In human sexuality, slut-shaming is the act of making, or attempting to make, a person, especially a woman or girl, feel guilty or inferior for certain sexual behaviors, circumstances, or desires that deviate from traditional or orthodox gender expectations, or that which may be considered to be contrary to natural or religious law. Some examples of circumstances where women are “slut-shamed” include violating accepted dress codes by dressing in sexually provocative ways, requesting access to birth control, having premarital, casual, or promiscuous sex, or being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted (which is known as victim blaming).
Slut-shaming is the experience of being labeled a sexually out-of-control girl or woman (a “slut” or “ho”) and then being punished socially for possessing this identity. Slut-shaming is sexist because only girls and women are called to task for their sexuality, whether real or imagined; boys and men are congratulated for the exact same behavior. This is the essence of the sexual double standard: Boys will be boys, and girls will be sluts.
I have been tracking slut-shaming for two decades. Repeatedly, girls and young women across North America tell me that they are encouraged, even expected, to present themselves as sexually knowing and sophisticated, both online and offline. Being “hot” or sexy is part of the recipe of heterosexual femininity. But with one false step, it’s easy to cross the invisible and ever-shifting boundary between “sexy” and “slutty.” If she is perceived as “too” sexy; if she calls too much attention to her sexiness; if she lacks the sprezzatura that is compulsory to pull off the sexy-but-not-slutty performance; she faces a real risk of becoming labeled.
In other words, if you are a heterosexual girl or young woman, you are damned if you don’t and damned if you do. If you refrain from any expression of sexiness, you may be written off as irrelevant and unfeminine. But if you follow the guidelines, you run the risk of being judged, shamed and policed.
Slut-shaming is certainly not new. Monica Lewinsky was called “a little tart” in a Wall Street Journal editorial in 1998. White radio show host Don Imus referred to the black members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” in 2007. Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” after she advocated for no-copay birth control in 2012.
What is new is that slut-shaming has become normalized and omnipresent. I have yet to meet an American woman under the age of 25 who has not been called a “slut” or a “ho” at some point in her life. Acts of slut-shaming are easier than ever to accomplish in the age of social media. Young men can anonymously take photographs of naked, unconscious women with their phones and post the pictures on Facebook without the women’s consent — as the members of the Penn State fraternity Kappa Delta Rho recently did. A university student can blithely and publicly call a 13-year-old girl a “slut,” as has happened to the rising talent in baseball, Mo’ne Davis.
Slut-shaming is far more harmful than simple name-calling — although being denigrated publicly in itself can be traumatic, as the suicides of a number of slut-shamed girls attests. Once a girl or woman is regarded as a “slut” or “ho,” she becomes a target for sexual assault. And if she is sexually assaulted, she may be assigned the “slut” or “ho” identity ex post facto to rationalize the crime and to protect the assaulter. The girl who was raped at a party in Steubenville, Ohio in 2013 was vilified by strangers and peers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube; they could make sense of the horrible crime only by assigning the “drunken slut” label to the victim.
You might think: Given this set of circumstances, isn’t it preferable for a girl or woman to abstain from sexual expression? Putting aside the sexism of this point of view, since boys and men never have to face this decision, it actually makes no difference if a girl or woman is sexually active or even utters any expression of sexuality: she can be called to task simply because she is female. Ashley Judd recently tweeted an innocuous comment during a basketball championship game (she wrote, “I think Arkansas is playing dirty”) and was harassed online as a result. People sexualized, objectified and threatened her with sexual violence — because she expressed an opinion. Clearly, sluttiness to some people indicates a woman who asserts herself, sexually or not.
Yet embracing the “slut” identity is also not necessarily a panacea. A number of teenage girls and young women I’ve spoken with have referred to themselves as “sluts” to indicate they were comfortable with their sexuality — trying to wrest control over the term for themselves — but this strategy backfired. Several were sexually assaulted, and women of color face even greater risks because many white people are influenced by the racist belief that women of color are inherently sexually wild and therefore deserve to be shamed.
As we’ve seen, slut-shaming is not really about women’s sexuality. It is grounded in the belief that men get to assert themselves, and women do not. It may be getting a lot of attention these days, but slut-shaming is really just a catchy way to signify old-fashioned sexism.
