I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (6 page)

However, at the same time, another meaning bubbled up; beginning at around 1450, “slut” was used to describe a woman of low or loose character—a woman who was inappropriately sexually forward or bold. Hundreds of years later, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens still used the term in this manner. As Dickens wrote in
Dombey and Son
in 1848,
“Does that bold-faced slut . . . intend to take her warning, or does she not?” The literal meaning of the word as a woman who didn’t restrain her home or appearance by keeping them tidy transformed into a metaphorical meaning of a woman who didn’t restrain her sexuality. Being sloppy in matters of cleanliness was akin to being untidy in matters of sexuality. This linguistic transformation occurred at the same time that the sexual ideology of passionlessness for women became ascendant. “Slut” became a judgmental sexual term precisely when women’s sexual expression was tightened. The metaphorical meaning is the one with which we are most familiar today—a woman who is sexually promiscuous.

I wonder if our ancestors were confused by these simultaneous, disparate definitions. After all, from the mid-1600s through the mid-1800s, “slut” was used contemporaneously in a playful way, sometimes without negative judgment. John Bunyan, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Richardson all used the word “slut” in this manner. As Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary in 1664, “Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut and pleases us mightily.” Yet throughout the 1800s, “slut” was also used synonymously with “bitch,” meaning a female dog.

Inventive compound nouns, such as “slut’s wool” and “slut’s pennies,” also were coined during this period. “Slut’s wool” is what we today call dust bunnies—accumulations of dust found in corners or under beds when a room is in need of a cleaning. “Slut’s pennies” are hard knots of dough within a bread loaf caused by imperfect kneading.
⁹

These entries in the
Oxford English Dictionary
demonstrate that “slut” is the site of an intersection of gender, class, and race. For over six hundred years, “slut” has referred
exclusively to working or poor white women. None of the historical literary usages refers to upper-class or noble white women, or to women of color of any socioeconomic status. Associations were made among white working women and dirt, a lack of control over cleanliness, and a lack of restraint. We may infer that a nonslut was a white woman of financial means with upper-class social status; a shipshape home with floors so clean you could eat off them; a tidy, pulled-together appearance; and a restrained sexual appetite. “Slut” has always implied, perhaps more than anything else,
white low-class vulgarity.

Why don’t we find any Western historical literary examples of black women being called “sluts”? Because femininity was equated with whiteness and sexual restraint. “Slut” had meaning only because it was the opposite of the (white) feminine ideal. Even before white people enslaved black people, they regarded black women as outside the boundaries of femininity. Black women were regarded as
inherently
slutty, unlike white women, whose sluttiness represented a supposed transgression of true femininity. Therefore, black sluttiness did not necessarily trigger a judgmental reaction among white writers.

All women “traditionally have been defined in sexual terms,” points out Frances Smith Foster, a scholar of African American literature, because women “alone have a capacity for reproduction and their virtue and value have more often than not been determined by the manner in which it is used.”
¹⁰
But in Western literature, white women have been categorized as sexually innocent (not sluts) or as temptresses (sluts). Historically, black women were caught in a no-win
situation. Under slavery, they were raped by their masters. When ex-slaves wrote about the experience of slavery, Foster notes, they repeatedly stressed that female slaves attempted to remain sexually chaste, yet were forcibly sexually violated through no fault of their own. Unfortunately, despite the attempts of ex-slave narrators to expose this system of sexual brutality, black women became equated with sexuality. White women who were raped were expected to die as a result of their abuse. Their degradation was expected to be totalizing, making postrape life unimaginable. But black female slaves survived their rapes and continued the work they were forced to do—a circumstance used as evidence that they were not properly feminine.
¹¹

According to Foster, the horrifying irony is that rape victims became associated with wanton sexuality. “The ultimate insult to the image of black women was made not by the narrators, but by their audience”—white readers—“whose concepts of femininity could not allow for inclusion of such creatures as those depicted,” she writes. “The black woman’s ability to survive such degradation became her defeat.”
¹²
A black rape victim was suspect, because if she were truly feminine she would not be able to survive sexual abuse. Even white abolitionists regarded black women as “so brutalized by slavery that traditional concepts of feminine sensibilities and intellect were not evident.”
¹³
The word “slut” as a shorthand for a woman who fails to live up to the feminine ideals of chastity would not have applied to black women under slavery, who by default were believed by white people to be unfeminine to begin with.

Thus, I found no historical or literary examples of black
women labeled “sluts.” The synonym “ho” crept into African American communities much later, only after the civil rights movement, when support for racial equality may have muted the racist belief in black women’s essential licentiousness. “Ho” is an alteration of “whore,” a synonym for “prostitute” with roots in Late Old English. In the 1960s, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, “ho” was used to mean “prostitute.” But by the late 1980s, it was used to refer to a sexually promiscuous woman.
¹⁴
The hip-hop artist Slick Rick sang in his 1988 song “Treat Her Like a Prostitute”: “Now your girl she don’t like to have sex a lot / And today she’s ready and she’s hot hot hot . . . / Next thing you know the ho starts to ill / She says, ‘I love you, Harold’ and your name is Will.”

As “ho” became part of African American vernacular, “slut” was treated as a sort of second-tier four-letter word. It wasn’t as crass as other four-letter words, but it also wasn’t a word you would utter in your grandmother’s presence. When it was used, it was shocking and titillating. In the late 1970s, Dan Aykroyd used “slut” for comic effect in a regular pundit segment on
Saturday Night Live
’s “Weekend Update” called Point/Counterpoint. He and a fellow comedian, Jane Curtin, debated a serious issue; Curtin—conservatively dressed in a blazer and a buttoned-to-the-neck blouse—would offer a reasoned argument, to which Aykroyd always responded, “Jane, you ignorant slut.” Aykroyd and Curtin were spoofing people who are unable or unwilling to present evidence to support their argument, and instead resort to ad hominem attacks. (Curtin would respond, “Dan, you pompous ass.”) “Slut” in this context was funny because clearly Curtin wasn’t a “slut,”
and it was interjected in a completely inappropriate and vulgar way into a supposedly high-level intellectual debate. Nevertheless, this usage of the word hinted that other women, perhaps less intellectually gifted and less covered up, deserved to be called sluts.

Twenty years later, when my book
Slut!
was published, the word was still inflammatory and off-limits in many newspaper headlines. I was told by a
New York Times
editor that the newspaper probably wouldn’t review my book because of the title (it didn’t), and other newspapers carefully avoided the term in the headlines of their reviews and features.

There have been several high-profile challenges to “slut” as a derogatory term over the last twenty-five years. In the early 1990s, the Riot Grrrl movement erupted onto the feminist scene from Washington and Oregon. Access to abortion was being eroded through state legislation, and in 1991 the antiabortion nominee Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court—despite Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings. Riot Grrrls were angry. They wanted to raise feminist consciousnesses. They sang about issues such as sexual assault and racism. Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill scrawled
SLUT
and
WHORE
in lipstick on her stomach. “When you take off your shirt [onstage], the guys think, ‘Oh, what a slut,’ and it’s really funny because they think that and then they look at you and it says it,” Hanna told Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, the coauthors of
The Sex Revolts
.
¹⁵
Hanna upended the ability of slut-hecklers to judge her by beating them to it and embracing the word. Her message was: “OK, you’re right; I
am
a slut. I sleep with whomever I want. So what?”

In 1997, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy published
The Ethical Slut
, a book of advice for people who practice consensual nonmonogamy, also known as polyamory. Since then, “slut” has been used by polyamorous people in an approving way to mean someone who openly expresses his or her choice to have multiple sexual partners. The authors define the term as “a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.”
¹⁶

In 2002, Jessica Crispin, a book critic, founded the literary blog
Bookslut
. The cheeky title implies that reading promiscuously (excessively and across genres) is good. “Sluttiness” in this context is a state to which book lovers should aspire.

In the early 2000s, the New York women’s networking group SLUTS—Successful Ladies Under Tremendous Stress—formed as part of a savvy “new girls’ network” of high-powered women in the world of business. The humorous name adds a dash of frivolity to the serious ambitiousness of the women.
¹⁷

In 2011, a feminist movement called SlutWalk began holding demonstrations across North America and then around the globe. Marchers protest the acceptance or rationalization of sexual assault on the grounds that, by wearing revealing clothing or behaving in any way that could be considered “slutty,” the victims were “asking for it.” In reclaiming the word “slut,” protesters raise awareness that nothing a woman does ever invites or excuses sexual assault. (See chapter 8 for further discussion of the SlutWalk movement.)

So is the word “slut” finally rehabilitated?

Not in most corners of the United States, where the
pejorative meanings of “slut” and “ho” predominate. Since the 1990s, parties known as “Pimps and Hos” began springing up on college campuses. Guys dress up like pimps, women wear outfits to look like sex workers, and the understanding is that the guys have permission to treat the women like sexual objects. Simultaneously rewarding and policing “sluts” is the unspoken theme of these parties. This agenda was clearly articulated in 2009 in the first episode of the reality show
Jersey Shore
, in which the female cast members sexualized themselves with heavy makeup, high heels, and long hair while simultaneously insulting other women who behaved similarly; one of the women asserted that “sluts need to be abused.”
¹⁸

In 2007, after the Rutgers University women’s basketball team lost a national championship game, the nationally syndicated white radio host Don Imus referred to the students as a bunch of “nappy-headed hos.” The women’s athletic success had nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality. Apparently the sight of physically strong, confident black women confused Imus, who could make sense of them only by maligning them based on racist and sexist assumptions that black women are inherently slutty.

Slut-bashing continues within middle schools and high schools across the country. Since 2008, there has been a drumbeat of names of girls who have killed themselves after having been harassed and repeatedly called a slut by their classmates, either in person or online. Jessica Logan, eighteen, from Cincinnati, Ohio. Hope Witsell, thirteen, from Ruskin, Florida. Phoebe Prince, fifteen, from South Hadley, Massachusetts. Alexis Pilkington, seventeen, from Long Island, New York. Rachel Ehmke, thirteen, from Mantorville,
Minnesota. Audrie Pott, fifteen, from Saratoga, California. Felicia Garcia, fifteen, from Staten Island, New York. Amanda Todd, fifteen, from British Columbia, Canada. Jessica Laney, sixteen, from Hudson, New York. Rehtaeh Parsons, seventeen, from Nova Scotia, Canada. Gabrielle Molina, twelve, from Queens, New York. Preadolescent and adolescent kids know that when they want to wound a girl they dislike for any or no reason, “slut” is the most effective weapon.

In 2012, the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh proved that he behaves just like a schoolyard bully himself. Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, then a Georgetown law student, a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she testified about her law school’s health insurance policy on birth control coverage during an unofficial Congressional hearing. Fluke argued that the co-pay for birth control should be covered by health insurance companies. Women, Fluke testified, should not have to foot the bill—which easily can climb to six hundred dollars or more a year.

Limbaugh asked the fourteen million listeners of his radio program, “What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.” Even for Limbaugh, these comments crossed a line of decency. After several sponsors withdrew their advertising from his show and President Barack Obama weighed in, calling Fluke to thank her for speaking out on women’s health care concerns, Limbaugh apologized—sort of. He wrote on his website, “My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”
¹⁹
He expressed regret that he had used
the words “slut” and “prostitute,” but he didn’t retract his argument that Fluke was an immoral woman because she believes that birth control is basic health care.