I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (11 page)

Stephanie, the fifteen-year-old girl from New York City, explains, “People can ask you questions anonymously—really personal questions. You can post video responses also. People feel obligated to answer what other people ask you. You could ignore the questions, but then people will give you a hard time: ‘Why are you on Ask.fm if you’re not going to answer the questions?’ Then you’re not relevant. People won’t go to your page anymore, and no one will ask you questions anymore.”

Kaitlyn adds, “If you’re a girl, the questions are 100 percent are about sex. ‘How many guys have you hooked up with?’ ‘How far have you gone?’ ‘How many blow jobs have you given?’ These questions start in the seventh grade.”

“What do guys get asked?” I wondered.

“Their questions are also about sex, but the tone is more
playful with guys. It’s not judgmental,” Katilyn explains. “The guys ask each other questions to get advice, like ‘How far did that girl go with you, and would you do it again?’ It’s not about judging the guy.”

But the girls are always judged on the basis of their sexuality. Sometimes they are lumped together into a group of interchangeable “sluts” via “slut lists.” These compilations of girls rated “hottest” to “ugliest,” sometimes listing phone numbers next to full names, were shocking in the early 2000s but now are as common as a celebrity sex tape. Certainly you don’t need the Internet to create a “slut list”: At New Jersey’s top-ranked high school, Millburn High, senior girls every year for a decade used paper and pens—the old-fashioned, quaint method of bullying. The list included incoming freshman by name and was circulated on the first day of school as a hazing ritual.
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But in this day and age, who needs notebook paper? How last century. Online “slut lists” are not only faster and easier, they’re harder to attribute to any individual slut-basher.

In one of the more well-publicized online incidents, in 2011 a list of over a hundred girls from seven high schools in Westchester, New York, and Greenwich, Connecticut, was forwarded so many times that one teen decided that it would be easier for everyone involved to post the list on Facebook. To avoid being flagged on Facebook as abusive, the boy called it a “smut list” rather than a “slut list.” The girls, some as young as fourteen, were ranked according to the sexual encounters they allegedly had engaged in and were willing to do, and the list included anonymous commentary. Their first and last names were included, but all boys’ names were omitted. The “smut list” group received over seven thousand
likes overnight. Facebook removed it two days later after parents and school administrators appealed to the site to take it down, but the damage already had been done.
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The Sexual Double Standard

Why do teenagers appear to have a relentless desire to categorize girls sexually? Because they (as we all do) live and breathe under the regime of the sexual double standard.

Yes, the sexual double standard exists even today. On the face of it, this claim may seem ludicrous. After all, many women are exceedingly open about their sexuality, and from afar it may appear that they face no consequences for doing so. Many willingly and inexplicably have bared their breasts for Girls Gone Wild videos and during halftime at football games.
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Girls’ and women’s tops have cutouts in the most unexpected places, forcing the wearer to expose her bra or forego it altogether. When Madonna and Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl, their outfits and shoes made them look as if they had walked off a porn set. Girls and women have flooded Facebook with so many photos of themselves in bikinis that a new iPhone app, Pikinis, automatically finds swimsuit photos of your friends or even strangers based on their proximity to your city or your campus. Brides routinely celebrate at their bachelorette parties by eating penis-shaped cake.

But it is a misunderstanding to conclude that these acts are the result of sexual equality. The opposite holds true: Some women sexualize themselves inappropriately as a result of sexual
inequality
. A great deal of the time, women’s
sexuality is stomped over. In fact, many Americans can’t handle hearing the word “vagina” and therefore censor it. In 2007, a public high school in Cross River, New York, suspended three sixteen-year-old girls who said the word “vagina” during a reading from Eve Ensler’s play
The Vagina Monologues
.
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In 2012, Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown was barred from speaking on the House floor after she used the word “vagina” during a speech against a bill seeking to ban abortions. A fellow legislator said, “What she said was so offensive. It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”
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In 2013, an Idaho science teacher was investigated for using the word “vagina” with his tenth-grade students in biology class.
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In multiple separate incidents, Facebook has removed photos of mothers breastfeeding, saying that they violated the company’s rules of decency, even though paid advertisements on the site displayed topless women.
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Often, boys and men sexualize females in an aggressive manner with an implicit understanding that it’s acceptable to force a girl or woman to have sex even if she says no. At the top-tier Piedmont High School in the San Francisco Bay Area, a “Fantasy Slut League” of male athletes amassed points for sexual activity with female students in an online competition that lasted for five to six years.
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At California State University, Long Beach, a weekly student newspaper ran an article titled “How to Get Laid: A Girl’s Guide for Guys,” which included this nugget of advice: “When you get to her place just get to the fucking no dilly dallying, you don’t want to give her time to really think about it. Don’t be afraid to be aggressive.”
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In sum, female body parts are regarded as offensive, female sexual activity is mocked as a competitive sport for guys or preyed upon as an opportunity for coercion, and girls are reduced to sexual playthings. If
you
were caught in this messed-up milieu, isn’t it possible that you might respond, at least sometimes, in less than healthy ways? Maybe you too might internalize your own objectification. Perhaps you also would flaunt your body, sometimes aggressively, sometimes in inappropriate times and places. Maybe this is the only way you know to get attention and have a good time; after all, no one has shown you anything different. If women’s bodies and sexual desires were perceived as utterly normal and mundane, if they could consent to or refuse offers without fear of repercussions, perhaps women wouldn’t feel compelled to objectify themselves (or men; don’t forget that penis cake) because they would have nothing to prove.

