I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (4 page)

Jasmine is five foot three and curvaceous. An early developer, she became busty at a young age, which led people to assume that she was sexually active, even when she wasn’t. In fact, she did not engage in any sexual activity until college; but in high school, “If a boy harassed me, people automatically assumed I was doing things sexually with him.” The boys in high school arrived at the conclusion that Jasmine’s body somehow belonged to them, not her. She explains,

T
here was one incident in tenth grade that got me labeled for the rest of high school. I was standing and talking with this boy, Marshall, who is black and was on the football team. He was very popular. Out of nowhere, he shoved his arm down my shirt to try to grab my breasts. I was like, “What the hell is wrong with you? What are you doing?” I pushed him away from me. I was a cheerleader at the time, and some members of my squad saw the whole thing. The next day at practice, all fifteen members of my squad knew about it, and everyone was talking about it. People were saying, “I heard that you let that guy do that.” I don’t understand why they didn’t see me push him away. I guess people see what they want to see.

Because of that one incident, I got labeled a slut. I was not even sexually active, but people
perceived
me as sexual. I knew nothing about sex. I thought “oral sex” meant talking about sex. But I was an early developer, and I was always flirtatious. So people made assumptions. Nobody knew my story. Since that day, people had a sexual portrayal of me. Everyone thought I was screwing half the football team. I told people I was a virgin, and they would not believe me. One person actually told me that I was a liar.

The word they used was “ho.” “Oh yeah, she’s a ho.” “I heard you were a ho.” People just came right up to me and said these things to me. One time a guy came up to me and grabbed my wrist hard and said, “You should give me a blowjob before the pep rally.” More than once guys would come up to me and say: “Let me get your number.” So at first I would think, “Oh, I must look really good today,” or
“This guy really likes me.” But after he had my number, he would text to say, “Hey, we should have sex.”

Jasmine became known as a ho because a boy sexually assaulted her. Then, once she had acquired a reputation, boys assumed she was easy. Jasmine was sexualized even though she’d never had sex. Her body was cheapened even though she treated it with dignity. She was assumed to always say yes even though she repeatedly, consistently said no.

Welcome to the upside-down, mixed-up, warped-mirror world of being a young female in the age of slut-bashing and slut-shaming.

What’s even crazier is that, all things considered, Jasmine was
fortunate.
She was not raped—a common consequence of being labeled a slut or a ho. Her reputation did not motivate her to become sexually active when she wasn’t ready—another common result of such labeling. She did not develop an eating disorder, become depressed, or turn to drugs or alcohol—all classic coping mechanisms. As awful as her experience was, Jasmine was one of the lucky ones.

A white woman from the Southwest named Jackie, also age twenty, was not as fortunate. “In high school, I was one of those people who wanted to be called a slut because I wanted the attention” is the first thing she wants me to know. “But once I lost my virginity, it backfired.” Jasmine’s and Jackie’s narratives are very different from one another. Yet both are emblematic.

Jackie and I spoke on the phone for an hour. I could hear her three-year-old daughter padding around and giggling; several times Jackie had to put down the phone to tend to her.
When we spoke, she was married and seven months pregnant and living with her grandfather. She volunteered to talk about what happened to her because, she said, she hopes that her story will help other girls learn from her mistakes. Yet her “mistakes” were actions that anyone in her situation could have made.

Jackie grew up poor with her mother, stepfather, and three siblings; the family moved frequently. She was homeschooled until the ninth grade. “My family was very religious, so they kept me home,” she says. “So I was kind of shy and introverted.” Her high school, the very first school she ever attended, was a big urban public institution with few resources. Forty students were crammed into each classroom. The setting was particularly overwhelming to a quiet, fourteen-year-old homeschooled girl. “I didn’t know how to socialize with boys, or with anyone for that matter,” she explains. “I was a little behind on that. I really just wanted to be like the girls in school once I went to school. Maybe someone who’d gone to public school her whole life would have acted differently, but I don’t know how.” Jackie continues,

