I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (25 page)

In the real world, girls who “own” the label end up having sex that is unhealthy. Please note that I am not arguing that sex is unhealthy, or even that sex among adolescents is unhealthy. Rather, I’m arguing that sex sought out for reasons disconnected from affection, intimacy, emotional pleasure, or physical pleasure is unhealthy.

Erica, the white twenty-one-year-old college sophomore, decided in the tenth grade that since everyone
thought
she was sexually active, despite the fact that she was not, she
should be
sexually active, but on her terms. She explained to me how her decision to embrace the label through her behavior spiraled out of control:

I
started to think I should act a certain way. I started making out with people. I started hooking up with a number of guys. I wore leopard push-up bras. I decided to “own” the label. I think it was a normal reaction to the situation I was in. There was so much pressure on us [girls] to show our value through our sexuality, so then we think we need to defend the label. I thought I was deriving power from having lots of sex. Also, girls were labeled either “prudes” or “sluts.” If you’re a girl and you want to have sex, the only thing you know is to be slutty.

When I graduated from high school, I didn’t even know you
could
be in control of your sex life. I thought that the girls my age just had a lot of casual sex that they might not have wanted. I thought that that’s just what teenage girls did. I didn’t know I could choose when, why, or how.

I was having sex with whomever, however. I removed my emotions from it. During one four-month period, I slept with twelve guys. I was successful in proving to myself that sex and emotions could be separated. It was exciting at first. Nobody was pulling at my emotions, which felt great. But after four months, I didn’t feel in control anymore. It wasn’t fun anymore. It became negative, and also I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about it.

There was a turning point where I had sex with someone who was really drunk, and it was very scary because I had no control. He was over six feet tall, and he overpowered me. I consented to the initial act, but then I wanted to get out of it, but I couldn’t. He was too big and strong and drunk. I tried to get him to stop, but he wouldn’t.

Lacking models of healthy sexuality, Erica believed that having sex with multiple partners in a short period of time was what she was expected to do. Although she “owned” her label to assert control, in fact she had minimal control, because she was ignorant of other sexual options. When she was physically overpowered in an act of sexual assault, she literally lost control. She had framed her sexual activity within a slut-shaming narrative, the only narrative she knew, which closed off the possibility of choosing to say no or yes and meaning it.

Elizabeth, a white twenty-nine-year-old educator who grew
up in New York City and now lives in the Southeast, was a very early developer—she first menstruated at age ten—and became known as a slut beginning in the seventh grade, when her family moved upstate and she was the new girl in school. One girl in her grade was a ringleader who “started a campaign” against Elizabeth, who stood out because she wore a bra and wore fashionable clothes and eye makeup. “I wasn’t trying to present myself as sexual,” she says. “I was just interested in fashion. I loved Madonna’s look.” The girl yelled out “slut” to Elizabeth in the school hallways, egging on her friends to do the same.

Like Erica, Elizabeth became known as a slut even though she had zero sexual experience, but after being known as a slut she became sexually active. Unlike Erica, she had only one sexual partner. Nevertheless, she too had sex to prove a point, and as with Erica, she was pressured into sex she did not want.

Elizabeth became sexually active when she was in the eighth grade with Robert, a fellow eighth-grader and the son of a woman in the community with whom she had become very close. Elizabeth told me that Robert’s mother became her “surrogate mother” because even though Elizabeth lived with her parents, she felt estranged from them emotionally. Her father had been emotionally abusive to Elizabeth and to her mother, and Elizabeth started to realize that her family was unbalanced. She became good friends with Robert’s younger sister and started sleeping over at their house, which is when she started having sex with Robert.

“I was definitely sexually curious,” she says, and “in some ways, maybe I felt that the label gave me the license to
experiment, whereas if I hadn’t been called a slut, I would have been too scared to be sexually active even if I had wanted to be. If you’re scared of getting labeled then you don’t do [sexual] things, but if you’re already labeled then it doesn’t matter.” Elizabeth thought of herself as sexually empowered, but she had never been properly educated about what “sexual empowerment” really means.