But in the meanwhile, no matter what a female does sexually, she is judged in a way that males are not. Boys will be boys . . . and girls will be “sluts.” And now we even have the research to prove it.

A University of Michigan psychologist, Terri Conley, designed a study with her colleagues in 2012 showing that heterosexual women who accept offers of casual sex are judged more harshly than men are. She further demonstrated that women are less likely than men to accept such offers, and that this gender difference is at least partially caused by anticipatory negative judgment. Women themselves also told Conley and her research partners that they expect to be perceived more negatively than men are for accepting an offer of casual sex.
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Conley and her colleagues conducted several experiments as part of their study, encompassing nearly three thousand participants, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-four. In the first experiment, college student volunteers read about one random student approaching another, introducing himself or herself, and asking if they could have sex that night. The second student agrees. Half the participants read a version in which the second student who accepted the casual sex offer was named Lisa, while the other participants were told that the accepter was named Mark. Both male and female participants rated Lisa more negatively than Mark. “Overall,” write Conley and her colleagues, “our results were consistent with the existence of a sexual double standard for casual sex. Participants perceived Lisa to be less intelligent, less mentally healthy, more promiscuous, less competent, and more risky than Mark—even though Mark and Lisa both accepted the sexual offer.”
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In a second experiment, Conley and her colleagues wanted the participants to situate themselves in the scenario. How would they expect to be perceived if they themselves accepted or rejected an offer of casual sex? The female participants who imagined agreeing to the sexual offer reported that they expected to be perceived, relative to the men, as more promiscuous, socially inappropriate, and sexually desperate. They also reported that if they turned down the sexual offer, they would expect to be regarded, relative to the men, as more intelligent, mentally healthy, physically attractive, socially appropriate, and sexually well-adjusted. In short, women assumed that accepting a casual sex offer would cause others to perceive them negatively and that rejecting a sexual proposal would cause others to think of them positively.
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Finally, heterosexual participants recalled the most recent time they experienced a casual sex offer. Overwhelmingly, men were more likely to accept the offer (63 percent) than to reject it, while women were far more likely to reject the offer (70 percent) than to accept it. The women reported that they were less likely to accept the offer because they perceived they would have been evaluated more negatively had they accepted it.
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Based on these results, Conley and her colleagues see evidence not only of a stigma for women who engage in casual heterosexual sex, but also of a “backlash effect”—conforming to sexual norms because of the fear of stigma. In other words, the fear of a stigma associated with accepting an offer of casual sex leads women to refuse such offers. Conley and her colleagues write, “Our results strongly support the existence of a sexual double standard, at least regarding casual sexuality.”
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Their findings are consistent with the sexual double standard because they suggest that men are granted more sexual freedom to engage in sexual activity than women are.

But isn’t it possible that women are less likely to accept an offer of casual sex not because they are afraid of stigma but because they just don’t like casual sex as much as men do? Maybe they are just biologically different. Maybe women’s and men’s hormones and chromosomes render them essentially dissimilar from one another. This could be true in theory, but in practice it isn’t. Under the right circumstances, Conley shows, women are just as interested as men are in casual sex.

Jumping off from a widely cited 1989 study by two psychologists, Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield, which
demonstrated that men are fairly likely to agree to sex with a stranger while women are exceptionally unlikely to do so, Conley in a separate study sought to show that this gender difference is not biologically determined.
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She theorized that in the Clark and Hatfield paradigm, a casual sexual proposal “is uniquely repulsive to women . . . because of what it conveys about the male proposer’s sexual capabilities and safety.”
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She warned that “to generalize from this situation to make judgments about women’s attitudes toward casual sexual encounters in general is not justified”
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and that “existing research suggests that concerns about danger and pleasure are prominent for women in a variety of casual sexual encounters.”
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In fact, Conley demonstrated that women avoid casual sexual encounters of the type described by Clark and Hatfield only when they believe that the sexual encounter will be unpleasant or risky. They are more likely to participate in sexual encounters if they have good reason to believe that the experience will be pleasant and safe. “In that way,” Conley wrote, “women are a lot like men.”
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If the circumstances are favorable to women—including being free of stigma—women and men behave similarly. Thus the sexual double standard should cease, because it is built on the assumption that males want sex more than females as a result of biological differences.

I spoke with Conley on the phone, asking her to help me make sense of her research. I wanted to know: If it’s not in fact true, why did the Clark and Hatfield study perpetuate the idea that males want sex more than females do because of biological gender differences? The sexual double standard, Conley responded, is a “fundamental attribution
error—when you make attributions to individuals instead of to the situations they are in.” When you take into account stigma and backlash, females do not differ from males in their sexual desire. Thus, a female who expresses sexual desire is not deviant; there is zero biological basis for the concept of a slut.

Furthermore, Conley’s research also suggests, she told me, “that the reasons casual sex may be ‘bad’ for women are fixable. For example, we know that in casual sexual situations, men believe that women are not as entitled to pleasure. And we also know that there is a stigma for women. If we could change those things, then the sexual situation would become a more equal and even playing ground.” In such a scenario, the idea of a slut would make no sense from any angle—biological or social—because female sexual agency would be considered yawningly normal.