I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (8 page)

Nicole, sixteen, offered the example of a girl in her school who had “hooked up” (in her definition: engaged in kissing or sexual acts without crossing the threshold to penetrative intercourse) “with multiple guys” at a party.

“It gave her power and status,” Nicole explained to me.

“Wasn’t she worried about being called a slut?” I asked.

“Well, people were talking about her. Yes, there was negative attention, but there was also good attention. This was the first party of high school. She was literally posting on her Facebook status things like ‘27 guys!’”

Confused, I asked, “Isn’t that really risky?”

Nicole patiently explained, “Yeah, it’s risky. But everyone gets called a slut. It’s just normal. Everyone’s sort of a slut. You get called a slut for pretty much anything. In middle school there is the experience where just one girl is the slut—and it was me for a little while—but, like, in New York City my
experience is that pretty much everyone gets called a slut for something that they’ve done.”

“The word is used as justification,” explains Stephanie, the fifteen-year-old girl who had explained that girls don’t want to be seen as prudes. “It’s so easy to label a girl—positively and negatively. It’s not always bad. It’s not always, ‘Oh, she’s a slut, don’t talk with her.’ Sometimes it’s”—Stephanie switches to a perky, upbeat tone—“‘Oh, she’s so slutty!’ It can be used differently in a positive way”

“In the sixth grade,” chimed in Rachel, “I literally hadn’t even started wearing a bra yet, and my friend said, ‘All the boys think you’re a slut.’ I took so much offense to that! I didn’t know what it meant. I had never gone out with a boy. I had never kissed a boy. It’s really murky.”

“My sister’s twelve,” Jocelyn, fifteen, told us, “and it’s like, if she even talks to a boy at recess, she gets called a slut.”

Nicole continued where she had left off a moment earlier. “It brings you power, and it gives you social status. That’s all really true. But no girl goes to a guy thinking, ‘Oh, hooking up with him is going to get me power.’ It’s a very blurred line between good and bad results from being called a slut. A girl kind of weighs the odds.”

“OK,” I said. “I understand that on the one hand, you need to prove to everyone that you’re sexually sophisticated, but on the other hand, you can’t be seen as
too
sexual So you have to do
something
to prove that you’re sexy and desirable, but you have to be careful about what you do.”

“Right!” exclaimed Nicole, brushing away a lock of hair that kept falling into her face. “But there’s a blurred line, and you take one step too far and it’s like, ‘Wow, that was insanely
slutty of you to do that.’ And it’s not clear what the line is until it’s crossed. If you’re at a party, you can’t figure out where the line is, but the next day you’re looking back and you think, ‘Oh, that was a bad idea,’ but you didn’t know that when you were doing it. You know what I mean? Because I mean, if the night’s not finished yet, how could you know if what you’re doing is the worst thing that will happen? So you’re a slut if you go farther than you were supposed to, not because you did something that’s specifically slutty.”

“What if you’re really popular?” I asked. “Does that make you immune from being called a slut in a bad way?”

“Not necessarily,” said Nicole, and the others agreed. Jocelyn elaborated, saying, “Well, slutty behavior might seem more normal if you’re very popular. The word means something different depending on so many different things. If everyone hooks up with three guys, and one girl hooks up with six guys, she’s the slut even though everyone else should be too.”

But, I pointed out, she was talking mostly about girls who were known to hook up with boys. What about girls like Rachel, who was called a slut when she had never kissed a boy? Or Jocelyn’s twelve-year-old sister, who gets slapped with the label simply for talking with a boy? Wasn’t it true that you can be called a slut even if you’re not doing anything sexual at all?

All the girls agreed, and I asked them to explain how the same word could be used in such vastly different circumstances—to describe the not-yet-sexual twelve-year-old and the older teenage girl who flaunted her sexual exploits—and how it could also be used alternately as a hurtful insult or as a badge of honor. For the first time, they were silent.

