I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (15 page)

Discipline and Punish

Reciprocal slut-shaming among peers is a new phenomenon. When I was harassed as a “slut” in the 1980s, the idea of “Hey, slut” being a friendly greeting was absurd. Trying to make sense of this fast-moving twenty-first-century behavior, I first turned to the works of several twentieth-century philosophers of critical theory for whom the power structures implicit in the acts of performance and surveillance play a big role. I wanted to comprehend the psychology of reciprocal slut-shaming. Why has exchanging insults become acceptable, expected, and even desired behavior among young women?

Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, argued that capitalist states require an ideology—a system of ideas and representations that are understood as natural yet in fact are manufactured by the state to exercise power so that individuals (or “subjects”) accept the state’s authority. Althusser called this process “interpellation” or “hailing.” He offered the example of a police officer calling out to a passerby, “Hey, you there . . .” When the hailed individual turns to acknowledge the police officer, he transforms from an autonomous
person into a subject willing to accept the authority of the state.
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He accepts that the police officer holds power over him. The passerby accepts as natural and unremarkable that there exists a power imbalance between himself and the officer.

Through the “slut” greeting, girls and young women hail each other the way the police officer hails the citizen. In this verbal exchange, however, each female takes a turn acting as police officer
and
passerby. Femininity is an ideology, and slut-shaming is a hailing mechanism that transforms females into both disciplinary agents
as well as
feminine subjects. When woman A posts a sexually revealing photo on a social networking site, and woman B comments, “You’re such a slut!” woman A recognizes herself as a “slut”—either a “good” or “bad” one depending on whether or not woman B “liked” the photo—and also affirms the fact that she is being judged and policed. Woman B is policing woman A. When woman A reciprocates on woman B’s post, the roles are reversed.

Sexual policing is enormously easy today because women’s bodies are photographed, tracked, and monitored overtly and covertly within social media. Boys’ and men’s bodies are photographed, tracked, and monitored as well, but not nearly as often as girls’ and women’s are. The social news site Reddit, along with Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, and other sites such as Creepshots.com, has encouraged users to post “creepshots”—nonconsensual pictures of women taken in public spaces. The Reddit forum Creepshots (now shut down) stated on its introductory page, “When you are in public, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. We kindly ask women to respect our right to admire your bodies and stop complaining.”
⁷³

“My students describe a suffocation,” says Shira Tarrant, PhD, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of
Men and Feminism
and
When Sex Became Gender
. “They feel a relentless pressure to put themselves on display. They are constantly under surveillance, not only with the ATM cameras and other surveillance cameras that are on streets and in stores and in national parks, but also with the photos they and their friends take for Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat. They have to perform for the cameras constantly.”

In a sense, young women are living within a surveillance prison—a “panopticon.” We all are. The panopticon was a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher of utilitarianism, in the late eighteenth century (although it was never built), that enabled a watchman to observe prisoners without their knowledge. The panopticon consisted of a courtyard with a circular tower in the center. Surrounding the tower were buildings divided into cells; each cell had two windows. One window faced the tower, and the other faced the outside to bring in light. One gaze, like a Facebook news feed, saw everything.

Michel Foucault, another French philosopher, expanded on the concept of the panopticon. He noted that the cells become “small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”
⁷⁴
The prisoner can’t see if the watchman is in the tower; he never knows if he’s being observed within his “theater.” Therefore, he must always assume that he’s being observed and perform the way he would if he knew that the watchman were eyeing him. In effect, he becomes his own jailer. Meanwhile, the watchman
is himself also being observed and therefore must regulate his own behavior as well.
⁷⁵
Observation becomes a mechanism of discipline and coercion. Self-surveillance—the result of having to assume you are always being watched—assures that at all times, individuals discipline themselves.

Self-surveillance also underlies the fictional totalitarian society depicted in George Orwell’s novel
1984
, in which the leader known as Big Brother and his Thought Police spy on all citizens through hidden microphones and cameras. Orwell wrote in 1949,

T
here was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
⁷⁶

Orwell’s description of self-disciplining as a result of surveillance was prescient. Whether or not the National Security Agency is a Big Brother monitoring US citizens, in our digitally networked age we are all monitored by people we know and do not know: friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and everyone within each of their social orbits.

The feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky expanded on Foucault’s understanding of disciplinary practices with regard to women.
⁷⁷
“We are born male or female, but not
masculine or feminine,” she notes. Femininity is a performance requiring “disciplinary practices that produce a body which in gesture and appearance is recognizably feminine.”
⁷⁸
Bartky points out that to conform to femininity, a woman must always remember that her body is meant to be seen by others. Therefore she must discipline her body, which must be the “right” size and shape; she must submit to regimes to control her skin, hair, makeup, fingernails, and toenails; and she must select an appropriate wardrobe. Bartky locates the source of discipline within a “system of sexual subordination” to which women voluntarily seek initiation. “No one is marched off for electrolysis at the end of a rifle,” she points out, “nor can we fail to appreciate the initiative and ingenuity displayed by countless women in an attempt to master the rituals of beauty.” But women do risk social and romantic censure, even ostracism, if they don’t conform to societal norms of beauty, and therefore they may become compliant within the regime of femininity “just as surely as the army aims to turn its raw recruits into soldiers.”
⁷⁹
Femininity as an ideology serves as a prison guard, and because women are rewarded for compliance, they police themselves as if they lived within a supervised prison.

