I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (14 page)

The boys were most interested in the girl’s motives. She was a “slut” because she wanted attention. Later in this conversation they also discussed the fact that the girl wanted everyone to read her letter. They positioned her as a girl who was irresponsible; she cared too much and tried too hard—in opposition to Fred, who said that “we couldn’t really care less about her anyway.” By situating himself as someone who didn’t care about her, in contrast with the girl who cared too much, Fred suggested that he is impartial, trustworthy, and moral. After all, he doesn’t gossip; he’s just providing information that may be useful to the moderator. He doesn’t care too much; he couldn’t care less about her anyway. Fred—and the other boys—are fundamentally different from this “slut,” who herself is different from other girls because “most girls are not like that.”

Bamberg notes,

T
he category of girls—in general, “good girls”—is established as a middle ground, in between “sluts” and
“us,” depicting a space distinctly separate from the space the boys claim for themselves. And girls, who traditionally or “naturally” engage in “popularity work,” run the risk of overdoing it and becoming victims of their own desire to be popular. They may end up as sluts. Thus, to run the risk of becoming a slut is only possible for those who occupy that middle ground: One has to be a girl to engage in popularity work, in contrast to us, as boys, who could never slide into this, because we do not need to engage in this type of work.
⁶⁹

The boys’ masculine identity was not threatened because, they implied, they would never engage in the type of attention-seeking behavior that girls do. They are rational, mature, and able “to make justifiable claims about their moral standing the way adults do to police children.”
⁷⁰
Those who do not “overdo” it—those who don’t exercise agency inappropriately—are permitted to police those who do.

Brittany, a nineteen-year-old white college student from the East Coast, tells me about a high school boy who rounded up other boys and orchestrated a slut-bashing campaign against her. She thinks that his insecurity “as a guy” led him to harass her in this way. The boy, Jason, was her second boyfriend; they started dating in the middle of sophomore year. Before Jason she had dated another boy with whom she was not sexually active; as a result, he had called her a prude, and other kids in school had, too. “It’s not that I think that girls shouldn’t have sex,” she explains to me, “but I just personally didn’t want to. But I also didn’t want the weight of that label, ‘prude,’ on me.”

So when she started dating Jason, she figured she could shed the “prude” reputation. She says,

H
e started pressuring me to do sexual things I didn’t want to do and I didn’t feel comfortable doing, but I did them anyway. The summer before junior year, when I was sixteen, he wanted me to masturbate for him, and it kept escalating. He started sending me pictures of his penis. He wanted me to send him pictures of me naked, including my face, even though he cropped out his face. I never did send him any pictures because my mom had always told me never to send naked pictures of myself, and I figured she had said it for a good reason. But I did send him texts with sexual words.

He also wanted me to wear certain clothes. I remember one time I wore a certain skirt for me, because I thought it looked nice. But he treated me like I was an object. He called me ‘bangable,’ which disturbed me, even though I think he was trying to compliment me. He thought I was wearing the skirt to get his attention, which led him to think it was OK to touch me even if I didn’t want him to.

I didn’t want to lose him, so at first I gave him hand jobs, but he kept pressuring me for more, so then I gave him blow jobs. Finally I gave in and had sex with him. The first time I was in the eleventh grade, the week before I turned seventeen. With each stage [of the progression toward intercourse], I felt dirty. I felt like I was less and less desirable to other people, like I was more used up. I know that’s a horrible way to put it, but that’s the way I felt.

At first, I was a little glad because now I wasn’t a prude anymore. But then I started to feel ashamed. He was all happy about it, but at that point I’d rather have been called a prude.

He never forced me to have sex. I always said OK, even though I didn’t really want to. I said OK to get him to stop bugging me, because he bugged me every day. He tried to have oral sex with me, but he didn’t know what he was doing, so I told him to stop. [
Laughs.
]

It’s not that I didn’t want to have sex. I wanted to do sexual things too. But I didn’t think he was the right person to do them with. I just didn’t feel right about doing them with him.