I
made one close girlfriend, who’d had sex at age twelve, or at least she said that she did, and I was kind of jealous. I don’t know; I felt I was missing out. All the girls
said
they were sexually active. They liked to call themselves “slutty,” but only if
they
called themselves slutty. They thought it was cool if they called themselves that word. If someone else said it, then it wasn’t cool anymore. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to lose my virginity to pretty much anybody. So I guess I did kind of act like a slut. My older sister took me to a party, and I got really wasted. The people
there were all a few years older than me. Even though I was drunk, I remember what happened. A guy at the party asked me if wanted to have sex, and I said yes. I didn’t have to do it, but I wanted to. We did not use a condom. I was scared but excited at the same time.

Jackie told her best girlfriend that she’d lost her virginity, and her friend told a few people. Then, all of a sudden, everyone knew. “Everyone was saying stuff to me. They couldn’t believe it. They were like, ‘Why did you do that?’ My friend joked around with me, saying, ‘Oh, you’re such a slut, you’re a whore.’ She would laugh when she said it, but then other people said it and they weren’t joking. Everyone started talking bad stuff about me, and guys all of a sudden started coming on to me.”

If her friends were also sexually active, or at least claiming to be, why was Jackie singled out as a slut? Jackie has given this question a lot of deep thought. She has concluded that “they sensed that I did it just to be cool. Maybe I seemed desperate, because I had made it clear that I wanted to have sex.” This is a common motif: the “slut” identity is more about one’s attitude (or perceived attitude) than actual sexual behavior. After all, if a girl has sex with a boyfriend, she is not regarded as a slut. Sexual activity per se does not a slut make.

Jackie became pregnant, which sealed her reputation. After the party, she dated the boy with whom she’d had sex; he is the only sexual partner she’s ever had, and he later became her husband. “Everyone at school made me feel really bad about it. To them, I was totally a whore, even though they were sexually active too.”

Jackie and her boyfriend did not use contraceptives. “We had no money,” she tells me. “I could have gotten condoms for free, but I would have had to go to a clinic near my school, which is also right near the recreation center, which has a pool, and everyone hangs out there. I didn’t want the kids from school to see me go in there.” She was scared her reputation would intensify if the kids had material evidence—her acquisition of contraceptives—that they could use against her.

Jackie stopped attending school, dropping out after the ninth grade. “Between the pregnancy and being called a slut and a whore, I didn’t want to be there,” she explains. Her pregnancy miscarried. The next year, she became pregnant again, and she decided that she wanted to return to school. “I was kind of excited about going back. But my mom wouldn’t let me. She said, ‘Don’t go back to school because everyone will think you’re a slut.’ She would also call me a slut and a tramp. It makes you feel bad when anyone says it, obviously, but especially it makes you feel bad when it’s your mom.” Jackie gave birth when she had just turned seventeen, and she never returned to school. She now works part-time as a caregiver, although she’s not sure how she will continue once her second child is born, which, at the time of my interview with her, would be in two months.

Jackie chose to have sexual intercourse at age fourteen with a boy she didn’t know because she thought girls her age were supposed to have casual sex with random guys. She followed a gender script—a set of guidelines that she believed she was supposed to follow to be normal and accepted as a teenage girl—that she inferred from her classmates. Today, she
continues to make decisions according to a gender script, but for the first time, she questions whether the script is appropriate for her. I pressed my ear to the phone as Jackie expressed the conflict she faces, the conflict so many females face.

I
try to not to ever use the word “slut,” because living up to what the word means made me feel pressured to do things I wasn’t ready to do. My husband, soon to be my ex-husband, wanted me to dress in a slutty way. I wore short shorts or a short skirt just to please him. Even still, he flirted with other women on chat lines and dating sites. I’m divorcing him and trying to grow up and move past being a slut. When I was with him, I felt that I couldn’t just be myself. But I want to be the way
I
want to be. I want to be a good role model for my daughter. It was the same before: I couldn’t just behave the way I wanted to or should have. The “slut” word pressured me to be sexually active before I should have been. I wanted to be the slut, but then I couldn’t control it. It backfired on me because then I couldn’t be the kind of slut I wanted to be.

