I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (13 page)

The Pretty Girl: “They Saw Me as a Threat”

Sometimes a girl is targeted because other girls are jealous of her. They may regard her as exceptionally pretty, or as someone who’s getting too much attention from boys, or who seems to have some undefinable unfair advantage as a girl. Erica, a twenty-one-year-old sophomore at a New England college, falls into this category. We are speaking to each other via Skype. Erica is white with shoulder-length light brown hair. She’s put on a touch of makeup today—I detect a bit of eye shadow beneath her strong, groomed eyebrows. She comes across as a natural- and wholesome-looking young woman who is pretty in a subtle, laid-back way.

“In the eighth grade, the kids called me a cocktease because even though I had girl friends, I also had several close male friends, and that was considered weird,” she recalls. “It was like
they thought I was looking for male attention, and that that was a problem. When I got to the ninth grade, I was hanging out with the friends of my older brother, who was in the tenth grade. There was this one girl in the tenth grade who wanted to cut me down. I think she thought, ‘Who is this ninth-grade girl hanging out with these older boys?’ She wanted to make me look bad, and she started going around saying that I was a slut and having all this sex.” She then got other girls to do it.

Erica had never even kissed a boy. “I was just comfortable with guys. People didn’t get it. It was like they couldn’t imagine that I
wasn’t
being sexual with them.” The name-calling was in person, online, and through AOL Instant Messenger. “One day a group of five girls pulled me aside and said to me, ‘Jeff is off-limits. You’re not allowed to talk to him.’ But Jeff was my friend! They didn’t want me hanging around with guys at all.” Erica believes that the girls were insecure about their own status with guys. Fabricating a story that she was a slut was a strategy to isolate her from the guys, to sabotage her status and poison her popularity.

Diana, a white twenty-two-year-old woman in California, was also positioned in the center of a false slut narrative. When she was eighteen, during the summer between her graduation from high school and the beginning of college, she began working at a restaurant as a hostess. She became friendly with the chef, who was twenty-six. “Someone started stories that we were hooking up late at night in the kitchen. There were lots of crazy stories that were not true. We were not hooking up at all! He was more like an older brother to me. But there was this server who was hooking up with him, and I guess she saw me as a threat. All of a sudden she got all
these other people at the restaurant to say that I was a slut. I felt like I was constantly being watched and judged; it was like being in high school all over again—all this drama. But it wasn’t high school; it was my workplace, and I had to put on a smile the whole time and make it seem like everything was OK even though it wasn’t.”

I asked Diana why she thought the server refused to believe that there was nothing sexual going on with the chef. She doesn’t want to answer me, but I press her. “I guess it’s because I’m considered pretty,” she finally says sheepishly. Diana is thin and blond with a small nose. “It’s possible that the women thought I was more attractive than they are. I feel really bad saying this, but really I think that they were just jealous.”

In Erica’s and Diana’s case, why didn’t the guys stand up for them? Because a guy’s status is enhanced if everyone thinks he’s having sex with another girl, even if in reality the two are nonromantic friends. It’s not in his interest to set the record straight. At Diana’s restaurant, “any time a new girl comes in [as an employee], the guys all look her over to decide if they want to hook up with her. They try to one-up each other over how many girls at the restaurant they’ve slept with.” So the girl or woman in this situation is left on her own, no one defending her or explaining that the stories are in fact not true.

The Raped Girl: “She Believed Him, Not Me”

When I began my original research on slut-bashing two decades ago, I was ignorant of the prevalence of sexual assault.
As I interviewed more and more girls and women in the 1990s about being labeled sluts, however, I was repeatedly told stories about sexual assault—at the hands of strangers, dates, acquaintances, and family members. I wondered: How was it possible that so many of these girls and women had been assaulted? I came to understand how widespread sexual assault truly is, and how often it is minimized or denied, especially when a girl or woman believes that she has done something to deserve it. Because so many girls and women who are sexually assaulted are labeled as sluts, many believe that they were not truly assaulted. After all, the thinking goes, a slut isn’t entitled to say no and if she does, why would anyone listen or care?

