I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (12 page)

The Sexual Girl: “It’s Like It’s All Her Fault”

The sexual double standard at its core is a narrative about agency: Girls are supposed to hide the fact that they are going after what they want, especially if what they want is sexual pleasure. “The summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I hooked up with a football player,” twenty-two-year-old Gloria shares with me in a Skype interview. Gloria is a Latina college student on the West Coast. It’s 7:30 a.m. Pacific time, but she’s an early riser and she’s ready to talk. Her brown hair is pulled back with an athletic headband, and her large brown eyes are looking directly into her computer’s camera. “He wasn’t the first person I had sex
with, but he was the first person I had casual sex with. We were on his mom’s couch,” she continues, “and I started to bleed. My blood seeped into the fabric of the couch. I found out later that I had an inflamed cervix”—it turned out to be nothing serious, just an infection that was easily treated with medication—“but I didn’t know it at the time. Immediately I felt ashamed and worried.” Was Gloria worried about the fact that she was bleeding? Did she think maybe she had a sexually transmitted disease or something precancerous in her cervix? No, she was worried for an entirely different reason: “I knew that he was going to tell people, which he did.”

How was she so certain he would tell people? I ask.

“I just had this sense about it. He was on the football team, and a girl bleeding on his mom’s couch was too good a story to not tell everyone. And I was right.”

Kids at school started coming up to Gloria, even people she thought were her friends, saying to her, “Oh, she does that” and “I heard what happened.” They didn’t just say it in her ear. “They said it to me when other people were around, trying to be funny. But it was ostracizing because they were trying to be funny but not to me. It was at my expense. They didn’t care about my feelings.”

Even though Gloria and I are looking at each other through cameras, her eyes appear so sorrowful that I feel as if we are facing each other in person. “The story was never about him, even though he hooked up with a lot of girls,” she continues. “There were no repercussions for him, just for me. He stopped talking to me because he never really cared about me; he just wanted to hook up with me. He continued hooking up with other girls.”

Gloria’s fourteen-year-old sister, Christina, is itching to get on the Skype interview too. She wants to tell me about her friend, who had sex in the sixth grade with an eighth-grade boy. “He pressured her into it,” Christina explains. “She’s, like, really, really pretty, and the boys were always asking her for sex. After she had sex with him, everyone found out, and she’s been called a slut ever since then. The boy is not called any names. It’s like it’s all her fault. I think it’s stupid. It sucks to get pressured to have sex, and then to get labeled when you do.”

Are you seeing a pattern here? Girl and boy engage in a sexual act; girl is harassed, her life is worsened; boy’s life continues as before, if not improved.

Here’s another tale of the sexual double standard: Sasha is a white forty-four-year-old single mother, but she too can’t get out of her head her own experience with slut-bashing three decades ago in a small town on Long Island. “I got a huge crush on someone on the football team—he was a senior and really cute,” she tells me, sounding just like the teenager she was back then. “But I did something horrible! I gave him a blow job in the back of his car. Oh my god—it was horrible!” Sasha is clearly embarrassed, and she doesn’t know quite how to express the fact that she never finished the act. “It wasn’t even a whole blow job!” is how she finally puts it. “We were in the back of a car after a party, and there was another couple in the front, and they told people, and everyone found out. So I was the dumb tenth-grade girl who was the talk of the locker room. And I hated giving him the blow job, actually. I didn’t get any pleasure from it. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at all. I was more like, ‘Can we be done now?’ And he didn’t
do anything for me [sexually]; it was just an ego trip for him to have me do this to him.”

Sasha needs a moment to collect her thoughts. She clearly remembers everything, but the humiliation of it all is washing over her. After a pause, she continues. “So everybody knew me, but there were two specific girls who gave me trouble. Maybe they were mean to me because they were burnouts who smoked cigarettes, and even though I was a cheerleader and hung out with the jocks I also smoked and would hang out with the burnouts. So maybe they felt I was encroaching on their turf?” she asks rhetorically, and then answers her own question. “I think they felt they had some claim on the guy. They called me a slut, and I was horrified. When someone calls you that, you don’t want to go to school. You don’t want to show your face. You want to disappear.”

