I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (28 page)

At least these women can privately purchase condoms when nobody’s looking. What do you do when you live at home and you have reason to believe that your own mother is tracking your contraceptive use?

Fortune, a twenty-two-year-old Latina college senior, lives with her mother, who repeatedly calls her a slut in Spanish.

T
he word she uses is
cuero
. It is slang for someone who is too easy and loose. It means someone who is dirty because she sleeps around. It’s similar to
puta
. She says it when she thinks I’ve done something wrong, like if I don’t
clean my room. When she says it, it means: “You’re acting bad. You’re not behaving the way a young lady should behave.” I tell her all the time that she shouldn’t call me that, but she says that when she’s upset and frustrated the word comes out. My other relatives must think it’s OK, because they know that my mom insults me in that way, and they never speak up.

To me, I feel like being called a slut is a bad insult because I am clean. It really hurts me because I’m nowhere near a slut. I don’t wear makeup. I don’t dress anything like a slut. I dress very conservatively when I’m around my family because they’re pretty traditional. I would never wear a dress or a skirt in front of my family, although I do when I go to a party. When I want to wear a dress for a party, I have to hide it and get changed somewhere else. Normally I wear jeans and T-shirts, and sometimes a sweater.

Fortune tells me that because of her mother calling her a
cuero
, she has to be very careful to hide the fact that she’s on the pill. She keeps the prescription and the pills themselves in her backpack, and she never keeps her backpack at home unattended. In fact, her mother doesn’t even know that her twenty-two-year-old daughter has a boyfriend. “It’s bad enough my mom calls me a slut just because I don’t act the way she wants me to act,” Fortune explains. “If she knew I had sex, then she would have a reason to call me a slut.”

Slut-shaming, then, is one cause of unintended pregnancies. Most unintended pregnancies occur because birth control is not used properly or at all, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Currently, half (51 percent) of all pregnancies in
the United States are unintended. Nearly all (95 percent) of unintended pregnancies are caused by inconsistent use (43 percent) or nonuse (52 percent) of birth control. Forty percent of all unintended pregnancies in the United States end in abortion.
¹⁶⁸
Slut-shaming, we see, can lead to unintended pregnancy and even abortion.

Birth control is available for free with no co-pay under the Affordable Care Act for forty-seven million women, and thirty million are already taking advantage of the benefit. Those without insurance can also get low-cost birth control from over seven hundred Planned Parenthood health care centers across the fifty states. But a woman has to want to obtain birth control, and slut-shaming often stands in the way of her need for this basic preventive health care.

Gabriela, a thirty-three-year-old Latina woman in New York City, relates that her mother also called her a slut. She connects her upbringing in the shadow of slut-shaming in her own home with her belief that guys alone must provide and use contraception. “When I was growing up, my mom was abusive and said many mean things to me that were unfounded. I don’t know if it’s because I lost my virginity at an early age.” Gabriela had sex at thirteen with the son of her building’s superintendant. When her mother found out, she cursed Gabriela for being a “slut.” Gabriela concedes that she was “too young to have sex,” and that “I was just a little girl, and I shouldn’t have been doing that at that age.” But because her mother called her a slut, “I thought of myself as one because I didn’t know any better.”

Gabriela did not have sex for the next several years. When she became sexually active again, “I realized that I needed to hide
my sexual activity from my mother. I also thought that the guy is the one who should always take responsibility for birth control because I was raised to believe that the guy should be the one in charge. I only knew about condoms and I didn’t consider any other form of birth control.” When she was eighteen, she moved out of her mother’s apartment because her mother was physically abusing her. She lived in a group home for a year.

“I was out of my mom’s home,” Gabriela continues, “but I continued to not take responsibility for condoms. I still always thought that the guy should carry condoms. It never occurred to me that I should carry them or have them. So then when I was eighteen, I got pregnant. We didn’t use a condom. As it was happening, I didn’t worry about the fact that we weren’t using a condom. I wasn’t thinking about diseases and I wasn’t thinking about pregnancy, although I should have been.” Gabriela became pregnant. She continues,

I
got an abortion, which was really scary because I didn’t have my mom’s support, and I was basically alone. I went with someone who was basically a stranger to me; she worked in the group home where I was living, and she had to take me. I was so naive, and I didn’t really even understand what was going on. I remember lots of people crying [in the clinic], and I was in a lot of physical pain afterward, and I remember thinking that I wished I could have been with my mom instead of this woman from the group home that I didn’t know. But mostly I remember thinking that I could have stopped this from happening by protecting myself. So after the abortion, I took it upon myself to get on the pill.

Gabriela believes that she became pregnant because of having been labeled a slut. She says, “I wasn’t aware of it then, but now I know that these labels do matter. Young women need to be educated about the whole slut thing so that they won’t think about themselves the way I did.”

Gabriela was lucky that abortion was available. Although the US Supreme Court ruled in 1973 in
Roe v. Wade
that abortion is legal without restriction until the point of viability (approximately twenty-four weeks of pregnancy), many states (nine as of this writing) have passed laws banning abortion after twenty weeks with limited exceptions for cases of rape and incest, and for the health of the woman; many other states are attempting to pass similar legislation.
¹⁶⁹
Other state laws that make abortion exceedingly inaccessible include those mandating waiting periods, the requirement that the procedure take place in a hospital or with parental notification, and the lack of public funding. Between 2011 and 2013, over two hundred state restrictions were enacted, making twenty-seven states “hostile to abortion rights,” according to the Guttmacher Institute.
¹⁷⁰
These measures have no practical purpose but to shame and stigmatize women, since nearly 89 percent of all abortions take place during the first trimester, with 99 percent occurring before the twenty-first week.
¹⁷¹
The tiny number of abortions that take place after the twenty-first week predominantly occur because of desperate medical circumstances involving the woman, the fetus, or both.