This is what the “slut” label does at its very worst: it convinces girls and women who have been victimized that they are the ones who have done something wrong. This dynamic is experienced in two ways. First, if a girl is already labeled a slut and then is assaulted, she may blame herself for having the reputation in the first place; if her assaulter knew about her reputation, he may have reasoned that she was not entitled to refuse a sexual encounter with him and that he was entitled to force her. Second, if a girl is not already labeled a slut and is assaulted, she may then become labeled as a result of her assault; when others find out that she was involved in a coerced sexual encounter, they very often side with the guy who assaulted her and blame the victim for having been victimized. A nonslut, a sickeningly high proportion of people believe, knows how to avoid being raped. It is the female’s responsibility to not get raped rather than the rapist’s responsibility to not rape.

Samantha, a white thirty-one-year-old waitress on the West Coast, was labeled a slut after she was raped. She was fifteen and drunk at a high school party. She knew the guy who raped her; he was twenty-three and the party was at his house. He was dating a senior girl, whom Samantha knew. He was not drunk. “He took me into his room,” Samantha remembers. “I was in and out of consciousness. He was a big guy, and he penetrated me. Other people at the party must have known what was happening because someone tried to get me out of the room, although it’s possible that they thought we were just having sex.”

The next day, she told her rapist’s girlfriend. “I said, ‘I got drunk and your boyfriend took advantage of me.’ But she believed him, not me. Then she and another girl ganged up on me and called me names. The other girl was angry with me because I was dating her ex-boyfriend. I was real confused because I thought I had done the right thing by telling her, even though I felt that I was at fault because I had been drunk. But these two girls had their own reasons for telling everyone I was a slut. Then there was sort of a joke about the rape. It was like, ‘Don’t leave Ted alone with your girlfriend because he’ll rape her,’ so people did know the truth, but he never got a bad reputation the way I did because of it.”

“I’m guilty of having done the same thing myself,” Allison confesses to me. An acclaimed actor who has performed on HBO and onstage, Allison is a thirty-nine-year-old white woman who also made a choice to believe the rapist rather than the rape victim. When she was in college, her fiancé sexually assaulted her best friend. “If I believed her,” Allison explains, “I would have been losing my future. So I stayed
with him and didn’t speak with her. The truth is that I knew it had happened. I did believe her. Half of me looked at him as a rapist, but the other half worried what would happen if we broke up.” Allison married the man who raped her best friend. They divorced after three years when Allison realized that she could be alone and also be OK. At that point, she could no longer justify to herself remaining in a relationship with someone she knew had done a terrible thing.

Samantha tells me that after she was raped, “I was messed up sexually for a very long time. At first I deliberately didn’t sleep with anyone. I thought the rape was my fault, and I just wanted to get away from anything having to do with sex. Then, when I was older and I did start having sex, I would get triggered and just start crying, sometimes in the middle. I’ve been to counseling, but this is something I just have to live with.”

I ask Samantha if the rape or the “slut” reputation in the wake of the rape is the cause of her distress. “It’s both. It’s the two events together. But they are also separate. Being raped is being abused by a man. Being called a slut is being abused by a woman.”

When Boys Slut-Bash

Although I have found that most slut-bashers in schools are girls, boys also participate. Sometimes a boy threatens to spread a “slut” reputation if a girl breaks up with him. That is what happened to Sarah, a white twenty-one-year-old lesbian from the East Coast. Before she came out, she had a
boyfriend in her junior and senior years of high school, “but he really didn’t want me to break up with him,” she recalls. “It was a bad relationship. I wasn’t sure where my sexuality was going, and I probably shouldn’t have been with him in the first place. I knew from the beginning that it wasn’t working out. He was not the nicest person, and he was possessive.”

Then he started using slut-bashing as a form of blackmail. When Sarah told him that she had doubts about their relationship, “he threatened to tell everyone at school I was a slut and he said he would make up lies about me. I was terrified that I would lose my reputation and my friends. When I look back on it now, I realize that probably wouldn’t have happened, but at the time I didn’t know that. Plus, I had really low self-esteem, and I thought bad things about myself, so I thought that everything he said must be true.” Sarah stayed in the relationship for a year and a half even though she wanted out after a few weeks.