Slut shaming is defined by many as a process in which women are attacked for their transgression of accepted codes of sexual conduct, of admonishing them for behavior or desires that are more sexual than society finds acceptable. Emily Bazelon says that slut shaming is “retrograde, the opposite of feminist. Calling a girl a slut warns her that there’s a line: she can be sexual but not too sexual.” Amy Schalet argues that too much sex is a liability for girls, which often causes the discourse on the topic of girl’s desire for sex to be non-existent, and that ignoring the fact that girls have sexual desire in sexual education, media, and the social sciences results in girl’s having difficulty developing sexual subjectivity; she says sexual subjectivity is the capacity to feel connected to sexual desires and boundaries and use these to make self-directed decisions. Many have stated that slut shaming is used against women by both men and women. Jessica Ringrose has argued that slut-shaming functions among women as a way of sublimating sexual jealousy “into a socially acceptable form of social critique of girls’ sexual expression.” The term slut-shaming is also used to describe victim blaming for rape and other sexual assault; e.g. by stating that the crime was caused (either in part or in full) by the woman wearing revealing clothing or previously acting in a forward, sexual manner, before not consenting to sex, and thereby absolving the perpetrator of guilt.
Men and women alike are culprits of “slut-shaming”: The study “Birds of a feather? Not when it comes to sexual permissiveness,” published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, notes that sexually lenient individuals are judged more negatively than non-permissive peers, which places those who are more permissive at risk of social isolation. The researchers from Cornell University found that similar sentiments appeared in nonsexual, same-sex friendship context as well. The researchers had college women read a vignette describing an imaginary female peer, “Joan,” then rate their feelings about her personality. To one group of women, Joan was described as having two lifetime sexual partners; to another group, she had had twenty partners. The study found that women even women who were more promiscuous themselves rated the Joan with 20 partners as “less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who’d only boasted two”.
An article in the New York Daily News described yet another mode of “slut-shaming”: in meme form. Young girls, and increasingly boys, have begun to generate memes on Tumblr and Facebook to offer mock – and often insulting – advice to their peers. For example: “Hey Girls. Did you know? That you spread Nutella…Not your legs,” reads one such viral post.
So here are some examples of things you might not realize are actually slut shaming:
1. Blaming the girl if someone spreads a stolen nude photo of her.
She has been betrayed in this situation. She has been wronged. Yes, it is foolish to trust someone else with a naked photo of oneself. But her motivation in sending it was to please the recipient. She was doing something for him, and he repaid her by destroying her life. He could have found porn online in a second, so this kind of behavior isn’t about a sexy image. It’s about control. He knew that once he got a naked photo of her, he could control her. And, if he has shared it without her consent, he has decided to use that control to ruin her social life. Which one of these two people deserves punishment?
2. Mocking someone else’s sexual practices because to you, they’re “weird.”
If someone is comfortable enough around you to share what turns them on, be a good enough friend not to shame them for it. Usually, though, we hear about other people’s “weird” sex stuff through the grapevine, in the form of gossip. Rumors, as most of us know from experience, are almost never true in the first place. But here’s the thing. Even if the rumor is true, even if so-and-so really is into anime porn, or pegging, or spanking, ask yourself honestly: How do you know that’s not actually normal? What is normal? The only person whose sex life you know anything about, for certain, is your own. So let’s stop acting like there’s one, boring, “normal” way to be sexual.
3. Assuming a girl is only dressing up to impress guys.
Think about it. We put clothes on our bodies to protect ourselves from things like weather and nasty park benches, but we also use clothes to express our personal aesthetic. If someone thinks the only reason for a girl to dress up is for the enjoyment of guys, that person is basically saying that the primary function for female bodies is to be pleasing to men. That our self-expression only matters if it matters to men. This isn’t true for the girl you’re slut shaming, and it isn’t true for you, either.
4. Talking differently about girls who have sex than you do about guys who have sex.
You know you can do anything a boy can do, right? I was told this from a very young age by my parents, teachers, books, and children’s movies. At least where I lived, people seemed to have agreed to teach children that girls and boys should have the same educational, athletic, and leadership opportunities. I could do anything a boy could do… until I hit puberty. Then, suddenly, for the first time, there were limits on what I could do. I couldn’t wear certain clothes anymore because now I had cleavage. I wasn’t allowed to dance by myself in the middle of a dance floor. And it was only because I was a girl. If girls can do everything boys can do, then women can do everything men can do, and sex is no different.
5. Describing another woman — or yourself! — as being “like a guy when it comes to sex.”
Yes, I know, I just wrote that we need to talk about girls who have sex the same way we talk about guys who have sex. But if you like to have casual sex (the implication of being “like a guy”), that just means you’re a woman who likes to have casual sex. Why should liking sex be something that’s inherently for guys? Men don’t get to have ownership over the act of “liking sex,” sorry.
6. Not speaking up for each other.
That guy who slut shames girls for hooking up on the first date is the same guy trying to get girls to do it. If we don’t speak up for other girls and women, that guy will think that slut shaming is OK. Speaking up means you risk being turned against, either as a slut or an angry feminist. But you also might get a productive conversation out of it. Our silence is often taken as agreement, so we need to break that silence. At the very least, that guy won’t be able to keep believing that everyone feels the way he does.