I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (29 page)

We all need to be understanding, not punitive. It’s true that Witsell initiated the chain of events that led to her reputation. She made a foolish mistake—not once but twice. But she was thirteen, and she felt the weight of enormous pressure. How can you be thirteen and
not
make a foolish mistake under these circumstances, perhaps even twice?

At the time that Witsell ended her life, Phoebe Prince, fifteen, was the new girl at South Hadley High School in Massachusetts. Her family had just moved from Ireland. Prince briefly dated a popular football player, as well as another boy. But wouldn’t you know it—each boy had a relationship with another girl, either a former girlfriend or someone with whom he was still physically involved. Those girls did not take kindly to Prince’s moving into their town and moving in on their guys. The girls enlisted their friends to launch an intense bullying campaign. Several girls regularly called her “Irish slut,” and cursed her in the hallways and cafeteria.
¹⁷⁷
Through texts and Facebook messages, others at South Hadley High called her a slut and a whore and told her she deserved to die. Prince was aware that there were threats to “beat her up” and “punch her in the face.” Hours before she hanged herself with a scarf in January 2010, one of her tormenters threw a can at Prince as she walked home from school.
¹⁷⁸

As with Witsell, her school’s administrators knew about the harassment but did not take action against any of the students who bullied her. As with Witsell, she was not sexually
naive. But in Prince’s case, criminal charges were brought against six teenagers who were indicted as adults on various charges ranging from statutory rape to criminal harassment to stalking. In May 2011, five of the teens were placed on probation, with several also sentenced to community service.

In
Sticks and Stones
, Emily Bazelon analyzes the complexity of Prince’s suicide, concluding that although she was indeed bullied and called a slut, Prince had a history of depression and had attempted suicide previously before she even had moved to the United States. It would be wrong, Bazelon cautions, to establish a causal relationship between the slut-bashing and the suicide.
¹⁷⁹

Suicide is never caused by only one thing, and it’s true that the relationship between slut-bashing and suicide is enormously complex. Slut-bashing alone may not motivate a girl to take her own life. At the same time, we should not ignore the association between the two. After all, a correlation between gay-bashing and suicide attempts has been documented, so it would make sense for correlation between slut-bashing—harassment that similarly focuses on the victim’s real or alleged sexuality—to also exist.
¹⁸⁰

Hope Witsell’s and Phoebe Prince’s stories received a great deal of publicity, leading to public conversations about slut-bashing. The experiences of other girls who committed suicide after being slut-bashed likewise have been uncovered:

IN JULY 2008
in Cincinnati, eighteen-year-old Jessica Logan hanged herself one month after graduating from high school. She had sent a photo of her
self nude to a boyfriend. After they broke up, he mass-forwarded the photo. Everyone at school saw the picture. They called her “slut,” “whore,” and “skank.”
¹⁸¹

IN MARCH 2010
in Long Island, New York, seventeen-year-old Alexis Pilkington hanged herself after landing a soccer scholarship to college. She had been called a slut on Formspring, but her parents said publicly that their daughter had suffered from depression; slut-bashing, they believe, did not cause her to end her own life. After her death, anonymous people posted graphic images of nooses around her neck on her Facebook memorial site.
¹⁸²

IN APRIL 2012
in Mantorville, Minnesota, thirteen-year-old Rachel Ehmke hanged herself after repeatedly having been called a slut and a prostitute in person and online. Two days before her death, an anonymous text sent to students at her school said that she was a slut, she should leave the school, and that the text should be forwarded to everyone they knew. Ehmke was in the seventh grade.
¹⁸³

IN SEPTEMBER 2012
in Saratoga, California, fifteen-year-old Audrie Pott hanged herself. The week before, she had been sexually assaulted by three boys at a party at a friend’s house at which she had passed out drunk. The boys, whom she had known for years, took off her clothes and sexually assaulted her, including writing and drawing on her body with a permanent marker. They also took photos of her marked-up body, which then circulated among her
schoolmates. At least one teenage girl was present in the room when the assaults occurred and encouraged the boys. Pott had written to a friend on Facebook, “I have a reputation for a night I don’t even remember and the whole school knows.”
¹⁸⁴

IN OCTOBER 2012
in Staten Island, New York, fifteen-year-old Felicia Garcia jumped to her death onto the track of an oncoming train. Several football players had tormented her with boasts about having had sex with her at a party after a game; other classmates joined in the name-calling. The night before she killed herself, she tweeted, “I cant, im done, I give up.” Garcia’s parents had died when she was a little girl; she was raised primarily within the foster care system, and had bounced around from home to home.
¹⁸⁵

IN OCTOBER 2012
in British Columbia, fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd hanged herself. When she was twelve, a stranger she had met through video chat convinced Todd to bare her breasts on camera and then circulated the photo online. The individual later created a Facebook profile using the same photo and even contacted her classmates. Soon after, she had sex with a boy who had another girlfriend; the girlfriend and a group of others physically attacked Todd. She tried to commit suicide by drinking bleach, but she survived; messages about her failed suicide attempt were posted to Facebook, and she was relentlessly teased by her classmates. A month before she killed herself, she posted a
nine-minute video on YouTube titled “My Story: Struggling, bullying, suicide and self harm,” in which she used a series of flash cards to tell of her experiences being bullied. After her death, she continued to be labeled a whore and a slut on online messages.
¹⁸⁶

IN DECEMBER 2012
in Hudson, New York, sixteen-year-old Jessica Laney hanged herself. Her friends said that she was called a “slut” and a “fuckin ugly ass hoe” on Ask.fm, the website modeled after Formspring that allows bullies to remain anonymous.
¹⁸⁷

IN APRIL 2013
in Nova Scotia, seventeen-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons hanged herself, leading to a coma; her family decided to switch off her life support machine several days later. When she was fifteen, she had been gang-raped by four teenage boys at a party when she was drunk. During one of the rapes, a bystander photographed the assault, and the photo was widely circulated in her school and town. “It went to every kid’s cellphone,” a friend reported. “Everyone assumed she was being a slut, that she wanted it.” When Parsons explained that she had been raped, her peers “decided not to believe her.”
¹⁸⁸

IN MAY 2013
in Queens, New York, twelve-year-old Gabrielle Molina hanged herself. Students had called her a slut online. Molina left behind a note describing the bullying and apologizing to her parents for ending her life.
¹⁸⁹

For a girl already depressed or anxious, slut-bashing may be the thing that finally pushes her over the edge and
motivates her to take her own life. Even if the majority of slut-bashing incidents don’t end in such horrific outcomes, it’s clear that to stand by while this kind of bullying is occurring and not intervene is unacceptable.

Slut-bashing and slut-shaming often are justified on the grounds that they teach girls a lesson: that they should not be sexually active at all, or that they should not be “too” sexually active. If girls heeded this lesson, the rationale goes, they would adopt healthy behaviors. Yet we see that slut-bashing and slut-shaming cause the opposite to occur. Girls and women consistently turn to dangerous, damaging, and degrading behaviors. Calling a female a slut is like telling her, “Do not take care of yourself, because you are worthless.” Tragically, some girls and women believe this to be true.

CHAPTER 7

The Rape of a “Slut” Is Rape

“If you’ve hooked up with someone like, three times,” says fifteen-year-old Jocelyn, “there gets a point where you can’t just, like, take off your shirt. You have to do more.”

Kaitlyn, sixteen, agrees. “There was a freshman in my school who hooked up with a junior and wouldn’t let him touch her boobs,” she adds. “So people talked about her in a negative way because it was like, ‘Why would she hook up with a junior and not do anything? He could get another junior girl who’s hotter and will do things with him.’”

These girls are describing a social system in which females are valued only for the sexual pleasure they provide males. They are not appreciated for anything but their ability to provide a sexual service. Their own desires are beside the point. They “have to do more” than what they want to do. If they don’t, the guy they’re attracted to will “get another girl” who “will do things with him.”

I was jolted by how blasé Jocelyn and Kaitlyn were in relating this state of affairs. The five other girls sitting with us on the floor of a studio in downtown Manhattan were just as languid. No one contradicted Jocelyn or Kaitlyn, or even seemed particularly disturbed by their reports.

How did we get to this point? I tried to keep my face neutral, and in a measured voice, I asked the girls how they feel about this pressure to go further sexually than they would like. What do they think about the fact that what they want to do sexually is less important to many guys than what the guys want—and that the guys tend to prevail?

“We kind of don’t think about it,” Jocelyn replied. “We kind of ignore it. This is just normal.” I looked around at the girls, seated in a semicircle on the scruffy floor.
Yep
, their expressions said,
this is just normal
.

These girls’ perception that they are expected to provide a sexual service to guys whether or not they want to was echoed in research conducted by Heather Hlavka, a sociologist at Marquette University. Hlavka analyzed interviews with one hundred girls between the ages of three and seventeen who had been victims of sexual assault, and found that the girls overwhelmingly did not even recognize acts of sexual assault as crimes. One white thirteen-year-old girl told her interviewer, “They grab you, touch your butt and try to, like, touch you in the front, and run away, but it’s okay, I mean . . . I never think it’s a big thing because they do it to everyone.”
¹⁹⁰
The girls in Hlavka’s research did not recognize sexual violence unless it conformed to their limited conception of rape; therefore, as an example, they did not perceive an act of violently forced oral sex as rape because they
recognized only violently forced vaginal penetration as an act of rape.
¹⁹¹
Hlavka concluded that the girls in this study “often did not name what law, researchers, and educators commonly identify as sexual harassment and abuse.”
¹⁹²

As the girls I met with shrugged,
This is just normal
.

Males who sexually pressure or overpower females they consider to be “slutty” believe that their behavior is acceptable. They think: It’s normal. It’s natural. It’s inevitable. After all, a “slut’s” value comes from her sexuality. Therefore, it’s OK to be sexual with her even if she doesn’t consent. Otherwise, why did she sluttify herself in the first place? Wasn’t it her choice, her decision, to turn herself into a sexual object? Isn’t she “asking for it”? Anyone who interprets the act as assault has misunderstood; the act was consensual.
^*

We’ve seen that a girl or woman may be labeled a slut for a variety of reasons. Sometimes she sexualizes herself—she wears clothing considered provocative, or she seeks out males’ attention. But sometimes she does not sexualize herself—she’s labeled a slut because she is drunk, or she’s considered a threat by her female peers, or she differs from them in some arbitrary manner. Either way, she becomes regarded by others as a sexual object.

Given the conditions at play today, in which, as we’ve seen, every girl or young woman is at risk of being regarded a slut, it’s reasonable to argue that every girl or woman is also at risk at some point of being sexually overpowered or coerced.

Once assaulted, the victim and not the perpetrator is blamed—because she is, after all, a “slut.” The accuser rather than the accused is presumed to be lying; the accused rather than the accuser is seen as sympathetic, as one who has experienced a trauma. This mind-set seems like a throwback to an earlier era, before feminists raised society’s awareness of the prevalence and seriousness of sexual assault. And yet this mind-set is astonishingly common. Many people use a victim’s preassault actions to justify her assault. Victims are conditioned to accept this logic and conclude that they are to blame. Maybe they weren’t
really
assaulted. They are uncertain. And their uncertainty feeds more assaults, because their uncertainty prevents them from reporting what has occurred. Their uncertainty protects the perpetrator and preserves the logic of slut-shaming.