I checked in with Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney, the two dynamic women who run the Arts Effect, at a café in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to talk about the group interview. Although she hadn’t mentioned it during the interview, one of the girls, Cappiello told me, had recently decided to have sex.

S
he came over to my apartment crying one night. She said, “This was what I wanted to do, so I did it. I wanted to have sex with him, yes, and I also wanted to start dating his best friend not long after that. So what? I told myself, ‘I’m a feminist, damn it, and I should be allowed to do these things and make these choices for myself.’” But now she realizes she had been trying to convince herself that it would be OK. The right to make decisions for yourself is almost a lie. It’s not that simple. Those guys told their friends, and now her life is miserable. The girls in school call her a slut. They say to her, “Hey, you’re walking funny today; are you sore from all the action you’re getting?” She thought she had made an empowering choice, and now look what’s happening.

The girl now recognizes that sexual equality does not in fact yet exist in practice. When a girl and boy are identically sexually active, only the girl is treated punitively.

For some high school girls, then:

•     Being a “slut” is good—but only when the girl herself is orchestrating her own reputation and maintains control over it.

•     In some social circles, it is compulsory to achieve “good slut” status. A girl must behave like a “good slut” whether she wants to or not.

•     Once a girl achieves “good slut” status, she is always at risk of losing control and becoming known as a “bad slut.”

•     The boundary between “good” and “bad slut” status, which is determined by one’s peers, is fluid.

•     If her peers determine that she has descended into “bad slut” status, she loses social status and becomes the object of harassment and ostracism.

A girl’s compulsion to achieve “good slut” status is the result of the prude/slut contradiction. Not wanting to be perceived as a prude, girls perform an act of sexual bravado—whether they want to or not. “There’s nothing wrong with these girls wanting to explore their sexuality,” Cappiello points out. She and McInerney not only work with girls to hone their acting skills; they also provide opportunities for the girls to talk about the issues that concern them—and the slut-prude tightrope is the number one issue on their minds. “Their curiosity is totally normal, and we want to encourage them in that way,” Cappiello continued. “But it becomes so hard. How can they explore their sexuality when they don’t even know what their actual desire is?”

“That’s exactly right,” affirmed McInerney. She continued,

W
e often talk openly with the girls about where their desire to explore their sexuality comes from. Why do they feel the need to be sexual in the first place? Are they engaging in certain sexual acts because they have a
genuine desire to explore their sexuality in a particular way? Or is it because the boys they like are encouraging them to do so? Do they want to kiss or make out with another girl, for example, because they like the girl, or because they like and want the male attention that goes with doing so? If a girl told us, “This particular sexual activity is something I really want, this is something I want to do,” we would say, “Great!“ But that’s not what they are telling us. Usually it is not clear what they really want. Usually what they say is, “I want him to like me” or “I may as well do this now and get it over with.” We never hear them say anything like, “I want this.” These girls are not doing sexual things for themselves. We believe that girls should be sexually empowered. But what exactly are their motivations? They say, “I own my sexuality.” But do they really?

The reason it’s impossible for girls to untangle their motivations, Cappiello adds, is that “they don’t want to be a prude.” When avoiding prudery is a priority, how does one know when a girl is being sexual because she really wants to be? “They don’t know what they really want,” she says. “And there are drastic consequences for the decisions they make, and now those decisions are permanent because there’s an online record.”

The “Bad Slut” Violates Feminine Norms

I wondered if college-age women who are labeled “sluts” agree with their younger cohort about the contradictory meanings
of the term. I theorized that women ages eighteen to twenty-two may feel less pressure to prove they’re not prudes, since 71 percent of nineteen-year-olds have had sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute, with seventeen being about the average age of first sexual intercourse.
²⁷
Therefore, I guessed, college-age women may not feel as compelled as younger teenage girls to behave like a “good slut.” I figured that they might have less to prove.