I
listened to a college radio station and heard Riot Grrrl music, and I had some feminist punk ideals. I tried to piece together an empowered sexuality, although I have to say that the sex I had was not very empowering. I was not in touch with what I wanted or needed, and we were drinking, and we were so young. I remember feeling like intercourse was a big step, and I expressed reservations about it, but then it happened very quickly. He and I had sex four or five times. I’m not sure about consent. I definitely consented to foreplay but not to intercourse. I was on the fence about intercourse. I would say things like, “I’m not really sure how I feel about this.” He pressured me. I don’t remember him overpowering me, but he definitely pressured me. I don’t think he was even aware of it.

At school, Robert did not acknowledge Elizabeth, but the kids were aware that the two of them had had sex. “I didn’t expect him to date me necessarily, but the fact that he didn’t even acknowledge me at school made me think of myself as a slut.” Elizabeth told an adult friend that she was having sex with Robert, and the friend used the word “rape.” Elizabeth was confused. “I thought rape was something that
happened by a stranger in an alleyway. I didn’t want that label for my experience. I didn’t know what language to use. Today I would say that the sex was nonconsensual but not rape.” The story that she had been raped got around school, and her surrogate mother found out. She called Elizabeth, angry not only that she’d had sex with her son, but also that she was supposedly spreading a rumor that Robert was a rapist, although Elizabeth tried to explain that she didn’t try to spread the rumor; the story was being spread around by other kids. “So then this woman who been so supportive of me was angry with me, and my support network totally crumbled out from under me.”

Elizabeth had had sex with Robert because she’d been labeled already, so she figured she could do no wrong; how could things get worse than being called a slut? Yet indeed they did. She had nonconsensual sex, became the subject of yet another rumor, and lost the support of someone important to her who had offered stability. In addition, she believed that having sex would dovetail with her feminist vision of “empowered sexuality.” The idea that having sex ipso facto is “empowering” led her, as it has led so many others, astray. As we have seen repeatedly, sexual activity within a framework of the sexual double standard and sexual inequality can undermine one’s power.

Cynthia, a white twenty-one-year-old student in Pennsylvania, became known as a slut after she was molested by her brother for two years beginning when she was eleven. He is four years older than she. “It was physical abuse that usually was not sexual, but sometimes he also dry-humped me and masturbated in front of me. But mostly it was him physically
beating me up,” Cynthia tells me matter-of-factly. “I always fought back. I thought this was normal brother-sister fighting, so I never talked about it.”

No one would have known except that when she was in the eighth grade, Cynthia confided in her school counselor, and the full extent of the abuse came out. Charges were brought against Cynthia’s brother, including molestation charges. Cynthia and her parents tried to keep the charges private, but her brother was sent to juvenile detention for a year and a half. Once his friends knew why, everyone knew.

The gossip started in ninth grade, she tells me. “Lots of rumors went around that I was having sex with my brother, which was not true. Random people would come up to me in the hallway at school and say to me, ‘Didn’t your brother rape you?’ and then just keep walking.”

Although the kids at school were aware of the charges, they didn’t know all the details. But in the eleventh grade, a girl who had previously been Cynthia’s best friend “revealed everything to a lot of people.” I asked Cynthia to speculate why her friend had punctured her privacy. “I think she was upset with me because we weren’t friends anymore, and the reason was that she fell into a crowd that did drugs, and I didn’t want to hang out with druggies. She might also have been upset with herself too for being with them, and she was also offended that I didn’t want to be with her anymore.” Cynthia added, “She did the worst form of bullying I ever encountered. Because of her, people called me ‘slut,’ ‘whore,’ and ‘skank.’ They did it right to my face. They said it right at me in the hallways. And as the stories went around, the information got changed. The
story became that I had slept with my brother, and that I had wanted it and enjoyed it.”

