I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (19 page)

It’s no mean feat to present oneself as both sexually attractive yet sexually unavailable, and girls and young women who have followed Spears’s model often miss the mark. “As the first generations of girls raised with feminism as a given have matured,” adds Marcotte, “there’s been a growing obsession with squelching and exploiting female sexuality. Both are sides of the same coin—an attempt to reduce women to their sexuality in order to deny their growing power in the world.” To many young females, it’s as if the feminist victory of sexual ownership never occurred: to them, sexual empowerment means being sexy to satisfy the desires of other people. And as was true before women’s liberation exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s, other people get to judge if one is sexy in the right way or in the wrong way. Along the way, young women’s sexual agency is contained. Spears sings in “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” that “I did it again to your heart / Got lost in this game, oh baby / Oops! . . . You think that I’m sent from above / I’m not that innocent.” Is she a sexual
provocateur, or is she an innocent naïf? She defends herself as clueless, but most who see her red catsuit in the video conclude otherwise.

Putting together a sexy-but-not-too-slutty outfit, you should realize, is not easy. It’s hard work. It requires careful planning. Yet high school girls don’t want their peers to know the extent of their calibrations and deliberations. They strive for nonchalance, for a seeming effortlessness and insouciance. When they’re called to task for dressing in an overtly sexualized way, they claim that they didn’t realize they were projecting a sexual message. “Oops, do I look like a lap dancer? I had no idea! I’m just wearing this see-through top and these short shorts because they’re comfortable!”

It’s easier than ever before to experiment with sexy clothes because clothes in the “fast fashion” market are inexpensive. According to Elizabeth Cline, the author of
Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion
, “Fast fashion is known not only for its constant offerings of the latest fads but for being shockingly cheap. Forever 21 can sell cute pumps for $15 and H&M can peddle a knit miniskirt for $5.”
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Girls and young women can use their allowance money or earnings from an after-school job to buy lots of cheap outfits made from synthetic materials by exploited laborers in China, Bangladesh, Honduras, or Pakistan. Since the prices are so low, the clothes become disposable, encouraging the taking of fashion risks. If it turns out that the cleavage-baring, backless leopard-print top doesn’t score approval points, a girl can just toss it into the throwaway heap.

Meanwhile, 28 percent of the clothes marketed to tween girls at stores such as Justice, Aéropostale, and Abercrombie
Kids are sexualized, according to a study led by two Kenyon College psychology professors, Sarah Murnen and Linda Smolak.
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In 2013, the clothing retailer Victoria’s Secret targeted tweens and teens with a lace-trimmed thong saying “Call Me” on the front, underwear with lace and the word “Wild” on the back, and another pair that said “Feeling Lucky?”
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Abercrombie described its tween jeans in 2011 as “fitted with a little stretch for a sexy look to give you the perfect butt.”
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Since the function of sexualized tween clothing, the researchers of the Kenyon study say, is “to socialize girls into a sexually objectified role,” girls are forced to grapple with sexual objectification years before they are ready to do so.
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Feeling the pressure to look ever-so-slutty, and possessing a large number of cheaply made sexy clothes, middle school and high school girls get dressed in the morning and pull out of their closet body-hugging or skin-revealing attire. In general, these girls claim that they make clothing choices
for themselves
, not for male attention. This, my friends, is a smoke screen. We know that admitting the truth about desiring male attention is a fast track to “bad slut” hell, because one of the central definitions of a “bad slut” is a girl who “tries too hard.” Pretending that they choose their outfits for reasons other than seeking male sexual attention, therefore, is essential. It is a way to cover over their true effort, much in the way a woman hobbling in four-inch stilettos absurdly claims, “These shoes are so comfortable!”

In June 2012, students at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, a prestigious, selective public school, protested the dress code, which read in part:

S
tudents should wear the appropriate attire to school. Guidelines include the following:

•     Sayings and illustrations on clothing should be in good taste.

•     Shoulders, undergarments, midriffs and lower backs should not be exposed.

•     The length of shorts, dresses and skirts should extend below the fingertips with the arms straight at your side.
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Many female students complained that administrators enforced the dress code subjectively, and that in doing so, they slut-shamed the girls. A senior wrote in the school’s newspaper:

F
or the most part, I don’t consider myself to be a particularly inappropriate dresser—even my mother would agree—but this year, I’ve been called out nearly every single time I’ve worn a skirt, dress, or pair of shorts (maxi skirts not included). Once I even lost my ID card over a belted dress that just reached my fingertips—and, once the belt was off (as I showed the administrator) actually went beyond. I’m not sure what it is about me that causes me to become the administration’s target girl. Not all my friends have the same problem; few girls I know get called out as frequently as I do, and of course boys barely have to acknowledge the existence of a dress code at all. Perhaps this simply stems from some sort of miscommunication about the rules of the dress code. One day I came in wearing a
jean skirt that actually extended beyond my fingertips (I had checked!) and, although wary of being called out, I was not totally surprised to be stopped anyway. What did surprise me was being informed that it wasn’t enough for the skirt to simply reach past my fingertips (à la the rules as stated in the student planner), it had to “go well past.” When I complained, indignant, that they just didn’t make dresses or skirts long enough to pass—not for teenagers, anyway—I was advised to “think knees,” or just wear pants. I was released with a warning, and left feeling like I’d been called out for wearing a bikini top to school, or a garter belt. It was an unpleasant, shaming experience.
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This student describes two outfits: one involving a belted dress, the other a jean skirt. As described, the belted dress did not comply with the dress code because it was too short, though the student implies that she alone was singled out when other girls wearing similarly too-short dresses were not. If true, enforcement of the dress code was unfair. With regard to the jean skirt, since the code states that skirts must extend below the fingertips, but not “well past” them, the skirt should have been deemed acceptable and she should not have been reprimanded.

