I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (10 page)

“I don’t want my little brother or little sister to hear that I’m a slut,” confesses Diana, a white twenty-two-year-old college senior in California. “That is my biggest fear. I want to be a role model to them, and I’m scared that I’ll be tarnished in their opinion.”

Calling a girl a slut in school often is an act of bullying that may be characterized as abuse. According to the American Association of University Women, nearly half of all girls (46 percent) in grades seven through twelve experience sexual harassment in some form, mostly verbal harassment (unwelcome sexual comments, jokes, or gestures) that takes place either in person or by text, email, Facebook, or other electronic media.
³⁵
When these acts fulfill certain criteria, they may be classified as “bullying.” According to Dan Olweus, the Swedish psychologist who pioneered research on bullying in the 1970s and 1980s, bullying is a form of abuse that encompasses three characteristics:

1
.   The acts are intentionally aggressive and negative. They may include physical contact, words, gestures, faces, or intentional social exclusion.

2
.   They are carried out repeatedly and over time.

3
.   There is an imbalance of power in the relationship between the victim and the bully or bullies. Because of this power imbalance, the student who is bullied has difficulty defending herself or himself.
³⁶

New research shows that victims of bullying are not necessarily socially isolated and completely unprotected at the very bottom of the social pecking order, and bullies are not generally at the very top. Rather, “most victimization is occurring in the middle to upper ranges of status,” according to Robert Faris, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, who led a research study on aggressive behavior among high school students. Many teenage bullies, Faris found, go after those whom they consider to be social rivals.
³⁷
Almost anyone can be a bully, and almost anyone can be a victim. Whether or not this was always the case, it certainly is so today in the cyber world. To Olweus, bullying always includes a differential in social status between the bully and the bullied. To Faris, that distinction is not a necessary component.

With regard to slut-bashing, I observe a differential in adherence to feminine norms. Therefore, I advance a slightly different way of looking at bullying through the lens of the “slut” label:
Slut-bashing is a particular form of bullying, I argue, because it is verbal harassment conducted repeatedly over time in which a girl is intentionally targeted because she does not adhere to feminine norms.
Thus, slut-bashing is less about social status and social power and more about
gendered
status and
gendered
power. From afar, the slut-basher and her victim may appear to occupy a similar rung on the social ladder, but the girl labeled a slut is vulnerable as a result of her botched performance of femininity.

Bullying is a hot topic of conversation—among adults. Spam lands in our in-boxes asking, “Is Bullying on Social Networks a Problem?” We were transfixed in May 2012 when
a Rutgers student, Dharun Ravi, was convicted for bullying his gay roommate, Tyler Clementi, through social media. When a Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, was accused of having bullied a gay classmate in high school, the news landed on the front page of the
New York Times.
School social workers email parents with updates on professional development workshops they’ve attended on bullying intervention techniques.

But the discourse is quite different among teenagers. They tend to be loath to describe acts of bullying with the term “bullying,” which they perceive to be a problem limited to younger kids in elementary or middle school. In part this may be the result of the implementation of antibullying programs within elementary and middle schools; when students graduate and move on to high school, they may associate bullying as a phenomenon from their past and not of their present. But in large part, teenagers want and need to regard themselves as agents with control over their lives. They don’t want to be told that they are powerless in the face of a phenomenon greater than they are. “Admitting that they’re being bullied, or worse, that they are bullies, slots them into a narrative that’s disempowering and makes them feel weak and childish,” explain danah boyd and Alice Marwick, researchers at Microsoft Research whose work focuses on teenagers’ use of social media.
³⁸

Instead, teenagers—particularly girls—refer not to “bullying” but to “drama.” “Drama” can mean gossiping about another girl, joking about her, or calling her names, explain boyd and Marwick.
³⁹
Different from the conventional understandings of bullying, drama is performed exclusively by
girls; it is reciprocal; and it is performed in public online. Drama is a way to get attention. It is a public performance. “‘Drama’ allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying,” write boyd and Marwick. “As such, they can retain agency—and save face—rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative. Drama is a gendered process that perpetuates conventional gender norms. . . . Dismissing conflict as drama lets teens frame the social dynamics and emotional impact as inconsequential, allowing them to ‘save face’ rather than taking on the mantle of bully or victim.”
⁴⁰

My interviewees repeatedly preferred the word “drama” when describing acts of slut-bashing. “Drama” is a concept they understand, and it helps them organize their thoughts about what has occurred to them. Oksana, a white twenty-two-year-old college senior in New York State, shared with me that when she was in the ninth grade, “there was all this drama after I had a sexual experience with my boyfriend.” Girls who were friendly with the boyfriend started calling Oksana a slut. They wrote comments on her friends’ Facebook pages such as “Don’t hang out with Oksana.” She says, “It was bad because everybody’s network is connected, so everybody sees it right away.” But she was careful never to use the words “bullying” or “slut-bashing” or any term that would imply that the girls were behaving inappropriately, and that she might have needed protection. “They just tried to create drama,” she insisted. Oksana used the word “drama” to demonstrate simultaneously that she was slut-bashed and that she’s a tough girl. “Drama” is a vehicle for taking agency or ownership over a horrible situation. Downplaying the events
as drama shows that a girl is not a blubbering victim. She is confident; she can handle the situation. But regardless of the language they use to describe slut-bashing, the reality is that most girls can’t handle it.

