slut-bashing is as much of a problem now as it had been then. But the more people I spoke with, the more I came to recognize that the problem is actually much worse today, and that it affects not only adolescent girls but also young women. The new world order of the Internet has upended everything, and I had to completely rethink my arguments. Thus,
I Am Not a Slut
is not simply an update to
Slut!.
It is not merely a report on why girls are slut-bashed and how they respond. This book casts a spotlight of a wider circumference. In these pages, I explore the meanings of “slut” for both adolescent girls and college-age women; the reasons that so many young people today, in the age of the Internet, refer to females as sluts; the methods and strategies girls and women use to respond; and the consequences, sometimes tragic, that result.

I chose to write about slut-bashing because I had been called a slut myself when I was fourteen. I had been the subject of painful, cruel gossip that began during the spring of my freshman year of high school. Although it ebbed over time, it continued in some form until my high school graduation. Why was I called a slut? For one thing, I was an early developer. In my junior high class, I was the first to grow breasts and the first to menstruate. By ninth grade, I had the physique of an adult woman. My physical appearance alone marked me as a sexual being. But my appearance was not the sole trigger. I also did something profoundly stupid and selfish. I went out on a date with a boy whom my best female friend liked. Although the two of them were not dating and in fact barely knew each other (he attended a different school), I knew that she had her eye on him, and I should have demurred when he asked me out. We met in his apartment, with no parents or siblings around, and made out.

Yes, I did something terrible: I broke a basic commandment of friendship. However, the punishment I received did not fit the crime. When my friend found out (the boy called her and told her everything), she was hurt and enraged. She decided to get revenge by spreading stories about me. Kids I had never spoken with, girls as well as guys, came up to me to tell me off, to look at me with pity or contempt, and to make jokes at my expense. Strikingly, they did not seem to care about my betrayal of my friend, which I thought was the true misdeed. No, the only thing that interested them was salacious rumors about my sexuality.

At the time, I thought that I was the only girl who had ever experienced this type of name-calling. I also thought I deserved to be called a slut, because I felt guilty about my unethical behavior toward my friend. Therefore it never occurred to me to protest my treatment.

A decade later, a survey conducted by the American Association of University Women found that three-quarters of girls in grades eight through eleven nationwide were sexually harassed in school through name-calling, jokes, gestures, and looks. The
New York Times
reported on the survey during the summer of 1993. I remember eating a muffin in my tiny Brooklyn studio apartment, tiredly flipping through the paper in my precious few minutes of headline-scanning before I began the commute into Manhattan for my job as an editorial assistant. A proverbial lightbulb went on over my head as I read the headline: “School Hallways as Gauntlets of Sexual Taunts.”
¹
A bar graph accompanying the article broke down the varieties of student-to-student sexual harassment; the graph showed that 42 percent of girls had “had sexual rumors spread about them.” At that eureka moment, I realized for the very first time that I too had experienced a form of sexual harassment, and that I was far from alone. My life would never be the same again. Now I had a vocabulary to explain to myself and to others what I had experienced. Now I could make sense of it all.