But Sasha did continue to attend school, and she was scared. The two girls threatened her physically, and Sasha had reason to believe that they would actually fight her. “They were tough bullies. They got into fights all the time. One of them got on my school bus one day and gave me the finger and threatened me by saying, ‘Something’s going to go on.’ I was shaking. I would never have hit anyone, and I had never been in a fight.”

In the end, the girls never did pick a physical fight with Sasha, and after a few months they stopped slut-bashing her. “Even though it didn’t last for a very long time, to me it felt like the end of the world,” Sasha recalls. “One day seemed like a year.”

And what happened with the guy? “I was a silly, naive girl,” Sasha says ruefully. “I thought he was cute and that if
I did that act for him, he would then like me and talk with me and maybe even want to hang out with me. What was I thinking? He never even said hi to me again afterwards. I felt really crappy. I felt, like, I don’t know—tainted. You know what I mean?”

A generation later, the same story repeats. Just as with teenagers yesterday, when teens today sense that a girl is being sexually active out of a desperate desire to be liked—and giving a boy she barely knows oral sex can certainly appear desperate—they pounce on her. The act is too aggressive in a needy way. The girl is expressing sexuality but not sexual confidence, which leads her peers to conclude that she has crossed a line. Remember, a successful performance of femininity requires acting as if everything is effortless—especially sex.

Vicki, a twenty-two-year-old white lanky college senior wearing a chunky southwestern-style knit cardigan over a loose shirt, meets me at a diner near her campus. The second the menus are handed over to the waiter, she is launching into her slut story.

“I never talk about this because I really just want to forget it happened. But here goes. I was popular; people liked me. I was in the ninth grade, and there was a boy in the tenth grade. He wouldn’t talk to me in person, but we started instant messaging on AOL Instant Messenger. He was sexy and he told me I was pretty. We arranged to meet up after school one day before I had basketball practice, and we went into the private handicapped bathroom with the lock. I tried to give him a blow job for, like two seconds, but I had no idea what I was doing. I was wearing braces! So I stopped and that was the end of it. Then I went to practice. I thought the whole
incident was kind of funny, so I told my friends about it. But they didn’t think it was funny at all! They thought I was disgusting. Nobody said that the boy was disgusting. He just kept on living his life.”

Vicki has several theories to explain her friends’ response. First, she was the first among them to do anything sexual, “and they didn’t understand.” Second, “they thought I was too aggressive.” Third, they thought the location—the handicapped bathroom—“was too racy, too scandalous.”

The girls told other people what Vicki had done, and “I’m sure they exaggerated it,” Vicki believes. “From that point on, I was a social outcast. I was iced out. People said I was disgusting. There were five hundred kids in my grade, and everyone knew. After that I wasn’t popular anymore. Even two years later, some random boy stopped me in the hallway and said, ‘Wanna go in the bathroom again?’”

Vicki’s story is just another tale of the sexual double standard in play, but it has a twist. Her sister, who’s two years older and was in the eleventh grade at the time, was very popular—and also known to be sexually active. She was able to get away with it. In fact, the name on her powder-puff football jersey was “Tulsa”—“a slut” spelled backward. “Everybody knew and thought it was so funny, and she didn’t mind,” Vicki marvels. “She went about it with confidence. She went around owning her sexuality in a way that I didn’t. It was so different for me. I wasn’t willing to stand up for myself. And my friends looked down on me and wouldn’t support me.”

At first, what jumps out from this story is how arbitrary slut-bashing can appear. If both girls were known to be sexually active, why was Vicki, and not her sister, targeted? Is slut-
bashing mercurial? In fact, there is a logic behind it. Vicki was targeted because she came across as desperate while her sister appeared calm, cool, confident, and controlled. Vicki’s sexual agency was suspect because she was perceived to have overplayed her hand. She appeared insecure, and her agency was too visible.

The “Other” Girl: “I Didn’t Do Anything; It Just Happened, I Guess”

You don’t have to be sexually active to be perceived as a slut who has crossed boundaries of gendered norms. Any girl who’s regarded as “other” can become the next “slut.” If she’s a new student, overweight, an early developer, a member of an economic or ethnic minority, or just different in any way, her femininity and sexuality can be called to task.

