I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (24 page)

S
ometimes I feel like hooking up with a guy is like going over to his house to do his homework for him. You feel like you’re not benefitting from it. Even though I do want to hook up, it’s not about getting off. When I’m hooking up with a guy, I feel like I have a boyfriend for two hours. It’s an emotional thing. But for him, it’s often not emotional. For him, it’s beneficial because he knows that by the end of the night he will have come. If I feel like I’m going to his house to do homework for him, than what really am I getting out of it? If it’s a onetime thing where I’m doing something because I just want to be with someone for the evening and it’s obvious that that person only cares about getting off, that’s not a good situation. If I can tell that the guy likes me as a person, then that feels really good.

But they don’t really care about whether the girl gets off. Once they come, they’re done. They don’t want to keep hooking up after that point. There’s maybe a 2 percent
chance they will make any effort [to give the girl sexual pleasure]. They won’t go down on a girl if it’s a onetime thing. Also if they don’t want to feel like you’re doing their homework for them, then they will try. Or they want the power of making you get off because they think it’s hot, or because it will help them get off. But in general, if they know you’re going to give them a blow job anyway, they won’t go down on you.

Nicole, sixteen, agrees with Kaitlyn, adding, “Girls go to parties all the time and get drunk and hook up with guys and give them blow jobs. But boys don’t do that. Boys don’t just go to a party and go down on a girl and then not see the girl again. If a boy goes down on a girl, it generally means that he’s in love with her, or that they are in a relationship.” The other girls in the room agree. “It’s only equal when you’re in a relationship,” Nicole concludes. “It’s not equal when you’re just hooking up.”

A young woman who hooks up drunk is
lucky
if the worst that happens to her is humiliation or an unsatisfying consensual sexual encounter. The worst way this strategy backfires is with sexual assault. Hooking up is an inherently ambiguous situation to begin with, since there are no clear parameters of what sexual activity or level of commitment may be involved. When alcohol is added to the equation, the boundaries of consent and coercion are blurred. Sexual refusal that may be obvious when both parties are sober becomes less clear in the fog of intoxication. Males who are predatory or severely compromised in their judgment can interpret a female unable to give consent as a female who would give consent if she could.

Sexual assault on campus is frighteningly common. According to the US Department of Justice’s Campus Sexual Assault Study of 2007, 13.7 percent of women have been the victim of at least one completed sexual assault while at college. Over half of these women were unable to give consent because they were incapacitated, primarily by alcohol, and nearly all the assaults were carried out by someone the victim knew and not by a stranger.
¹⁵⁸
Drinking increases the likelihood that a hookup will lead to sexual assault. The problem is most acute during a college student’s freshman and sophomore years. Female college students in their first two years surveyed by William F. Flack Jr., a psychologist at Bucknell University, and his colleagues reported that 48 percent of all unwanted sexual activities took place during a hookup, and 81 percent of all incidents of unwanted sexual activities involved alcohol.
¹⁵⁹

One Penn student told the
Times
that during her freshman year, she went to a party with a boy who lived on her floor, drank too much, and told him she wanted to go back to the dorm. Instead, he brought her to his room “and had sex with her while she drifted in and out of consciousness. She woke up with her head spinning. The next day, not sure what to think about what had happened, she described the night to her friends as though it were a funny story: I was so drunk, I fell asleep while I was having sex!” Humor may have been the only way she could have attempted to seize control over this nonconsensual sexual act and also stave off development of a slutty reputation. She explained to the
Times
that when a girl has been drinking, “Guys assume that the default answer is always yes.”
¹⁶⁰

What young women perceive as a protective measure ends up being the opposite: it renders them unsafe. Being drunk at a party to show she’s nonchalantly sexy is confused by men with her being willing to have sex with anyone, even if she says no or can’t say no because she is too drunk, or even blacked-out. Girls and women who drink excessively must recognize that they are putting themselves at risk whether or not they plan to hook up, although they never are at fault if they are assaulted. If they are unable to control their behavior, including the ability to affirmatively give consent, they may be dismissed as “bad sluts”—and many guys believe that it’s fair game to coerce or assault a “bad slut.”

We see that the three sexual containment strategies are doomed. Wearing sexy outfits, sexting but not actually having sex, and having sex but only when drunk may seem like shrewd ways to attract sexual attention without appearing slutty. But each strategy cascades into the next: when a young woman wears sexually provocative clothes, guys feel entitled to ask—even demand—that she send them sexual images. Once she’s complied, guys want what they see as the next step: a hookup. Meg McInerney of the Arts Effect points out that when a girl sexts, she raises expectations of what she will do in person, in real life. She says, “After sending pornographic images and sexual texts, how do they tell a guy in person, ‘I don’t really want you to touch me’ or ‘No, I don’t actually want to give you a blowjob’? When intimacy is at a high level electronically, it becomes much harder to say no when they’re in person.”

This isn’t to suggest that young women lack sexual
desire, and that they’re just going through the motions with no agency at all. Many freely express their interest in sexual activity—but on their terms. Yet they can’t have sexual activity on their terms, under their control, under the present conditions of the sexual double standard and benevolent sexism. Thus, their sexual agency is severely compromised.

CHAPTER 6

“Bad Slut” Coping Mechanisms

Few who have been slut-bashed—or who have witnessed slut-bashing—go unscathed. For girls in middle school or high school, the experience is traumatic and their actions in the immediate aftermath often are severe. My interviewees who were slut-bashed in adolescence tended to go in one of two divergent directions: either they became excessively sexually active—even if they hadn’t been sexual before they acquired their reputation—or they shut down sexually. Both responses are dangerous for girls’ physical and emotional health. Other girls developed eating disorders or turned to drugs. Tragically, a number of slut-bashed adolescent girls have taken their lives.