But notice her defense. With regard to the dress, this student points out that when she removed her belt, her dress passed the length requirement. Yet she
was
wearing a belt, so what difference does it make what the length was when the belt was removed? And is it really true that no dresses or skirts exist that extend past her fingertips?

My point is not to embarrass this student, who found the
experience not only “unpleasant” but “shaming.” I empathize with her, and I don’t blame her for feeling upset. She seems to have been singled out when others were not, and she was reprimanded when she should not have been. At the same time, I want to point out that her defense is an exercise in denial of agency. A dress that just reaches the fingertips is, by almost anyone’s standards, short. It is a minidress. Why wear a minidress unless you want to show off your legs? I am not blaming the student for wanting to show off her legs. But then why can’t she admit that this was her intention? Why does she not concede that she wanted to appear sexy?

The answer is that this student, like so many young females, has been ensnared by the pressure to be sexy without being slutty. And one of the smartest ways to fit into this pinhole is to disavow your agency by pretending you’re looking sexy by accident. If you admit that you’re deliberately attempting to show off your body, you run the risk of being labeled a slut. Therefore, the only rational thing to do is deny your attempts at sexualization. You can then be sexy but in a “good” way. Moreover, if you’re stopped by a school official who calls you out for being “too” sexy, you can protest that you’re being slut-shamed. This preemptive measure adds another layer of protection against actually being slut-shamed by one’s peers.

To protest the dress code itself, as well as the haphazard enforcement of the code, students called for a “Slutty Wednesday” in which they dressed as . . . you know. Boys and girls alike wore tank tops and short shorts, with some girls wearing spaghetti strap tops. Jessica Valenti, a feminist writer and a Stuyvesant alumna, supported the students. In an essay in
The Nation
, she condemned not only the subjective enforcement but the code itself. Valenti argued that the code violated female students’ rights, and that “the thinking behind the code sends a dangerous message to young women—that they are responsible for the way in which society objectifies and sexualizes them.” She quoted the school’s principal, Stanley Teitel, now retired, who had said, “Many young ladies wear denim skirts which are very tight and are short to begin with, and when they sit down, they only rise up, because there’s nowhere else to go. . . . The bottom line is, some things are a distraction, and we don’t need to distract students from what is supposed to be going on here, which is learning.”

Valenti responded, “It’s not the responsibility of female students to mitigate the male gaze. You find female bodies ‘distracting’? That’s your problem, not women’s. Society teaches that women exist to be looked at, objectified and sexualized—it’s up to others to make sure that they don’t contribute to that injustice. . . . Whether or not [the students at Stuyvesant] wear tank tops or shorts [while learning] is so irrelevant.”
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Singling out curvier students for wearing too-short skirts while turning the other way when less physically developed girls do the same thing
is
a form of slut-shaming, because it signifies that curvier girls are “bad sluts” while less curvy girls are “good sluts” or not even “sluts” at all. The Stuyvesant students were justified in their indignation. But I believe that as long as the dress code is enforced consistently, there is nothing slut-shaming about it. In fact, if it were up to me, I would eliminate the fingertip rule, because different people’s arms have different lengths, so the fingertip rule does not establish
a single standard for clothing length. In addition, in general a skirt that extends precisely below the fingertips of most girls is—yes, I’m going to say it—too short for school. The principal merely was noting a fact of physics when he pointed out that a short skirt rises up and can reveal a girl’s underwear, however unintentionally, when the wearer sits. A better rule could be that skirts and shorts must be at least four or five inches above the middle of the kneecap.

The fact is that these girls, like many high school girls around the country, deliberately dress to resemble “good sluts.” Yes, this is a distraction for everyone involved—the girls (because they’re competing with each other and eyeing each other), the heterosexual boys (because in adolescence, chances are they find breasts spilling out of the low-cut top of the girl sitting next to them more attention-grabbing than problem sets), and the teachers (because they are all too aware of the various dynamics at play). Girls are sexualizing themselves with their attire. It’s not a leap to point out that as a result, everyone who sees girls in sexualized attire will think of them in a sexualized manner.

When I taught at a New York City public high school that required a uniform T-shirt for all students, I observed two reactions among the girls. Some seemed to have accepted that they were stuck wearing an unfashionable, asexual shirt; they didn’t put in any noticeable effort to sexualize their appearance within the school building during school hours. They wore jeans and sneakers and a minimal amount of makeup and jewelry. But the majority of girls did everything they could to subvert the school’s imposed asexuality. (Although I have no reason to believe that the school’s intent was to clamp
down on girls’ expression of sexuality in dress, that was the result. As far as I could tell, the school’s goals were to instill a sense of school pride and to reduce competitiveness over clothing.) These girls routinely took off the uniform shirt in between classes, hoping they wouldn’t be reprimanded. Beneath the uniform shirt they wore revealing and trendy tops. They also favored miniskirts, low-slung jeans, dramatic jewelry, and stylized hair and makeup. I didn’t blame them, and I don’t blame the Stuyvesant students either for trying to subvert their dress code. Nobody, especially teenagers, likes to be told how to dress—or what to do in general. Clothing is a way to express oneself and to define one’s identity; both activities are central aspects of being a teenager. And many teenage girls, as we know, crave sexual attention. They believe that they must always look sexy, and that looking sexy is the best or only way to attract positive attention.

Yet there is a time and a place for looking sexy. School is not the right occasion for intentional hypersexual presentation. I found my students’ attire distracting, just as former principal Teitel did with his students at Stuyvesant. It is difficult to focus on academics within a sexually charged environment.