Motherhood had long been the central feature of normative femininity, according to Bartky, but in the 1980s, when she wrote her analysis, she argued that motherhood had given way to the sexualized body as that which defines femininity.
⁸⁰
Three decades later, the self-regulation of women’s bodies has become truly oppressive in the mirrored hallways of social media. Today, the aesthetic of pornography determines the ideal of sexiness; achieving a sexy appearance involves
mimicking the grooming habits of women who work in pornography. Women involved in sex work have become mainstream stars, even role models. When Jenna Jameson promoted her book
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star
, thirteen-year-old girls came to readings to tell her she was their role model. Although Jameson’s book relates a story of resilience—Jameson overcame rape, drug abuse, and alcoholism to become hugely successful in the adult film industry—her teenage fans seemed to have overlooked, or been unaware of, the book’s message. Jameson told the
Los Angeles Times
she was bothered by the fact that her young fans looked up to her as a porn star and not as a three-dimensional person.
⁸¹
When Tracy Quan, a prostitute who also wrote a book, shared a meet the author event at a Barnes & Noble with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, she told the
New York Times
, “If that’s not being part of the Establishment, I don’t know what is.”
⁸²
Since so many heterosexual boys and men fantasize about women who look like Jameson and Quan, many girls and women come to believe that they should look like Jameson and Quan themselves.

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Heather Wood Rudúlph, the authors of the book
Sexy Feminism
, point out that because of pornography, “huge breasts, platinum hair, and hairless vaginas seem standard,”
⁸³
and with the popularity of so-called Brazilian bikini waxes, it is now “a routine occurrence to pick your legs up over your head, approaching yoga’s plow position, and/or turn over on your side and spread your cheeks for the nice lady making you pretty.”
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To be sure, bikini line maintenance is not necessarily a form of pornographic grooming. Many women want to wear a bathing suit in
public without displaying errant pubic hairs, and a normal bikini wax, which strips away the hairs at the top of the inner thighs, is the least uncomfortable method of removing those pesky hairs. Brazilian waxes are different not in degree but in kind. In a Brazilian, every single pubic hair is ripped out. Hairlessness is popular because porn stars are hairless; many ordinary women and men associate sexiness with hairlessness. As pornography has gone mainstream, so has the porn aesthetic.

Pornographic grooming practices are not just for adult women. Preadolescent girls are now going to spas to get bikini waxes. “For waxing, 12 years old is the ‘new normal,’” Melanie Engle, a Philadelphia aesthetician, told the
Today
show’s website. Armstrong and Rudúlph note that one New York salon advertises special rates for “virgin” waxing of “virgin hair” (prepubescent traces of hair from pubic hair follicles). “Virgin hair can be waxed so successfully that growth can be permanently stopped in just two to six sessions,” explains the website for Wanda’s European Skin Care Center. “Save your child a lifetime of waxing . . . and put the money in the bank for her college education instead!” The owner told the
New York Post
she’d seen two hundred child clients in 2007 and advised girls to begin waxing at the age of six.
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Teenage girls, meanwhile, are turning to breast augmentation; in 2012, over 3,500 girls eighteen and younger underwent this procedure.
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If an adult woman contemplates having her breasts enlarged, she is capable of taking into account the medical risks involved to arrive at a sound decision. Such a procedure may not be risk-free, but at least she’s able to assess the costs and the benefits for herself. But girls who are still physically developing are not always capable of arriving at
the best decision. Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Center for Health Research, told the
Washington Post
that she has “concerns about teens undergoing plastic surgery at a time when they are psychologically vulnerable.” While the increases in surgery on noses and ears among children and teens under eighteen are not dramatic, the “increases in breast implants and liposuction are very dramatic. In fact, the number of girls 18 and younger getting implants has tripled in the last few years,” she says. The distinction between surgeries like rhinoplasty (nose reshaping) and otoplasty (pinning back protruding ears) versus breast implants is that the latter have a high complication rate, she adds. “Having something implanted in your body causes more problems as the implant ages,” she explains.
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Breast augmentation also implants an idea in a girl’s head: that her body should conform to a narrow ideal of sexiness.

Even before they menstruate, girls develop an awareness of themselves as sexual objects meant to pleasure guys. Shira Tarrant observes to me that for females, performance means looking sexy for the benefit of other people. Young women always have to think of themselves as sexualized objects to be consumed. “It’s not ‘
I
think I’m sexy’ but ‘Do
you
think I’m sexy?’” Rosalind Gill, a British cultural theorist, points out that there has been “a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification in construction of femininity.” There has been “a move from an external male judging gaze to a self-policing narcissistic gaze.”
⁸⁸
This dynamic probably was always present to some extent, but it is amplified now in the age of surveillance. With the phone in her pocket acting as a GPS tracking device, a woman today may be surrounded
by people who can photograph or record her with their own phones or with Google Glass. A woman today knows that her image may be broadcast at any moment to others near and far—prompting her to be hyper-self-aware of her appearance at all times. Men experience the same thing, but men are not judged by their appearance in the way that women are. To Gill, the new internal gaze is particularly exploitative because many women today actively choose to sexualize themselves in the name of liberation, but in the end they are really choosing to be regarded as sexual objects.
⁸⁹
Girls and women “choose” to represent themselves as “good sluts,” yet their “choice” is made within a regime of surveillance, policing, and self-discipline.