As noted in chapter 3, nearly half of girls in grades seven through twelve experience sexual harassment in some form,
mostly verbal harassment, according to the American Association of University Women. This means that nearly half the female student population in middle schools and high schools across the country may to some extent turn to unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to cope with their harassment. The girls in the other half are hyperaware that they could be slut-bashed too, even if it hasn’t happened yet, and therefore they may also turn to similar behaviors. After all, once a girl is labeled a slut, the thinking goes, she may as well act like one—she’s got nothing to lose. And since
all
girls are potential “sluts,” they
all
may come to believe they have nothing to lose.

College-age women, meanwhile, also may engage in very harmful behavior that can have devastating consequences. They learn to manipulate their sexual history as a protective mechanism. A few years older and wiser now that they’re out of high school, they may believe that they’re gaming the slut-shaming system. They proceed in what appears to be a normal and age-appropriate sexual development trajectory, but they become anxious about being perceived as slutty; as a result, they don’t use contraceptives, or they lie about their sexual history, even to health care professionals, endangering their own health.

We must recognize girls’ and young women’s coping mechanisms not as evidence that young females today are hopelessly wild or misguided, or that their parents deserve an F in child-rearing. Rather, we must take a step back and recognize that their responses are symptoms of the sexual double standard and the culture of slut-shaming. We need to listen to what girls and young women are trying to tell us:
that being shamed as a slut—particularly in the digital age of wall-to-wall humiliation—makes their world a living hell and that they will do anything to make the pain go away. In many cases, they turn to coping behaviors to manage guilty feelings because they may believe they deserve to be publicly humiliated. Those of us who have girls or young women in our lives need to show them that no matter what they’ve done sexually, they do not deserve this label.

If You Can’t Shed It, Own It

A common reaction to being slut-bashed is to become extremely sexually active with multiple partners. On the face of it, this response is counterintuitive. If your classmates are calling you a slut, wouldn’t it be logical to protect your reputation by behaving in a manner that is antithetical to sluttiness? Yet this is not the way slut-bashed girls approach the problem. From their perspective, they can’t control being called a slut. Their reputation is being shaped by others. But there is one thing they can control—their sexual behavior. By “owning” the reputation, they assert that they “own” their bodies—that no one, no matter what names they hurl, can take their bodies away from them. Girls who follow this line of reasoning misinterpret feminist notions of empowerment. They are not truly taking ownership over their sexuality because they are behaving defensively in a highly pressured environment of sexual inequality; they are not free agents with real choices. Once again, we see that the sexual double standard restricts girls’ choices, and that the act of fighting back is itself
constrained because it too is conducted within the sphere of the sexual double standard.

The satiric 2010 movie
Easy A
explored the phenomenon of “owning” the “slut” reputation—even when the so-called slut is not sexually active. Olive, played by Emma Stone, is under the radar and desperately wants the kids at school to notice her. In real life, any student who looks like Emma Stone would be impossible to ignore; despite this ludicrous premise, the film is actually quite astute. Olive lies about losing her virginity, and although her plan isn’t for the lie to spread around school, she’s not displeased when that occurs. “I gotta admit,” Olive says, “I kinda liked being on the map.”

To continue being the center of attention, Olive creates a slutty alter ego and embraces the identity. As her gay male friend Brandon says, “You’re not even a real slut—but you’re acting like one.” Brandon concocts his own reputation-management scheme. He wants the kids in school to think he’s straight so that they will stop tormenting him, so he asks Olive to pretend that the two of them have had sex, and she agrees. Brandon wins: he gains status as heterosexual and masculine. Olive loses: her “slut” reputation is sealed, and everyone thinks she is a “dirty skank.” Olive decides, “So fine. I will be the dirtiest skank they will ever see.” She goes to school dressed like Miley Cyrus in a bustier and tights with no skirt or pants. Soon every guy who needs a boost in status asks her for the right to tell the kids at school that he’s had sex with her. Olive agrees, but each guy has to give her a gift card in exchange for their pseudosex. Her mocking narration makes it clear she thinks the sexual double standard is absurd and that the boys’ sexual desperation is ridiculous.

Olive’s fake identity goes too far when a boy who’s been having an affair with the school guidance counselor lies and says that his sexually transmitted disease is from Olive. She chooses to allow the lie to stand, protecting the female guidance counselor, who risks losing her job and marriage. This being a Hollywood movie with A-list actors, all’s well that ends well, with a romantic conclusion. A hunky classmate played by Penn Badgley doesn’t believe the slut stories and saves Olive as the two ride off on a lawnmower.

Easy A
portrays the very real coping mechanism of “owning” a “slut” label. As with many real girls:

1
.   Olive would rather be known as a slut than not be known at all.

2
.   Once she’s known as a slut, she plays the role to the hilt.

3
.   Her identity as slut is necessary for her community; it supports masculine status. It also covers up an adulterous affair.

4
.   The slut is sacrificed to protect everyone else.

5
.   Her identity as a nonslut is restored only through a monogamous heterosexual relationship.

However, there are two crucial differences between Olive’s fictional situation and those of actual girls. First, Olive has a lot of parental support. Her parents do not make her feel ashamed. They openly talk about sexuality, and they don’t appear concerned about their daughter’s reputation. If teenage girls had the same level of support at home, they would be less likely to resort to unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Second, in real life, girls who “own” the label don’t fake having sex. They really do have sex. As a result, they don’t get to ride off into the sunset. Olive, you see, remains a virgin despite her wild reputation—a false note in an otherwise remarkably perceptive script. Hollywood reinforces the sexual double standard because the audience knows that Olive isn’t
really
having sex.