Slut-bashing isn’t new, but the Internet and mobile communication have enabled it to envelop girls’ lives. Unlike for previous generations of girls, slut-bashing now is inescapable, anonymous, and eternal. A girl may be called a slut or a ho everywhere and at any time—not just when she’s in the school cafeteria or gathering books from her locker. She can’t hide, rushing to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her; she can’t even transfer to a different school and get a clean start. If she’s being slut-bashed, hurtful messages appear the moment she turns on her phone, tablet, or computer. Disconnecting from the Internet isn’t a viable solution, since that means disconnecting from social life completely. Besides, with teachers increasingly integrating technology into their classroom and homework assignments, disconnecting is not even a choice a girl is permitted to make. Diane, a white twenty-six-year-old marriage and family therapist in California, tells me that when she was seventeen, a “gang of girls” attacked her on MySpace. “They called me a bitch to make me fearful and to threaten me. It was easy for them to reach out to me, to find me, with the technology, which was pretty new at that time. They could see that I had posted pictures of myself with a guy I had hooked up with, and they decided that that meant I was having sex with guys and therefore I was deserving of being attacked.”

Slut-bashers are also strengthened by the Internet and mobile communication. Hiding behind the anonymity of the
technology, their impulse to bully is fueled by the knowledge that no matter how coarse and abusive they are, they can’t be tracked down. They may regret their actions after the fact; but once comments are sent, they can be endlessly mass-forwarded, posted online, and linked to multiple sites. Completely scrubbing away the names, photos, and comments about an individual girl may become impossible. Even when an online comment is deleted, it’s never really eliminated.

Not only young females are vulnerable: any person’s professional or social reputation can be discredited because of untrue reports posted online. We are all vulnerable in the digital world. But many adults can move on, fight back, enlist professional support, or post their own narratives. Typically, young people possess far fewer resources and far less savvy.

The addictive nature of the Internet can make its effects unbearably corrosive. Psychologists treat patients who have been diagnosed with Internet Addiction Disorder. When a girl today is labeled a slut, her bullies are in her bedroom with her, one click away. As much as she may not want to, she can’t quite help clicking and reading the most recent remarks posted about her online for all to comment upon.

Who ever thought that we could be nostalgic for the odious comments carved into bathroom walls? The ephemeral nature of that graffiti posed an advantage. A freshly painted wall after summer break indicated that what was written last year was dead and buried. A new year meant a new start for both the bullied and the bullies. However, unless the wall was photographed, there was no evidence of the abusive comments. If a girl was abused year after year, she lacked a compilation of evidence over time. Today, a girl can create a record
of screenshots and printouts to bolster her position that she’s being bullied.

To explain the viciousness of anonymous bullying, I need to say only one word: Formspring. A social media site created in 2009 that has since waned in popularity, Formspring quickly became the online destination for mean, crude, anonymous comments and questions. It was, according to the
New York Times
, “the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip.”
⁴¹
Sharon broke it down for me: “You create an account, and then people can anonymously ask you any question about anything. Since they know you’ll never know who they are, they ask crazy things. They can search your name, or they find you because your profile is connected to your Facebook or your Twitter or Tumblr. They ask things like, ‘What size bra do you wear? Your boobs are huge.’ Or ‘Why are you acting like a slut and whore?’ Some people actually expect you to answer. Then you post their question with an answer, so everyone sees it.” At that point, the identity of the person questioned becomes public, but the questioner still remains anonymous.

I stopped scribbling notes on my legal pad, flabbergasted. “Why on earth would anyone
choose
to have a Formspring?” I asked. Yet Sharon was the one dumbfounded by my middle-aged obtuseness. “The entire high school was involved in it!” she replied. “How can you
not
be curious to see what it was all about?”

In her insightful exploration of bullying,
Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy
, the author Emily Bazelon notes that a million people joined Formspring in the six weeks
after the site went live; over the next few years, it had enlisted twenty-five million users, one-third of them seventeen or younger. “The whole point of Formspring,” she observes, “seemed to be that it was risky and public—like walking on a tightrope.” One fourteen-year-old girl told her, “It’s like an interview where you find out how other people really see you. It’s just honest. Even if what you find out about yourself is bad, you think you want to know.”
⁴²

Sharon echoed this obsessive desire to know what everyone is saying about you, even if it’s abusive. “Does anyone ask neutral or nice questions, or is it all mean stuff?” I wondered.

“All mean stuff,” Sharon answered, “because that’s more fun.”

“And why does anyone answer and post mean questions?” Sharon looked me right in the eye. “Girls want attention,” she replied. She paused. “But we have to start playing smarter.”

Abusive comments on Formspring have preceded—and even followed—a number of teens’ suicides. In fact, Formspring ceased being a well-known secret among teens when the word got out in March 2010 that it was linked with the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl, Alexis Pilkington from Long Island. Although her parents did not believe that abusive online messages caused her to take her own life, Suffolk County police officers investigated graphic, lewd images that were posted
after
news had spread about her death. On Formspring and Facebook, people posted photos of Pilkington doctored to look as though she had a noose around her neck.
⁴³

Since Pilkington’s suicide, Formspring has been replaced in popularity among teenagers by Ask.fm, founded in 2010.
The company says it has fifty-seven million users in 150 countries, with half its users under the age of eighteen. The site adds an additional two hundred thousand new users each day. The average visitor spends one hundred minutes a month on the site.
⁴⁴
In 2013, a fourteen-year-old British girl committed suicide after receiving abusive messages from Ask.fm users such as “drink bleach,” “go get cancer,” and “go die.” A mother of a teenage girl from Irvine, California, who was bullied on the site told the
Los Angeles Times
, “For teens, this is a feeding frenzy in shark-infested waters without a cage.”
⁴⁵
A twelve-year-old girl from central Florida, Rebecca Sedwick, also killed herself after receiving hate-filled messages from fifteen middle school children on Ask.fm as well as the messaging apps Kik and Voxer. The harassers wrote, “Why are you still alive?” and “Can you die please?”
⁴⁶