I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (17 page)

Celebrities—They’re Just Like Us!

The duck face is an example of how girls and young women attempt to control their image through the emulation of celebrities, who have to manipulate their faces in unnatural poses because that’s part of their job. Regular girls and young women have come to believe that the perfection of celebrities’ images is attainable—if they discipline their bodies, purchase the right clothes and shoes and bags, and carry the right attitude. Since the performers on reality television are not professional actors, ordinary people are greatly influenced by them. Michael Stefanone, who studies the social psychology of technology use at the University at Buffalo, and his colleagues Derek Lackaff and Devan Rosen argue that the boundary between the celebrity world and the everyday world of ordinary people has been eroded. “Taken together, reality television and [social media] set the stage for a major shift in the way individuals perceive their role in the media environment. Rather than simply being the target of
mediated messages, they see themselves as protagonists of mediated narratives and can integrate themselves into a complex media ecosystem. The media tools and strategies employed by celebrities and their handlers—airbrushed photos, carefully coordinated social interactions, strategic selection and maintenance of the entourage—are now in a sense available to everyone.” Stefanone and his colleagues conclude, “Results suggest that social behaviors commonly associated with mediated celebrity are now being enacted by noncelebrities in an increasingly mediated social environment.”
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Regular people mimic reality television performers not only in appearance but also in behavior. The reality television genre requires performers to reveal their private thoughts and emotions to their entire viewing audience. Similarly, blogs, photo sharing, and video sharing are methods of disclosing private items to a large public audience. Young people, growing up with reality television, produce online content to be like the celebrities who are rewarded for doing the same thing. Many feel pressured that they
must
blog, they must
publicize
photos and videos, they
must
create collages of other people’s material in order to be rewarded with high social status.

But at what cost for girls? Erica, a twenty-one-year-old white woman who attended an elite New England high school on full scholarship—her father is unemployed and her mother works in retail—remembers that in her school,

S
ome girls became sort of celebrities because of the Facebook personalities they had made. They took pictures of every single thing they did. The other kids had a double perception about them. On the one hand, they were
seen as glamorous, but at the same time, they were considered insubstantial. There was one girl, fourteen, who was very wealthy and had to be hospitalized because of cocaine abuse. She actually posted pictures of herself getting wasted, wearing very little. And the other kids just loved talking about her. They would say, “She’s a disgusting slut,” but they couldn’t stop looking at her Facebook. But nobody ever said, “Wait a minute, this girl needs help.” Instead, it was just like, “Can you believe that she did that?” It was like she was an object to watch and follow. It was like she wasn’t even a real person.

Cappiello adds, “Kids are photographing reality instead of experiencing it. That’s why when a girl is raped, like in Steubenville, the reaction is, ‘This is something to document, not something to stop.’” In an effort to be like the reality television stars they look up to as role models, girls and young women are distancing themselves from appropriate
real
behavior. Their peers are transformed into objects to watch and document, not people to interact with and protect when necessary.

Used properly, social media can boost a girl’s confidence, especially if she’s shy or awkward. Amanda Marcotte, a feminist blogger, points out to me, “Social networking can be a relief because you do have control. When you’re an awkward teenager, it can be hard to respond to people on your feet. But online, you can slow down and edit your responses. You have the advantage of time, even though there is pressure to respond right away. You can choose photos that are the most flattering ones. There’s a lot of power in that aspect.
You have immediate control over how you’re perceived in the world.”

But your power extends only so far. For one thing, anyone can tag unflattering or private photos of you at any time. Even if you untag yourself, you might be too late if the photo has been seen by others, and it remains online even if your name isn’t associated with it. Jasmine, the twenty-year-old black and Latina student who, you may recall, was called a slut after a football player at her large urban high school tried to grab her breasts, tells me that on Halloween of her senior year of high school, someone uploaded a picture of her without her consent. “I was blacked-out drunk and dressed kind of scandalously,” she says. “They took the picture with my phone and then uploaded it to my Facebook.” Jasmine explains to me that on Facebook, when you upload a photo from your phone, you don’t receive a notification, so she had no idea what had happened. “I found out because my mom came into my room and said very coldly, ‘Your friends uploaded a picture of you on Facebook.’ I didn’t know what she was talking about. I deleted it from my profile page and all I can hope is that it’s not out there.”

For girls, the ability to manipulate their image becomes a mandatory compulsion to do so. Jenna Wortham, a
New York Times
technology reporter, explains that the “feedback loop of positive reinforcement is the most addictive element of social media. All those retweets, likes and favorites give us a little jolt, a little boost that pushes us to keep coming back for more.”
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Girls in particular “feel all this pressure to represent themselves as sexually attractive, but then when they do, they become the target of vicious criticisms,” notes Amanda Marcotte. She continues,

T
he girls are made to feel ashamed for posting sexy poses. They cannot win. And meanwhile, no one worries about the way boys represent themselves sexually. Besides, it’s not easy looking sexy. Most girls are kind of inept at it. They make the “duck face” and everyone mocks them, but what else are they supposed to do?
You
try making yourself look sexy, and you’ll see that the whole exercise is ridiculous. We did the same thing when I was a teenager, the only difference being that we did it on film, and there was only one copy of our ridiculous sexy poses.

Everyone knows that the reality depicted on social media is as artificial as the reality portrayed on reality television. And yet, we can’t help but wonder if perhaps a drop or two of authenticity is included. After all, things that are filmed or otherwise documented can sometimes seem more real than real life. “People emphasize certain things to portray themselves in a certain way,” says Jasmine. “I know girls who post photos with people who are supposed to be their friends, but I know they hate those girls. So you see these photos of people who appear to be friends even though in reality they hate each other. So many people have a fake Facebook persona. Nobody ever posts anything that makes them look bad. People live in a fantasy world that gets expressed on Facebook.”

