I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (23 page)

I
think he took advantage of me because of our age difference. I was eighteen and he was twenty-four. He was never willing to try to have a real relationship with me. I
wanted a committed relationship, and he told me that he wanted a real relationship too, but he never really acted like he did. I think he just wanted to use me for the sex, although he would tell me his feelings for me, so I couldn’t understand it. For me, hooking up is with the hope for a future relationship. When you’re hooking up, it’s hard to hold the other person accountable because there’s a sense that there’s no responsibility, because it’s just a hookup. There’s no real commitment when it’s just a hookup. When you have a relationship, you are explicitly deciding to be monogamous. But hooking up is unstable, and you never talk about your status.

Men have long misrepresented their romantic intentions, so what happened to Gloria was certainly nothing new. But never before having experienced the instability of hooking up, Gloria didn’t realize that for many guys, even adults in their twenties, having casual, uncommitted sex without establishing a serious relationship is the ultimate goal.

Ella, a twenty-four-year-old student in Pennsylvania whose mother is black and whose father is white, also reports that guys pretend to consider elevating a hookup to a committed relationship just to get the woman to agree to have sex in the first place. She finds that white men are guilty of this practice for racial reasons.

A
lot of white guys want to sleep with a black girl. They say it right out loud. They aren’t trying to hide it. But they’re nervous about going with a full-fledged black girl, so they look for someone who’s half-black, like me. They
sleep with a half-black girl a few times, and then they’re gone. They act like they’re going to commit to you, but in reality they just want the experience. For example, there was a really good-looking guy during my senior year of high school. He was a college student at [another university], and we knew each other for a few weeks. My mom worked the night shift, and he slept over one night and we slept together. Then he disappeared. He told his friend that he just wanted to sleep with a black girl, and his friend told me. This kind of thing happened to me two other times. They use me as a notch in their belt, so that they can say, “Oh, I’ve slept with a black girl.” Thankfully that’s not the majority of guys, but there are plenty who think that way.

There are also guys who don’t care about my race, they just want to have sex with me because they just want to have sex. They have no intention of making it serious. They mislead me to make me think they are interested in an emotional connection. But I want the emotional part too, not just the sex.

Like Gloria, Ella is dismayed with her lack of control within the hookup scenario. The guys she hooked up with controlled the encounters. The white guys additionally held a racial advantage that, overlaid with the sexual double standard, denied Ella her agency.

Aaron, a white twenty-one-year-old male college student in California, explained to me why after hooking up he often does not feel motivated to elevate the encounter to an emotionally attached relationship. He told me that from his
perspective, hookup culture breeds insecurity among females—which he finds unattractive and alienating. He says,

A
fter hooking up, girls always ask me, “How do I compare with other girls?” They want me to compare their bodies, their posture, their voices, their personalities, the way they are in bed, everything, My roommates had a screen saver on the monitor in our living room that was a slide show of fake boobs. Usually the screensaver shows a picture of mountains or trees, but for a week my roommates had a slideshow of fake boobs. So I was with a girl, and she asked, “Do my boobs compare with the ones on the screen?” I said, “But those are fake! You’re my lover, and I appreciate your body, so this shouldn’t be an issue.” So as soon as I said that, then she asked, “OK, so how do I compare with other girls you’ve hooked up with?” It was like as soon as I answered one question to make her feel secure, she had to ask another. Girls are always asking questions that basically say, “Hey, I know that you hook up with other girls, and I want to know how I compare.” They always want to know, “Where am I on the scale?” They express so much insecurity! This makes me want to, I guess, detach myself from those girls. They’re so needy, and also they are implying that I have been with so many girls and therefore I am in a position to judge them on a scale. It’s so awkward. Why do all these girls think this way? Why can’t I find a girl who
doesn’t
compare herself to other girls and who doesn’t want to talk about her insecurity with me?

I told Aaron that I empathized with him, because most people don’t want to be intimate with someone excessively
needy. But I also asked him to step back and assess the situation from the girls’ point of view. I asked him to be compassionate for his sexual partners. Hooking up for them is unstable, usually one-sided, and risky in terms of managing their reputation. Their sexual reputation is in his hands. If he chooses to spread stories about their sluttiness, he can. If they want to pursue a more meaningful relationship with him but he does not, that decision is also in his hands. In many ways, then, he holds great power over the women he hooks up with. The question is not why so many of his lovers are insecure—but why would they
not
be?

It’s no wonder that so many females drink to excess when they go to a party or a club where there’s a chance they will find someone with whom to hook up. Drinking may be an activity that washes away insecurities. “Women drink to excess in public for many reasons, often the same reasons that men do. Sometimes people drink to excess in public as a coping mechanism,” says Nicole Kubon, a social worker and an advocate for survivors of sexual assault. “If they’ve been victims of sexual assault previously in the same type of space, like at a party, they may drink to try to regain control of the situation. It may be an effort to convince themselves that they were not victimized or that their experience of victimization has not or will not change who they are or how they act.” And what about women who have not been victimized in this way? “Beyond the standard reasons why many people drink to excess, they may also be triggered when they are in certain spaces to drink more than they should because they feel anxiety or discomfort in the situation,” she explains. Drinking to excess at a party, then, may be a way
for a woman to deal with the depressing, disturbing reality that hooking up—under the present conditions of benevolent sexism and the sexual double standard—is far from her romantic or sexual ideals.

