I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (21 page)

Theoretically, a girl could control distribution of her image with Snapchat, an app that promises that photos disappear automatically after a few seconds of viewing. But there are no guarantees with Snapchat, because in fact it’s possible to take a screenshot of a photo before it disappears. Snapchat is supposed to inform the sender if the recipient has taken a screenshot, but this mechanism can be disabled. Snapchat users in 2013 sent two hundred million photos a day.
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Georgiana, the white twenty-two-year-old graduate student, informs me that she knows “several people who send naked pictures to their boyfriend or girlfriend thinking that it can’t be saved” with Snapchat. But not only can you take a screenshot and save a Snapchat photo, “you can also press down and save it directly to your library or post it to your Facebook. The app tells you if someone took a screen shot, and how many they took, but what can you do? Nothing. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”

Teenagers under eighteen can be charged with a felony under child pornography laws, leading to prison time and sex offender registration requirements—and girls are treated more punitively than boys are. In some states, prosecutors have investigated and prosecuted girls who took or posted pictures of themselves and, at worst, sent their photos to one individual. In several cases, they have even gone after girls involved in “self-sexting.” When they were students at the Georgetown University Law Center, LiJia Gong and Alina Hoffman analyzed prosecutions of “teen self-sexting”—when photos are
self-taken and intended only for personal, private use—and concluded that most investigations are unwarranted and sexist because the harm of “self-sexts” is minimal.
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More than twenty states have enacted laws making sexting in some form illegal for minors.
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In a legal note that Gong and Hoffman wrote in the
Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law
, they analyze several incidents in which girls were punished for sending naked images of themselves.
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In
Miller v. Skumanick
, local District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. threatened to prosecute several thirteen-year-old Pennsylvania high school students for child pornography because they had taken a photograph of themselves from the waist up, each wearing a white, opaque bra. One student was speaking on the phone and another was using her hand to make a peace sign. Another girl was photographed in a white opaque towel wrapped around her body; another was wearing a bathing suit. Skumanick said that the girl in the bathing suit was posed “provocatively,” and ordered the girls to enroll in a counseling program.
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In another case, two female high school students had photographed themselves posed with phallic-shaped, rainbow-colored lollipops. They also wore lingerie and pretended to kiss each other. They had posted the photos on MySpace and Facebook, with the photos accessible only to those granted “friend” status, and on Photobucket, which required a password for viewing them. As punishment, the school suspended the girls from school activities and forced them to apologize to their school for bringing “discredit and dishonor” upon themselves and their school. The students and their parents brought an action against the school district and the
principal in which they claimed that the punishment violated their First Amendment rights. The court ruled in the students’ favor, but also found that the school district and principal were immune from damages.
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Gong and Hoffman are infuriated by the sexual double standard that was applied in these prosecutions and by the fact that girls were slut-shamed as a result. “If someone chooses to share a photo, and everyone involved has given consent, he or she should not be regulated,” Gong tells me. “Clearly there’s a double standard for sexual activity, especially among young people. Women’s bodies are eroticized in a way that men’s bodies are not.” For a heterosexual girl, “getting a ‘dick pic’ [from a heterosexual guy] is considered hilarious. I’ve never met a female who finds that erotic—whereas pictures of women’s bodies are considered scandalous and salacious. Why are schools and prosecutors concerned about the purity of women’s sexuality but not men’s?”

Hoffman adds that teens’ sexting makes adults uncomfortable. “It forces people to confront the reality of girls’ sexuality. It forces people to recognize that teenage girls are sexual beings, and that this is what their sexuality looks like. The more social media are integrated into our lives, the more people will use them to explore their sexuality. They are using electronic media to figure out who they are.” Sexting is becoming a routine, normal part of adolescent sexual exploration. But because it produces evidence, it causes adults to panic and moralize. If a couple’s sixteen-year-old daughter says she’s going over to a boy’s home to study but doesn’t return till midnight, they can pretend to themselves that she must be a committed student. If their daughter comes home
crying that everyone at school has seen a video of her masturbating, they can’t ignore or deny the truth of her sexuality.

Many adults don’t realize that sexting among teens often is coerced. Girls often send a photo or video to a guy because they feel that they have to, not because they want to. Georgiana tells me that during her sophomore year of high school,

O
ne particular guy that my girlfriends had introduced me to sent a picture of himself totally naked. Full-body, totally naked. He was not interested in me; he just wanted to sleep with me. And he then wrote, ‘Now you have to send me one.’ I texted him back: ‘I never asked you for this picture, so no, I’m not sending you one back.’ He continued to send me naked pictures, and he would text and leave voice mails. He did it repeatedly—numerous times. I ended up sending him a picture of myself clothed just to get him to stop. He wrote back, ‘This is ridiculous; this isn’t what I wanted.’ This went on for at least six months. He finally stopped after I told my girlfriends about it, and I guess he became embarrassed when he knew they knew. But I admit that I liked that he paid attention to me. I was definitely attracted to him. I went to an all-girls’ school, so it was exciting to meet a guy and have him be interested in me.

I asked Georgiana why, if she was attracted to the boy, she never caved and sent him a naked photo of herself. “I was paranoid about my picture getting circulated,” she explains. “Around the same time, a girl at school had sent a naked picture of herself to her boyfriend, and after they broke up, he
forwarded it to a bunch of people and she got expelled. So I was more scared than anything else.”

“What did you do with the photos he sent you—did you ever forward them or show them to your friends?” I asked Georgiana.

“No, I deleted them,” she told me. Her reaction was typical: although there are exceptions, females generally don’t collect or brag about the sexts they receive. They tend to want to distance themselves from the images.