It turns out that women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two narrate slut stories that contain similar tensions between proving oneself to be not a prude and presenting oneself as a “good slut.” However, these young women express the tension with different language. They talk about sluttiness within a discourse of sexual freedom. They told me that being sexually active, especially outside a romantic relationship, is perceived as an issue of “pride.” It is “liberating.” But is liberation really liberating when it’s compulsory?

“Women at my college are very comfortable sexualizing themselves,” reports Min, nineteen, an Asian American woman who grew up in New York City and now attends an elite university in the Northeast. “They see being sexual as a feminist statement. To them, being liberated is being sexual. So they do sexual things even if they don’t want to in the name of feminism.” Echoing the high school girls, Min continues, “The women here sexualize themselves but not necessarily to please themselves. Often it’s just to please the guys.” Is this what feminism today looks like to college-age women—mandatory sexualization? I believe it’s fair to say that the positive connotation of “slut” has led at least some young women to embrace a warped vision of feminist sexual
liberation. Certainly many young women actively choose to be sexually active because they want sex. It’s simply not true that every sexually active female is coerced into being sexually active. But either way, the “slut” label wreaks havoc.

Maria, twenty-one, tells me that she had sexual intercourse for the first time when she was a freshman in college. In her sophomore year, she says, “I was single and became sexually active with more than one person. I also realized that I was bisexual. It was the first time that I recognized that my desires were not dirty, and since my relationship with my boyfriend had ended, I wanted to act on my desires. But I noticed that other women did not accept me and did not want to invite me to parties because they thought I would sleep with boys they liked. I started to notice jealousy. In high school, it was the girls with confidence who were called sluts regardless of their sexual activity. I started to see the same thing here at college too. This was hard for me because I was in the process of figuring out that I needed to have pride over my sexuality.”

As Maria notices, sluttiness is more about attitude than behavior—a key element that holds true for both teenage girls and young adult women. I asked Maria why she thinks the other women find her threatening. “I ask myself this question all the time,” she responds. “Partly it’s because of my bisexuality. Being bi is not taken seriously. People think it means you’re easy, that you could be with anyone. There’s a stereotype that you’re not discriminating. But another reason is that I make it clear that I’m not looking for romance. A lot of women hook up with guys with the hope that the hookup will become a relationship. Even when they’re hooking up casually, they try to do it with the same person again and again. And I’m not doing that.”

“Normal” females are supposed to want romance, not sex for its own sake. Choosing to be sexual purely for the sake of the sex—being a sexual agent—is not considered naturally feminine. It is an expression of pure confidence, and stereotypical femininity at some level is supposed to encompass neediness. Renee Engeln, the director of the Body and Media Lab at Northwestern University, told the
New York Times
that “we have complicated reactions to confident women in general, and particularly to women who are confident about their bodies. Women sometimes see them as arrogant.”
²⁸
I would add that we also have complicated reactions to women who are confident about their sexual selves.

Vanessa, a white twenty-one-year-old student, shares her “slut story,” which took place at a summer camp when she was nineteen and working as a counselor. One of the other counselors, she said, “was hitting on me, but I pushed him away and told him I wasn’t interested. One of the girls, who liked him, was very angry with me even though I had pushed him away. I told her, ‘If I wanted to hook up with him I would, but I don’t want to.’ That statement got me in trouble. Later, I hooked up with a different guy that no one had a claim on. Somehow I became known as the girl who slept with different guys. I think it’s because I made it clear that I wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship and I was, like, really unapologetic about it. I recognize the way hooking up works, and I didn’t expect a hookup to continue into a relationship. I saw it for what it was. Every summer there’s a counselor who’s the slut, the summer slut. That summer I was known as the summer slut, even though I had done nothing wrong.”

Maria and Vanessa were labeled sluts because they violated
two central rules of femininity. To be sure, there are countless unspoken rules governing women’s appearance and behavior that girls infer and internalize as they come of age. But to avoid “bad” sluttiness, they must adhere to two rules in particular: