I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (33 page)

The name-calling went beyond just friends of friends at a party; it began to haunt her in her dorm, making her unsafe. Jamie’s resident adviser created signs for everyone’s door. But for Jamie’s door, the sign did not say
JAMIE
. It read
MUFF MASTER
. The RA’s action was particularly inappropriate since she was supposed to oversee the students’ well-being. Instead, her action made Jamie feel threatened. Jamie took it down immediately, but her RA put up a new one. “What shocked me was that everybody had heard about me. From sophomores to seniors, they would say, ‘Oh, you’re the Muff Master! I’ve heard so much about you.’ I’d say, ‘What have you heard about me?’ ‘That you get around.’ At that point, I would just walk
away. I started telling my friends, “Enough with the whole Muff Master thing. Let’s just go back to Jamie. I go by Jamie now.” Jamie pauses and sighs. “I probably waited too long. Too much time had gone by. So now I had this reputation of sleeping with anyone. Guys would show up and say to me”—she impersonates a deep, masculine voice—“‘So, I hear you’re the Muff Master. Would you like to go the other way?’”

One night, her dorm had a party on the floor. Guys were walking in and out of different rooms. Her door sign still said
MUFF MASTER
. Jamie, who had been drinking at the party, went to her room at 1:00 a.m. Her roommate was away for the weekend, so she wasn’t expecting anyone to be inside. She pushed open the door, and sitting at her desk chair was a guy she didn’t know, although she recognized him because he worked part-time as the desk attendant in the lobby. “He is a very big man—probably six foot seven.” Jamie said, “Can I help you?” He was clearly drunk. He said, “I hear you’re the Muff Master, and I hear you like guys too, so how about the two of us, what do you think?”

“I was extremely scared,” Jamie tells me. “Now, I’m a big girl; I can defend myself. I’m five foot eight and strong. But I was scared, and I didn’t know what to do. He pushed me on the bed. Because of the party, it was very noisy outside my room, with music blasting. I could see that he was not going to leave until he had sex with me. I could see that there was no way I could stop him. I was really scared. So I managed to tell him, ‘Listen, let’s get a condom.’ He didn’t listen to me. He raped me, and he did not use a condom.”

Jamie ran out of her room hysterical, crying. She found some of her friends, who went with her to her room, where
the rapist was still sitting. Her friends told him he had to leave. Jamie again lowers her voice to a deep masculine boom, imitating his voice: “Well, she said that she was fine with it. I don’t understand what’s the matter.” And then he left.

The next day, he sent Jamie a Facebook message: “Hey listen, I don’t know what happened last night, but if you want to go in for halvsies on Plan B, let me know.” Jamie did not respond. Because he worked in her dorm lobby, she saw him every Tuesday and Thursday at 8:00 a.m. He acted as if everything were normal.

Jamie doubts that he recognizes that he raped her. Even she sounds a little hesitant when she says the word. “I would say it was rape.” She pauses. “But I do look at it as sort of my fault.” She pauses. “I should have been decisive. I’m an assertive person. I wish I had handled it differently. Did I say no at first? Yes. Of course I said no. But he was forceful, and then I stopped saying no because I was fearful of my personal safety. I just passively let him do what he wanted. I figured, let me just get through it; it will be done soon; and then he would just leave.” Jamie’s experience shows that rape does not necessarily entail physical force.

Jamie attributes the rape to her reputation as a sexualized woman. “He must have thought, ‘Well, she sleeps around all the time, so she’ll say yes to me.’”

The “slut” label–rape–alcohol connection can operate in two directions. In Jamie’s case, she was first known as “slutty” and then raped as a result of her reputation. The rape took place during a party in which alcohol flowed freely, which as research on campus rape shows is extremely common. The fact that Jamie had been drinking meant her defenses
were down, and the rapist no doubt took her condition into account when he targeted her. But sometimes a woman becomes known as a “slut”
because
she is raped while drunk. The “slut” label in this scenario is a mechanism for others to make sense of the sexual assault. Instead of understanding the assault as a crime committed by the rapist, they understand it as a fabrication concocted by the drunken victim.