Even within the first trimester, a large number of girls and young women don’t realize they’re pregnant for many weeks: home pregnancy tests are not foolproof, and they sometimes provide a false negative result; some women continue to bleed
even during pregnancy, and if they have a history of irregular periods, they don’t question this bleeding, because it’s their norm; not everyone experiences morning sickness; and if a woman is overweight, she may not notice the extra pounds in her midsection.
¹⁷²
Once a woman realizes she’s pregnant and decides she wants an abortion, she may need several weeks to collect the funds to pay for it, including costs for traveling to a health care site that may be in another state, and to take off work without pay, which in some states may stretch out to a week when state law calls for a waiting period. So even if abortion is legal, very often it is not accessible—particularly for low-income women who don’t have the money or the ability to take off time from work without penalty.

What drives abortion bans and restrictions? The belief that women who have sex for pleasure rather than procreation are sluts. Low-income women more than anyone else are profoundly hurt by obstacles to abortion access.

Andrea Grimes, an investigative political reporter who now advocates for the right of women to have access to safe and legal abortion, had been an ardent pro-life supporter when she was growing up in Fort Worth, Texas. She reveals that punishing women for having sex rather than concern over fetuses was the engine driving her pro-life rhetoric:

B
ecause while I said it was about the babies, it wasn’t. It was about slut-shaming. I absolutely
loved
slut-shaming. Because I was saving myself for marriage—well, oral sex doesn’t really count anyway, does it?—I knew that I would always be right and virtuous and I would never be a murderer like those
sluts
. The issue couldn’t possibly be up for
real debate, to my mind: either you were a baby-killer slut, or you behaved like a proper Christian woman and only let him get to third base. Babies were simultaneously women’s punishment for having premarital sex and beautiful gifts from Jesus Himself. That didn’t seem like a contradiction in my mind. It was just another one of God’s perfect mysteries. . . . In private, my anti-choice friends and I would laugh and laugh . . . about how stupid women were for having premarital sex. How evil they were for not being able to control themselves. How great I was for not having sex with my boyfriend.
¹⁷³

If those who want to outlaw abortion were truly concerned about fetuses, then why are women alone singled out for punishment—why aren’t the men who create unwanted pregnancies also taken to task for their sexual activity? Why don’t those who want to outlaw abortion combat ignorance about pregnancy through comprehensive sex education? Why don’t they work to make birth control more, not less, accessible? Why do legislators continue to propose antiabortion bills with no exceptions for the health of the woman? The answer is that the desire to outlaw abortion is mingled with the desire for women with unwanted pregnancies to suffer because they are “sluts” who should have known better. Once again, we see the mind-set that “sluts” must be punished.

Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old.
¹⁷⁴
And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
¹⁷⁵
Blaming women who need abortions through
slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible.

Better Dead Than a Slut

The most egregious and extreme consequence of slut-bashing is suicide. Since 2008, we know of at least eleven slut-bashed girls ages twelve to eighteen who have killed themselves.

One of the most widely covered stories was that of Hope Witsell. In June 2009, whenever Witsell, a thirteen-year-old from rural Florida, walked into a classroom, someone invariably said, “Oh, here comes the slut.” No matter where she tried to hide at Beth Shields Middle School, kids taunted her. Turns out that Witsell had sent a photo of herself topless to a boy she liked. Another girl borrowed the boy’s phone, found the photo, and forwarded it to some friends. The photo went viral. Everyone at school—even kids who went to a neighboring school—had seen it.

Witsell was a good student and the kind of untroubled child teachers love. A student adviser for the local chapter of the National FFA (Future Farmers of America) Organization who went to church every Sunday with her parents and enjoyed fishing with her father, Witsell wrote in her diary that, “Tons of people talk about me behind my back and I hate it because they call me a whore! And I can’t be a whore I’m too inexperienced. So secretly TONS of people hate me . . .” Two weeks into the summer vacation, the school’s administration learned about the photo and suspended Witsell for one week in September. Her parents took away her cell phone
and grounded her for the summer, but they permitted her to attend an FFA convention in Orlando.

Several older boys staying at the same hotel met her at the pool, and called her room repeatedly to ask her for a photo of her breasts. According to a friend who was in the room, Witsell was scared of the boys and took a picture to get them to stop bothering her. She left the phone for one boy, who didn’t have a phone of his own, to pick up and view. But an adult intercepted the phone and found the photo. When her school found out that Witsell had done it again, its administrators decided not to allow her to run for student adviser the following year.

When school started up again, so did the bullying. Witsell met with a school social worker, who noticed cuts on her leg and had her sign a “no-harm” contract in which she agreed to talk to an adult if she felt the desire to hurt herself. But the school did not call her parents.

On September 12, 2009, Witsell’s mother went to kiss her daughter good-night. She opened the door to find that Witsell had hanged herself to death with a pink scarf tied to the canopy of her bed. The “no-harm” contract lay in the trash can. Witsell had determined that because everyone thought of her as a slut, she had no future, and that ending her life made the most sense.

In an excellent exposé, Andrew Meacham of the
Tampa Bay Times
recounts how Beth Shields Middle School botched up big-time. The school did not take any action against any of the students who forwarded the photo of Witsell or brazenly humiliated her. Instead, the school was relentlessly punitive toward Witsell.
¹⁷⁶
Perhaps administrators reasoned that
if she took topless photos of herself and sent them to boys, she was not worthy of sympathy. The school’s reaction reinforced the belief that she was deserving of punishment rather than understanding.