Jackie’s dilemma is that she was told to follow a script that hurts rather than helps her. Many girls and young women face the same problem. They are given one script, a terrible one. They can act out the script faithfully, or they can improvise. Many girls and young women try out a variety of improvisational strategies. Unfortunately, many of their strategies—including slut-bashing and slut-shaming—worsen rather than improve their situation.

The Prude/Slut Contradiction

These girls’ and women’s experiences illuminate an unstable terrain in which female sexual development is fraught with tricks and traps. It’s not an accident, I believe, that the words “slut” and “ho” are popular at the same time that adolescent girls and college-age women face a sexual contradiction of enormous significance. Repeatedly, my interviewees explained that they must prove to their peers that they are sexually sophisticated and knowing. Revealing oneself as a “prude” or sexually ignorant—for girls as well as boys—is the kiss of social death. It means not keeping up, not developing properly, not being normal. Therefore, many girls and young women deliberately construct an identity in which they perform as a sexually empowered female to an audience of their peers, just as many boys and young men feel pressured by norms of masculinity to brag about sexual adventures.

Stephanie, a white fifteen-year-old girl in New York City, relates that she was called a prude when she was in the seventh grade, “when I had braces and everything. I had a really cute boyfriend, and we just hung out and didn’t do anything. Kids asked me if we’d kissed, and I said no, and they were like, ‘What?’ So they said I was a prude. And so I became so irrelevant.” (Instead of judging their peers on a scale of popularity and unpopularity, I discovered, teens deem them “relevant” or “irrelevant,” also described as being “under the radar.”) Stephanie continues, saying, “If you’re part of a group that cares about hooking up, and you’re not hooking up, then you become irrelevant.” Stephanie did not want to be
rendered “irrelevant.” Who does—especially when you’re fifteen years old?

Unlike their male peers, girls have to perform an exquisitely complicated and contradictory sexual role if they want to be regarded as “relevant.” Up to a point, they
must
be a little “slutty,” however they define the term. But they can’t be too much so. Girls and young women report that they constantly must prove that they aren’t
too
sexual,
too
promiscuous,
too
far off the grid of feminine normalcy,
too
slutty. As Stephanie’s friend Kaitlyn chimed in, “The word ‘slut’ is the most destructive word you can say about a girl. You feel dirty and you want to go back under the radar.” But going back under the radar doesn’t help, because the label sticks. “The word is so delicate,” Kaitlyn explains. “If you do one thing that pushes the limit, then no matter what you do later, everyone will say, ‘See? She’s a slut.’ You have to put your foot in it, but then if you cross the line everyone will use it against you for years.”

This contradiction is a modification of the virgin/whore dichotomy that has plagued women since the third millennium BCE, when the ancient Sumerians divided women into the categories of wife and prostitute. Historically, two mutually exclusive sexual identities—sexually inexperienced wife/Madonna figure who engages in sexual behavior only to procreate with her husband; and sexually experienced woman/prostitute who engages in sexual behavior only for personal benefit—were available to women to embrace. This virgin/whore dichotomy gave women no space to express their sexuality without consequences. Today, the prude/slut contradiction provides two mutually exclusive sexual identities a
woman must avoid; again, women have no space to express their sexuality without consequences.

Jill McDevitt, PhD, a sex educator, runs a popular “Virgins and Sluts” workshop with college women. “We talk about the fact that you cannot win,” she says. “You act a certain way, which is labeled slut behavior. But you’re equally ridiculed for abstaining from sexuality.” McDevitt instructs her workshop’s participants to fill out two postcards anonymously—one to themselves when they were slut-shamed, and one to themselves when they were virgin-shamed. “Every girl has had both experiences,” she explains. “They see that it doesn’t matter how you behave; you will be chastised either way. I read the postcards aloud. Girls write things like, ‘I wouldn’t give him a blow job. He kept asking me, and I kept saying no. He pressured me, and I gave in, and then I was a slut.’ And I ask, ‘How does this make any sense?’”