Although Georgiana never sent a naked photo of herself, the boy’s demands were coercive. “Now it’s your turn to send me one” is a refrain my interviewees have heard repeatedly. Guys pressure girls to send them naked pictures and then amass a collection of photos. And the guys always want the girl’s face in the picture—otherwise the body could be anyone’s. When girls think they’re outsmarting the system by sending headless shots, they’re told that headless isn’t good enough. Did Anthony Weiner, who resigned from Congress after it was revealed that he had sent photos of his penis to at least six women who had followed him on Twitter, use his photos as leverage? None of the women involved who have come forward have said so, but it’s likely that Weiner photographed himself not only to show off but to initiate a negotiation over the acquisition of photos of naked women.

Once a guy has amassed a collection, he may use it to authenticate his own masculine status. Jessica Ringrose reports that in her research of British youth she has found that boys use photos of naked girls as “a form of popularity currency or a commodity to be collected, traded, shown to others and
distributed, but could also be used to punish the girls in question via ‘exposure.’”
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Mara, a nineteen-year-old white student in California, remembers that when she was a freshman in high school, a senior guy she liked sent her a picture of his abs. He wrote, “OK, now send me one. I’ll never show it to anyone.” So she sent him a picture of herself wearing a bra. “Then there was another guy who didn’t even send me anything but kept asking me to send him pictures, and I just ignored him. In my high school, the guys were always pressuring the girls to send them pictures. Guys would say, ‘Oh, I have a picture of so-and-so on my phone; come and look!’ They would show the pictures to everyone. It was boobs but also sometimes full-body naked. And they would forward them as a way to brag. It was a pride thing, like, ‘Look who sent
me
a picture!’ One guy had a hundred photos on his phone, a collection.”

Jasmine, the twenty-year-old student who is black and Latina, shares her high school sexting saga. “Once in high school a guy sent me a picture of his penis and asked for one back. It made me really uncomfortable. I refused. I said, ‘No, I don’t do that.’ I was asked a lot in high school and a couple times in college. ‘Hey, can I have a picture of you?’ I’ve always said no. I was even hooking up with a guy once and he said, ‘Hey, can I take a picture of you?’ I had to grab his phone and hide it from him because he wasn’t listening to me.”

“My friend in the tenth grade, who’s considered one of the most popular girls, literally gets a handful of dick pics a day,” reports fifteen-year-old Abby, a white girl from Arts Effect in Manhattan. “There’s this one guy I see in church who sent his dick pic to two of my friends. And they’re best friends and he
sent the same pic to both of them at the same time. She gets at least two a day, usually Snapchats. I figure that if the guy is sending you a dick pic, it means he’s looking for something in return.”

Kaitlyn, sixteen, chimes in, saying, “It’s sent only for leverage. It’s not like any of us actually want to see their dicks”—and the six other girls dishing about sexting laugh hysterically.

Nicole, sixteen, offers that “I had someone on video chat spontaneously take off all his clothes. In middle school, lots of people say, ‘Hey, want to video chat?’ And then you strip for each other. So there was this girl in my school who did that, and she didn’t know it but the guy took a snapshot of her. Plus technically you can’t record the video chat unless the other person accepts, but he had software where you could record your screen, and she didn’t know. And she was masturbating for him. And now that whole video of her masturbating got sent around to everybody.”

Christina, the fourteen-year-old Latina high school student in California, tells me in a Skype interview, her big eyes looking serious and sad,

I
t started in the eighth grade. Two different guys sent me pictures of their penises, and then they wanted me to send a picture to them. I said no to them. Their pictures were not expected, and I didn’t want them. But I did send a naked picture to a boy who had been my boyfriend, even though we were not together when I sent it. It was my whole body, but not my face. It was the summer after eighth grade. He then sent it to all his friends, and then he
threatened to put it on Facebook if I didn’t send him more. I was crying, and I told my older sister and my mom. It was pretty scary even though my face wasn’t in it. I never replied to him, and he ended up not posting it. His friends go to my school and are in my math class. It makes me uncomfortable that I have to see them. I guess I just have to live with it.

I asked her why she sent the photo—fully recognizing that since she was thirteen at the time, she was just at the beginning stages of navigating the manipulations of sexting communication (not to mention the manipulations of dating and sexual attraction in general).

“At the time, I wanted him to like me,” she explains. “I wanted to get back together. I thought this would get him to like me again.” Now at fourteen, she’s older and wiser. “I would never send a naked picture to anyone again,” she says.

Twenty-six-year-old Diane, the white feminist marriage and family therapist in California, points out that it’s not just high school guys who repeatedly ask girls for naked photos. We speak with each other via Skype, and although the image of her face and dark blond hair fills my computer screen, I get a glimpse of several large, bold tattoos on both her arms. She reports that she recently was active on the dating site OkCupid.

T
here was a lot of “Before we meet, can I see other photos of you?” And then you haven’t even met the person yet, and already you start texting and sexting. Because of my tattoos, I cover up my arms when I send a picture. So
the pictures I sent were just my boobs without my face or arms—and they really could have been anyone’s boobs. How would he even know they were mine? But always immediately I would get a picture back—a picture of a dick. It was like, there was no foreplay. Immediately there would be this photo of a dick in the guy’s hand. It was always about showing me how big it was. And it would just be his dick, not the rest of his body, not his face. I started accumulating these dick pictures. At one point I had five at the same time that I would show my girlfriends. We would sit around and show them to each other. After they would send me their dick picture, they would always expect something else from me—usually a crotch shot—even though I had never asked for the dick picture. It was a power play or a control thing. And at this point, what, I’m supposed to meet them in person? Are we going to have dinner? So I would usually lose interest. [
Laughs.
] Because at this point, the guy has seen my boobs. If he wants to see more of me, then we are having dinner next—I’m not sending a crotch shot.