“Alcohol is key to the perpetuation of hookup culture on campus. It plays a huge part in the poor decisions students often make—and later regret,” writes Donna Freitas, who surveyed 2,500 college students about their sexual experiences.
¹⁴⁹
Female Penn students told the
New York Times
that they would never hook up without drinking first “because they were for the most part too uncomfortable to pair off with men they did not know well without being drunk.”
¹⁵⁰
Nineteen-year-old Min, an Asian student, said in chapter 2 that many women on her Northeast campus equate sexualizing themselves with making a feminist statement. She adds, “Sometimes they are too wild or behave out of the confines of appropriate behavior. Sometimes they get very drunk as an excuse to be more touchy or flirtatious or to justify hooking up; they’re only having sex with someone because they’re not sober.”

If you hook up drunk, you can always attribute your sluttiness to the influence of alcohol. You’re a “good slut”—you would never just sleep with any old random guy. If not for the fact that you were wasted, you never in a million years would have given that guy over there that blow job. Hooking up drunk is a strategy to disavow agency and sexual desire—two ingredients in the definition of a “bad slut.” It’s easy to say, “I didn’t mean to have sex;
it just happened
because I was wasted!” The drunk woman who hooks up surmises that she can’t be held responsible for her allegedly slutty behavior
because she was unable to police herself. Ergo, she’s not really a slut. And if she is, she’s the “good” kind.

When a girl or woman reports that “it just happened,” writes Deborah Tolman, a developmental psychologist and the author of
Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality
, her words can be understood “as a cover story. It is a story about the necessity of girls to cover their desire. It is also a story that covers over active choice, agency, and responsibility.”
¹⁵¹
“Oops, it just happened” erases sexual desire. Covering up desire is “unsafe and unhealthy,” writes Tolman.
¹⁵²
“Healthy sexuality means having sexual desire, but there is little if any safe space—physically, socially, psychologically—for these forbidden and dangerous feelings.”
¹⁵³

“Girls want to get drunk because it gives them permission to have a wild side come out so that they can become slutty. They can use alcohol as an excuse,” explains Jessica, the twenty-three-year-old Latina in California. But, she warns, women are not in control. “It becomes expected of you to drink because a guy will buy you drinks, and he will be persistent to get you to drink, because he thinks that if you get drunk you will do what he wants. So then it’s like you
have
to drink.” Mara, nineteen, agrees. “Girls want to be in a carefree situation,” she says. “But also, there’s a huge element of peer pressure because drinking is so prevalent” on her campus.

How does the strategy of getting drunk while hooking up backfire? The same way the other sexual containment strategies do. No matter how much effort a girl or young woman exerts to control her image as slutty in a “good way,” invariably it will be translated as slutty in a “bad way.” Min tells me
about a popular girl in her high school who was well liked and regarded as “pretty” and “cute” until she hooked up drunk.

O
ne night she got drunk at a party and made out with two boys, and I think maybe “threw herself” on two others. After that, she became known as the “messy slut” and was slut-shamed by both genders. Apparently there was a discussion in the boys’ locker room where it was agreed that she was “no longer attractive” and a boy who was seen walking with her into a room was chided by his friends. The slut-bashing eventually blew over, but she still had a reputation as a “messy bitch” because she frequently got drunk. After the incident, I talked about it with a male friend of mine who defended people’s calling her “sloppy” because of her drunkenness. He disagreed with me that the term “sloppy” was gendered or linked to the word “slut.”

Min’s classmate violated one of the most important rules of “good slut” femininity: she expressed desperation and neediness by “throwing herself” at boys. Even though she was drunk, her actions were held against her. Note that her peers used the adjectives “messy” and “sloppy” to refer to her. We know from its etymology that the word “slut” historically has been linked with notions of uncleanliness; for six hundred years, “slut” conveyed a woman who could not or did not keep herself tidy. Even in the twenty-first century, “slut” continues to refer to a female who lacks the necessary control to keep herself “clean.”

Hooking up drunk also backfires at the level of physical pleasure. If a woman thinks that her sexual encounter will be
worth it, despite its limitations, because at the very least she will have an orgasm, she may be in for a surprise. Research shows that women are much less likely to have an orgasm during casual hookups than in committed relationships. Men aren’t focused on pleasing women in hookups, explains Paula England, a New York University sociologist who oversaw the Online College Social Life Survey, because of “the lingering sexual double standard, which sometimes causes men to disrespect women precisely for hooking up with them.”
¹⁵⁴
She found that only about 40 percent of women had an orgasm during their last hookup involving intercourse, while 80 percent of men did. Approximately three-quarters of women in a committed relationship, on the other hand, had an orgasm the last time they had sex. Because women are still stigmatized for having casual sex, says England, they “are not feeling very free in these casual contexts to say what they want and need.”
¹⁵⁵
England’s statistics were confirmed by a similar study led by Justin R. Garcia at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.
¹⁵⁶

We have no data on how many hookups involve intercourse, how many involve only oral sex, and so on. But anecdotally, girls and women say that random hookups, especially when they’re drunken, are fellatio affairs. When hooking up, females are much more likely to give males oral sex than to receive it. Aaron confirms that the guys in his peer group receive but do not give oral sex when they are hooking up. “The girls I know rarely receive oral from the other guys,” he tells me, adding that for him, “it’s part of foreplay. But most guys will say, ‘OK, I’m trying to get my dick sucked tonight,’ and they don’t even want to learn the girl’s name.”

One Penn student told the
New York Times
that during her freshman and sophomore years, her sexual encounters often ended with fellatio because she always drank to excess. She said “that usually by the time she got back to a guy’s room, she was starting to sober up and didn’t want to be there anymore, and giving the guy oral sex was an easy way to wrap things up and leave.”
¹⁵⁷
Repeatedly in my interviews, the subject of one-sided oral sex came up within the context of drunken hookups. In my group conversation with the Manhattan teenage girls, we discussed the fact that even in high school, girls are drinking to excess at parties. When they hook up with boys, “the boys are really benefitting,” says Kaitlyn, sixteen.