I think a lot of his bugging me was because of the pressures he felt as a guy. He was a little short, just an inch taller than me, and people picked on him for that reason, so maybe he felt this was a way to be a guy.

During their senior year, Brittany broke up with him. She wanted to date someone else, but she waited until after she and Jason were completely through. Jason enlisted “a lot of guys” to walk up to Brittany and call her a slut and a ho. “They did it mostly in the hallway, and they did it loudly so that everyone could hear. This went on every day for a month.” Brittany went to the school’s security office to complain. “I was embarrassed and angry,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t a whore. He also got this one girl to call me a bitch and a ho on Facebook, but mostly it was just guys saying it to me in the hallway.”

Brittany doesn’t know how to explain Jason’s behavior. “It
was ironic and ridiculous,” she fumes. “
He
was the one who pressured
me
to do all that stuff, and then he was getting people to call
me
a slut! How come
I
was the slut?”

Brittany was the “slut” so that Jason could salvage his own reputation in the face of being rejected by his girlfriend. Jason degraded her to elevate himself. That is what slut-bashing is all about: making the slut-basher feel secure in his or her own masculinity or femininity. Slut-bashing reveals the tenuousness of gender identities. If femininity and masculinity require slut-bashing to be bolstered, how stable can these identities really be?

CHAPTER 4

Reciprocal Slut-Shaming: Sexual Identity in an Online World

Before social media, there was no ambiguity when someone called a girl a slut. She knew she was being insulted, bullied, harassed, or abused. But today, “slut” is often a casual, reciprocated greeting among peers. “It’s like saying hi in passing,” reports a white twenty-year-old college student. “Girls calling girls sluts is really prevalent. It’s become normal to do it.” Daniela, the Latina bartender in Texas, says, “Around here, girls basically call out ‘slut’ as a sort of compliment to any female who looks good. Basically, you say it to any female.” Sarah, the twenty-one-year-old white student whose high school boyfriend used slut-bashing as a form of blackmail,
tells me, “On my campus, girls say to each other, ‘Hey, you’re such a slut’ or ‘You’re such a whore,’ and I’ve never heard anyone get upset about it. It’s just a way for girls to acknowledge each other.”

“Slut” is also commonly used on social network sites. Georgiana, a twenty-two-year-old white doctoral student in comparative literature, reports that her peers routinely call each other “slut” on Facebook as a complimentary greeting. She tells me that the women in her program sexualize themselves in their Facebook photos to attract attention from both females and males. Even doctoral candidates in their twenties and thirties, who presumably would be most likely to gain status from their academic work or job prospects rather than from their bikini shots, are chasing status from their sexuality. In response to their profile photos, their peers offer sexual validation.

A
lot of girls [and women in their twenties] think that showing their bodies on Facebook is the best way to get attention. In the comments section, people tell them that they’re hot and they give them “likes”. Girls use the word “slut” all the time when they’re “liking” a photo. They write, “I love you, you slut.” They mean it to be positive. So then a girl thinks, How many likes can I get? Because if she posts a picture of herself wearing a cropped shirt and short shorts, she’ll get a million likes. And that is very rewarding. And then the other girls who are paying attention see that this is a way to get attention, so they do it, too. So then everyone starts to do it. You even see girls who are fourteen, fifteen, doing the same thing.

Guys also like to show off their bodies. They post pictures of their abs and their tattoos. But guys don’t have to post pictures of their bodies unless they want to. That’s their choice. All a guy really has to do is “like” a girl’s picture or comment on it, and that’s enough for him to get status because it shows everyone that he’s in the game and that he’s friends with hot girls. It’s more important for him to “like” hot girls than to be hot himself.

It’s different for girls. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram teach them that they will get status and be rewarded if they sexualize themselves and get called sluts.