But then why do people keep returning to Facebook to see what their peers are doing? “Because there are some genuine relationships and photos,” answers Jasmine. “But I don’t think you can trust it. You look at someone’s Facebook and you think, ‘Oh, her life is so great!’ But it’s all so fake.”

Adds Zeilinger, “Body image is the number one issue
girls write about on the
FBomb.
It’s the topic I’m most often asked to speak about. It’s a huge issue. Girls tell me, ‘I know that photos are photoshopped, and I’m a feminist so I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but I
still
feel bad about my body because these photos are everywhere.”

The world portrayed in social media is artificial and manipulated, yet it can feel so very real—just like femininity. In both, females stitch together an image of themselves as sexually alluring while hiding the seams of their effort. In both activity on social media and in the performance of femininity, females put on a performance that can backfire at any moment.

“Because of social media, there’s no room for mistakes,” observes Katie Cappiello. “Girls can’t make real sexual choices. Once you’re branded a slut, you can’t back away from that. It’s part of your permanent record. And if you try to make a shift from being sexually active to not being sexually active, you’re called out for being a fake or a phony or a poser. If you’ve cultivated a slut identity online, now you’re expected to own it in the real world.”

If You’re Female, You’re Being Rated and Judged

Behind every act of reciprocal slut-shaming lingers an unspoken question: Which female is sexier? Who has more status? Competitiveness is in the DNA of social media. When he was a Harvard undergraduate in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea of Facebook after first creating a hot-or-not site called Facemash. According to Claire Hoffman of
Rolling Stone
, Zuckerberg had just been jilted and went to his dorm room to think up a vindictive plot. He revealed his plans for Facemash on his blog, writing, “Jessica A——is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her. I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough, now I just need an idea.” He hacked into Harvard’s private online directories of student photos, downloaded photos of his classmates, and posted them online next to farm animals. Students could rate who was more desirable. (Contrary to the depiction in the movie
The Social Network
, Zuckerberg included both males and females.) By 11:09 p.m. that night, the site was up. Over 450 students signed up with twenty-two thousand page views. In a matter of hours, Harvard administrators shut down Zuckerberg’s web access. He was accused of violating student privacy and downloading property without permission. But the accusation didn’t hurt his reputation, and he wasn’t expelled. He went back to his dorm and celebrated with champagne with his roommates. He wrote later in a deposition that people “are more voyeuristic than I would have thought.”
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Several years later, Facebook’s engineers revisited the Facemash concept—this time for rating only females. Katherine Losse recalls that one day, one of the engineers showed her an application he was working on called Judgebook, whose purpose was for Facebook users to rate female users on their appearance. Two women’s Facebook profile photos appeared side by side with a space for the viewer to input a score for each one. Writes Losse, “This was a way for men on Facebook to explicitly judge women’s looks and assign them a score. To host the application, the engineer purchased two domain
names: Judgebook.com and Prettyorwitty.com. “You could either be pretty or you could be witty and, in either case, you would definitely be judged and scored and rated.” (The application never went live.) “Facebook made it possible for men to have endless photographs of women available for judging, like so many swimsuit models at a Miss America pageant,” Losse observes. “Because, with Judgebook, like all Facebook platform applications, women did not have to consent to have their photographs used by the application.”
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Young male social media programmers just can’t get Facemash out of their heads. Ranking women according to their appearance, they seem to believe, is every man’s right, and every male programmer has a social obligation to help his fellow men fulfill their destinies. In 2010, a Boston University sophomore named Justin Doody ripped off the Facemash concept, creating RateBU.com. He claims he was inspired after seeing the movie
The Social Network.
“Me and some friends just saw it and were like ‘Wow, we could make this,’” he said.
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Users upload photos from Facebook. Photographs of two women are placed on a page side by side and the user votes on who is the “hottest.” As with Judgebook, the women themselves do not upload their own photos and do not consent to participate in the competition. But while Judgebook thankfully never moved forward, RateBU.com, I’m sorry to say, is an actual live, popular site. In the comments section following an article about RateBU.com that appeared on a Boston website, one student wrote,

T
he women who appear on Doody’s site aren’t asked permission to use their photos and names. A lot of the
women featured are shocked and hurt that their privacy is being affected. . . . While Doody and his friends may find his site “entertaining” and all in good fun, most people on campus DO NOT. . . . A lot of women on campus no longer feel safe on campus and it is all thanks to Doody and this ridiculous site.

Doody claims that he’s not doing anything illegal, since the women have already posted their photos on Facebook.
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But men are not alone in this judging behavior. Many women deliberately position themselves as “hotter” than their peers. One in four women admits to deliberately tagging unflattering photos of her Facebook friends. In a survey of 1,512 women over eighteen, two-fifths also admitted to purposely posting pictures of friends not wearing makeup, and one-fifth refused to remove an unflattering photo when asked to do so, in an act of “photo sabotage.”
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What better way to shore up your own attractiveness than by surrounding yourself with unattractive women? If this attitude is shockingly callous and superficial, it may be the logical consequence of social media meeting feminine performance. In a study of 3,500 girls ages eight through twelve, Clifford Nass found that the girls who used social media heavily had fewer positive feelings about their friends than did other girls their age. They also were more likely to have friends whom their parents considered to be a bad influence. Girls who had more face-to-face communication with friends and less online communication were more likely to have healthy emotional interactions.
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