Jessica, twenty-three, is getting ready to graduate from college in two weeks, but she carves out the time to speak with me in between finals and job interviews. She is Latina, as well as a fluent Spanish speaker. In her freshman year at her California high school, she fell into a habit of speaking Spanish with a Latino boy who was in band class with her. “He was just being flirty with me,” she explains apologetically. “I just liked him as a friend. It really wasn’t a big deal.” But it was a big deal for the boy’s white girlfriend, who didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t understand what Jessica and the boy were saying. Jessica theorizes that the girlfriend came to believe that Jessica and the boy were speaking romantically to each other.

“So she spread a rumor about me. She got her friends to come right up to me and say ‘home wrecker’ and ‘slut.’ She should have blamed her boyfriend, but it’s easier to blame the girl; they never blame the guy. I didn’t feel comfortable going to band class after that, and as soon as class was over I would leave and not hang around with the other kids in the class.”

The role of agency is important in this story: the white girl was threatened by Jessica’s active communication with the boyfriend. Since the white girl didn’t understand what they were talking about, she imagined that Jessica was behaving aggressively. Girls regarded as “other” are regarded as provocateurs, even when they have done nothing active to provoke anyone.

Sharon, the woman whose best friend was threatened with being thrown down a flight of stairs, was herself called a slut despite her having zero sexual experience. Sharon is differently abled. She is both visually and physically impaired; in high school, a paraprofessional helped her walk from class to class. It was obvious that she had special needs. “When you stand out, you get labels,” she theorizes, “and 90 percent of the time, the label for me was ‘slut’ or ‘whore.’” Her huge high school had a number of differently abled students with special needs, so she wasn’t the only one. But Sharon says that she never fit in seamlessly with either the nondisabled kids or the differently abled kids. “Many of the kids in the disabled community had more severe disabilities than I did. Overall, I’m considered to be in pretty good shape, so there was some jealousy of me.” In addition, Sharon was a very early developer who began menstruating at the age of eight and who was wearing a double D bra by the ninth grade.

“There was one girl I’d been in school with since kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade. She and I had totally different disabilities, and she was more limited than I. She would say to me, ‘You’re a fucking whore, you’re a fucking slut, your boobs are too big, no guy would ever date you, you don’t dress the right way.’ She was always trying to bring me down emotionally. I wasn’t having sex, and I never gave any indication that I was.”

It’s possible that Sharon might have been singled out even had she been flat-chested, but being an early developer definitely added to her disadvantage. I asked Sharon if she ever reported the girl’s harassment to a school administrator, or even to her paraprofessional. She never did; it never occurred to her. “You know,” she answered, “I thought it was normal to have people make fun of me. For me, it was a normal occurrence.”

Like Sharon, Molly, a twenty-year-old white woman who grew up in Kentucky, didn’t do anything yet was perceived to have provoked her reputation. She was also called a slut in high school despite the fact that she was completely sexually uninvolved with others. She was the new girl who had just moved from a medium-sized city to a small city in her junior year. There were a hundred students in her grade at her new school. It was November, and Molly was at a football game when a girl she had befriended revealed that many girls were calling her a slut behind her back. “It came out of nowhere,” Molly recalls. “I still don’t understand it. I didn’t do anything; it just happened, I guess. Maybe it was the way I was dressing? I’m not sure. I didn’t think I was wearing anything unusual. I felt horrible. I barely knew anyone and
no one knew anything about me. I was not a slut. I had no sexual experience.”

The only thing that might explain her reputation, Molly says, is that she was “the new girl from the city. They might have thought I was snobby and uptight. I asked my one new friend to talk to the other girls and get them to realize that I wasn’t that way.” By senior year, the reputation had fizzled. “I was in a relationship with a guy, so that probably put down my label because everyone could see that I was in a relationship.” Ironically, having sex (with a boyfriend) made Molly less likely to be considered slutty because she was doing what girls are “supposed” to do.