Melinda, a white thirty-nine-year-old educator in the Pacific Northwest, was raped twice as a teenager; both times, she was blacked-out from being drunk. Melinda grew up in a small town, and her home was “chaotic and violent,” she tells me. “My mom was violent to me, physically and verbally. She would beat me and pull my hair, and she was also always very critical of everything I did. She and my dad had come from violence and poverty, and my household was very disjointed.” When Melinda was fifteen, in the ninth grade, she went to a party and drank vodka for the first time. Not knowing her limits, she passed out cold. “I had never had sex before, but while I was passed out, I was raped, although I didn’t know it. The next day, I felt sore, but I didn’t know why.”

I asked her how she found out what had occurred. “A guy came to my door the next day and asked me if I knew what had happened.” Melinda discovered who had done this to her—a guy at the party who was eighteen or nineteen. It turned out that he had a girlfriend who went to Melinda’s high school. Several days later, the girlfriend confronted her. “She called me a slut and a skank and told me to stay away from her boyfriend. All of a sudden, my social status changed. Before the rape, I’d been nerdy. I’d gotten good grades. Now the entire high school saw me as a slut. I was a
girl who couldn’t be trusted.” Even the teachers knew about her rep. One day her French teacher told the class, “Today let’s discuss Melinda’s sex life.” Melinda says wryly, “Since everyone had to speak only in French, I guess he thought it was OK.” No one recognized that Melinda had been a victim of violence because she never told anyone, so only his version of what had occurred—that the two of them had had sex—went around.

“Why didn’t you tell the girls at school that you’d been raped?” I asked.

“Because I blamed myself. I shouldn’t have been drinking. I shouldn’t have been at the party. I shouldn’t have been pretending that I was a normal girl with a normal family. I felt an immense weight of shame. I became really depressed, and I decided that I was going to own the label. I thought, ‘I’ll just become the slut you think I am.’ I started sleeping around. During the rest of my time in high school, I slept with ten to twelve guys. I drank and smoked pot. I dated the high school drug dealer. I shoplifted. I tried to take control because the story about me was out of my control. Also, I really just wanted attention. I’d only had negative attention, and I did anything to try to get some positive attention.”

One year later, she went to a bar with her cousin at her cousin’s college campus. She drank and blacked out again. Melinda was raped again—by a college student living in her cousin’s dorm, and she became pregnant. She managed to hide the pregnancy from her friends and family. At two months, she deliberately took a home-pregnancy test and left the stick in the bathroom where she knew her mother would find it, but her mother pretended that she never saw it. “But
I knew that she had,” Melinda says. “When I was at three months, I told her, and then she told my dad. They were furious with me. I explained that I had been raped, but they said it wasn’t really rape and that I deserved it. My mother called me a slut.”

Melinda had an abortion at fourteen weeks. “My mom drove me to the clinic and dropped me off, so I had to walk through the protesters by myself. Everyone in my family then pretended that none of this ever happened. I started obsessively going to the gym to try to gain control of my body. I weighed myself all the time and always counted calories. I never got down below 105, but my behavior was neurotic.”

I ask Melinda which was worse: having been raped, or having been called a slut. She doesn’t hesitate with her reply. “Being called a slut was worse than both rapes,” she says. “Being known as a slut was like being branded. No one knew about the second rape. But the labeling was public.”

Melinda’s reputation occurred before the age of social media. Were she twenty years younger, she likely would have experienced the horror of seeing humiliating, denigrating photographic evidence of her assault, coupled with slut-bashing commentary, bouncing around Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Every day, it seems, another girl goes to a party and drinks too much—because she lacks the judgment and experience to know her limit, because boys encourage her to exceed her limit, or possibly, as was in Melinda’s case, because she needed to cope with violence at home. She passes out, is raped by multiple perpetrators, is photographed, and is shamed on social media as the photographic evidence of her “sluttiness” is mass-forwarded. As we’ve seen, in recent years,
Audrie Pott, fifteen, of California, and Rehtaeh Parsons, seventeen, of Nova Scotia, committed suicide after they were gang-raped while drunk. In both cases, boys photographed the assaults and then circulated the photos, adding public humiliation to the private shame and psychological trauma of having been sexually assaulted. Branded “sluts” via social media, each girl determined that she would rather die than live with her reputation.

In Torrington, Connecticut, in 2013, two eighteen-year-old high school football players were charged with raping two thirteen-year-old girls, one of whom drank vodka and smoked marijuana with the boys but who said they did not want to have intercourse. The girls were subsequently taunted as sluts who deserved what they got. A Twitter message posted one day after one of the boys was arrested said, “Even if it was all his fault, what was a 13-year-old girl doing hanging around with 18-year-old guys.” The message was reposted several times.
²²⁶
One student wrote on Twitter, “Young girls acting like whores there’s no punishment for that. Young men acting like boys is a sentence.” A high school sophomore told the
Times
, “The chick, she should get in trouble, too. It’s probably a regular thing she does.”
²²⁷

But the mother of all “drunk raped sluts deserve what they got” narratives is that of the Steubenville, Ohio, victim. On August 11, 2012, a sixteen-year-old girl from West Virginia drank vodka and then went to a party in Steubenville where many popular wrestlers and football players were present, including the team’s quarterback, Trent Mays, sixteen, with whom the girl had been flirting via social media. At around midnight, Mays and his friend Ma’lik Richmond, the team’s
wide receiver, went to another party, and the girl insisted that they bring her with them. At the next party, she threw up. Mays and Richmond carried her outside. She threw up again in front of the house on the street. Then she blacked out and doesn’t remember anything until she woke up the next morning in the basement of a senior. She woke up naked next to Mays. According to Ariel Levy of
The New Yorker
, when her friends came to pick her up, “she seemed fine with where she was.”
²²⁸
The girl had no memory of being raped, and was unsure if a crime had been committed.

Photographic evidence of the girl’s sexual assault soon surfaced. An ex-boyfriend uploaded a photograph of the girl being carried by Richmond and Mays on Instagram. Richmond holds her by her ankles while Mays has her by the wrists, and she is clearly incapacitated, dead weight. The ex-boyfriend tweeted, “Never seen anything this sloppy lol.” Another boy tweeted, “Whores are hilarious.” A third boy tweeted, “If they’re getting ‘raped’ and don’t resist then to me it’s not rape. I feel bad for her but still.” A fourth boy tweeted, “Some people deserve to be peed on.” In addition to the photo and tweets, a twelve-minute video of several boys laughing about the girl was created. A Steubenville student says, laughing mirthfully, “You don’t need any foreplay with a dead girl” and “She is so raped right now.”
²²⁹

At the trial in March 2013, Mays and Richmond were accused of penetrating the girl’s vagina with their fingers while she was incapacitated. Mays had texted to one friend that he had had intercourse with her, although he told another friend that he didn’t because “she could barely move.” To a third friend, he wrote, “I’m pissed all I got was a handjob. I shoulda
raped her since everyone thinks I did.” One witness said that he saw Mays kneeling over her, trying to insert his penis in her mouth, despite the fact that she had passed out. The witness said that “it didn’t seem that bad.” Levy writes, “The testimony left little doubt that Mays had been physical with the girl.”
²³⁰

These facts are horrifying: A drunken teenage girl is sexually assaulted by boys she trusts. The boys boast about their actions. They mock the girl they assaulted. They humiliate her in the most public way possible. They appear to have no recognition that any of this behavior is wrong.

Other people too—adults in the larger world—also regarded the girl as a sexual object who deserved what she got. After Mays and Richmond were arrested, people unconnected with Steubenville felt compelled to share their opinions on Twitter. They wrote:

“There is no controversy nor is this up for debate: the girl put herself in the situation and two innocent guys are paying the price.”

“IMHO, the girl should be the one held accountable.”

“Sorry ladies, skimpy clothing is pretty much implied consent. Don’t dress like a whore if you don’t want to be treated like one. Simple.”

“Shouldn’t they charge that Lil Slut for underage drinking???”

“Those poor boys . . . All because the pictures and texts made that lil whore decide to play victim after it was over #Steubenville.”