Cynthia reacted the way so many girls in her situation do: “I tried to embrace the label.” She continues,

I
kind of tried to take the slutty personality and work with it and make it cool. In a way, I took on the role of being promiscuous. I tried to be what people expected of me. I started hanging out with girls that other girls considered skanky. I decided to be a slut and be what people were saying about me. I had sex with four random older guys who were acquaintances. I was fourteen and they were eighteen or nineteen. I just met them and hooked up with them purposely so that I could lose my virginity. The first guy I approached told me that he never slept with virgins, so I purposely went and slept with someone else first, although I never even hooked up with him. At the time, I felt cool. I tried to appear cool, so I talked about my sexual experiences with my friends, which made me seem experienced and slutty. My new friends looked up to me as someone who was experienced.

I slept around to try to take back the power and control that had been taken from me when I was abused and when people called me names. It was really just about me trying to be in control. But then I realized—what am I doing? I wasn’t respecting my body. I never got any physical or emotional pleasure. I didn’t have an orgasm once, although they all did. If it’s a one-night stand, the guy doesn’t care if the girl gets off. It’s not in his interest to care. I did like the power and control, but nothing else.

When Cynthia embraced the label, she received no physical or emotional pleasure. Every girl and young woman I spoke with who embraced the “slut” label to cope with her reputation ended up having sex that, for lack of a better word, was “bad.” Not every sexual encounter was bad, to be sure. But ultimately these sexual relationships were bad because the girls and women ended up assaulted, coerced, or used. Sex that is intended to prove a point rarely does.

The Disappearing Slut

Having a lot of sex is one way to exert control. Another method is bodily deprivation. After Elizabeth embraced her reputation by having sex with Robert, she developed an eating disorder. “I connect it with my confused sexual awakening,” she explains.

I
made a conscious decision to be skinny. All of a sudden I started to feel really uncomfortable in my body. I thought I needed to look perfect. There was also so much pressure at school to be perfect. I was a very good student, but I wanted to be perfect at everything. And at the same time, I felt rejected by Robert because he wouldn’t even acknowledge me in the hallway at school after we had sex, even before the rumor went around that he had raped me. I never thought I looked right, and I had trouble looking at myself in the mirror. I never felt that my body was attractive or beautiful. So I got really controlling about it.

Elizabeth first exhibited anorexic behavior. Then she turned to bulimic behavior. Five feet tall, she was down to eighty-nine pounds at her lowest point, although she never had to be hospitalized. “I think I was looking to create boundaries. The behavior gave me a sense of control over my body that was difficult to come by not only because of my sexual experiences but also because of the controlling dynamics in my household, and I didn’t really have anyone to help me,” she tells me. “I didn’t have that support—not from my own parents and not even from my surrogate mother.”

Elizabeth made a second conscious decision: not to explore her lesbian sexual desire. “If I hadn’t been called a slut, I would have been queer in high school. But being labeled a slut put me in a heterosexual box. I did not want to be called a slut and also a ‘dyke’—that would have been just too much. I didn’t date girls until I was twenty-one, and I know that I would have done it sooner if I hadn’t been labeled.”

Refusing to eat is not only a method of controlling one’s body. It is also a way to signal “I’m not sexual.” Although being slender is equated with being sexy, being skeletal (by the standards of most people) is not. Also, the refusal to eat is a refusal of bodily pleasure, and therefore it is a rejection of one’s sexuality. In some respects, developing an eating disorder is the opposite of “owning” a “slut” label because it projects an asexual persona. And since Elizabeth also decided to ignore her lesbian sexual desire, she crushed her sexuality doubly.

Abigail, a white twenty-one-year-old student who grew up in upstate New York, developed an eating disorder after she was labeled a slut when she was a junior in high school.

T
he kids were fascinated by my spiraling down. I was well liked, but people were just fascinated. This was a small town with no distractions, so it was like I was their soap opera. I’m five foot two, and I got down to ninety-one pounds. My body shut down and I was hospitalized. But in my senior year, I snapped back and ended the disordered eating, although I was clearly troubled. I did not sexualize myself at all. I always wore large, baggy clothes. The truth is that because I suffered from having the eating disorder, the ‘slut’ reputation didn’t bother me as much as it might have. I then had other things to worry about.