Other times, boys slut-bash for the usual reason—to put a girl in her place. Maria, the twenty-one-year-old Latina, tells me that just two months ago she was called a slut to her face by two guys who go to her college. Maria is bisexual and openly sexually active with multiple partners. Until now, no one had ever called her a slut before. But she was at a party, and a guy approached her, saying, “I’ve heard about you. I heard you get around a lot.” He said it in a flirtatious way, leading Maria to believe that he was interested in her. As he approached her again, another guy whom she recognized but didn’t know walked over to the two of them and said to the first guy, right in front of Maria, “She’s a slut.” Then the two guys laughed.

“Right in front of me,” Maria adds bitterly. “I had never experienced that before. I felt humiliated. Before this incident, I never felt that I had to apologize for my sexuality, but now I was being judged. It doesn’t feel good to be judged. They laughed at me like I’m a joke.”

To these college boys, there is something wrong with Maria’s femininity. But if she’s not behaving in an appropriately feminine way, does that mean that she’s masculine? No: the “slut” is a gendered category unto itself, neither completely feminine yet also not masculine. When boys slut-bash, they position themselves in relation to the “slut” to prop up their own masculinity just as slut-bashing girls position themselves to prop up their own femininity.

Michael Bamberg, a psychologist at Clark University, has demonstrated that adolescent boys make sense of themselves as masculine through ridicule of a “slut.” In a fascinating 2004 journal article, he analyzes the way five fifteen-year-old boys described a girl in their school as a slut.
⁶⁶
They told the adult moderator about the girl during a three-minute digression within a two-hour group discussion. The boys had been talking about friendships with boys when the moderator shifted the topic to girls. Two boys then began to describe the female classmate, saying that she was sexually promiscuous and may have been pregnant. They went on to relate that she apparently had written a letter in which she discussed her pregnancy. One of the boys, Ted, claimed that he had access to the letter. The boys’ word choices are pivotal in understanding how this girl functioned as a symbol of femininity gone wrong. The digression started out like this:

TED
   Actually, a girl, a girl in our class . . . last year she was like, she was always a little bit crazy, she always wanted a lot of attention and she didn’t get it, she didn’t get the attention she needed, and so this year she’s had a lot of sex with boys in order to . . . gain attention of others around her.

FRED
   And not just sex but everything. She’s got—earned—the reputation . . . she’s earned the reputation of being . . . a slut, that’s how everyone knows her.

MODERATOR
   . . . How does she feel?

TED
   She likes it.

FRED
   I think she likes it.

TED
   She needs the attention, she likes the attention. I think she enjoys the attention so much that I think she is worthless . . . she’s horrible . . .

FRED
   She . . . most girls are not like that but for some reason you know how they say negative attention is better than no attention at all. She really likes the attention she’s getting.

TED
   Yeah . . . and also . . .

FRED
   Now everyone knows who she is . . . I know it may sound mean to say this but we couldn’t really care less about her anyway.
⁶⁷

Ted introduced the topic of the girl and ascribed to her full agency. As Ted told it, the girl wanted attention from her peers, and in full control of her actions, chose to have “a lot of sex with boys” so that she could “gain attention of others around her.” As a result, Fred pointed out, the girl now had a reputation of being a slut. But notice that Fred started to
say that she “got” a reputation and then changed his word to “earned.” Bamberg points out that this linguistic slippage is not an accident. Fred indicated to his peers and to the moderator that the girl deserved to be called a slut. In these boys’ minds, Bamberg writes, “What she did led to what she got; it was deserved. She earned this reputation; this is a fair deal.”
⁶⁸
Agency was placed completely on the shoulders of the girl. The agency of the boys and other classmates who had labeled her a slut was now erased from the narrative, because in this telling, it was inevitable and natural that such a girl would be called a slut.