Note that images of female bodies offer validation not only for girls and women, who are judged on the basis of their own appearance and sexiness, but also for boys and men, who are judged on the basis of their
appreciation
of female bodies. Images of sexy females have currency for everyone, females and males, while images of sexy males have limited currency. Within this framework, casual usages of “slut” are like trading cards. The more a girl receives positive affirmation for being “slutty,” the more her status is strengthened.

But at what cost? Girls and women are saying that they “love” the “slut” in question. Do they really? After all, we have seen that “slut” is an infinitely confusing term. Its meanings are not always obvious. How is a girl or woman supposed to know if she’s being complimented or insulted? “I’ve been called a slut in a joking way by my roommate,” says Jasmine, the twenty-year-old black and Latina student in California. “She’s like, ‘God, you’re such a slut!’ She said it three times over the last year. I laughed it off the first time, and after that
I ignored her. She totally was judging me for hooking up with guys. She wanted to insult me, but under the cover of a joke.”

Because “slut” has become an acceptable label among close friends, it can be used to frame an insult inside a term of endearment. “To me,” explains Sarah, “it’s like, ‘Hey, maybe you’ve done some crazy things over the weekend, so I’m going to call you a slut, but I’m not trying to be derogatory.” Translation: You are sexual, which is to be admired as long as you don’t go too far, in which case it’s bad—really bad. I’m calling you a slut, and I’m leaving my meaning deliberately ambiguous. I have my eye on you. But I’m being very casual about it, and I’m not putting in any real effort here, and if you accuse me of shaming you, I will deny it.

Unlike slut-bashing, which is an overt form of bullying,
slut-shaming is a casual method of judgment. It may be indirect and conducted only one time, and its intention may not be clear. Like slut-bashing, slut-shaming is a method of policing a girl or woman for being inappropriately sexual and deviating from normative femininity. Reciprocal slut-shaming is a two-way communication system in which two girls or young women alternately police and affirm each other’s femininity.

Even when used in a casual, reciprocal way among peers, in person or online, “slut” remains a hammer to nail down the sexual double standard. Do not be fooled by outer layers of friendliness. Beneath lies a judgmental and sexist core. Reciprocal greetings of “Hey, slut” constitute slut-shaming in camouflage. Because it’s performed covertly, slut-shaming is easy to deny and dismiss—even when it’s damaging girls’ and women’s reputations.

It’s not an accident that of all the informal salutations
females have at their disposal to acknowledge each other—“girlfriend,” “sista”—“slut” is now ascendant. Young females are creating a sense of identity, even a sense of community, through recognition of each other as sexualized people. They are “not prudes”; they are “sluts”—“
good
sluts”—the kind that are acceptable and valued. This is the way young females perform femininity.

Achieving “good slut” status depends primarily on the judgment of other girls and women; guys’ opinions carry some, but not as much as girls’, weight in this arena. After all, “good slut” status is ultimately an affirmation of femininity and reputation, which have meaning only within a community of girls and women who determine the extent to which each member conforms to or violates a series of rules. We are “good sluts” only if members of our peer group say that we are after we have proved that we fulfill the criteria they have established. We need their affirmation to maintain our status. In turn, they require our validation to maintain their own status. But a girl’s validation counts only as long as she is in good standing, so the platform for validation is weak and could crash at any given moment.

In the era of online social media, girls and young women have turned to new technologies to prove their credentials as “good sluts,” which authenticate their offline performance as normatively feminine. Almost all teenagers in America use social media, according to the advocacy organization Common Sense Media. Although Facebook is falling out of fashion, it remains the dominant social networking site.
⁷¹
Calling a fellow female a slut within a social media platform seals the deal: two females recognize each other as “good sluts.” Each
enters into this exchange to elevate her own status as sexually attractive. But because “slut” can also potentially mean “shameful, disgusting, sexually out-of-control female,” greeting another female with “Hey, slut” is a sly wink that says, “I’m watching you, and I’m policing you.” The exchange is empowering and disempowering at the same time.