I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (16 page)

A girl or woman who successfully conforms to “good slut” ideals finds herself trapped: The better her performance, the more evidence exists that can prove she’s really a “bad slut.” “You have evidence that you can use against a girl,” says Stephanie, the fifteen-year-old New York City student. “Everyone has profile pictures of themselves in bikinis. It’s so easy to label any girl a slut because you have all this evidence. All you have to do is go to her Facebook.” If you’re not slutty enough in the good way, or if you’re slutty in a bad way, the news is all over the Internet, leading to slut-bashing or other forms of gendered social ostracism such as being rejected by a sorority or a club because of sexual reputation, or losing professional opportunities.

Women objectified and policed themselves long before the Internet, as Sandra Lee Bartky demonstrates. They have long been the watchman in the panopticon’s tower, who himself is being watched. These processes are not new. Women in
previous generations took diet pills during pregnancy to avoid excessive weight gain, wore breathing-constricting girdles to give the illusion of a wasp waist, vacuumed their homes in dresses and high heels, did aerobic exercise to look sleek like Jane Fonda, and slept with painful hard curlers in their hair—all in the name of feminine beauty.

What’s new is that surveillance and self-surveillance have become inescapable and relentless. For women previously, the sidewalk was not a catwalk with paparazzi snapping photos of them against their will. “It’s like you can’t go anywhere without people keeping track of you,” says Jessica, a twenty-three-year-old Latina. “You’ll be talking to someone, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, you were at that party the other night,’ and it’s like, ‘How do you know? I never told you.’ Or they’ll say, ‘You looked good at that party the other night.’ People really pay attention to where you are and what you’re doing. It’s kind of scary, but I’ve kind of accepted it.”

Observes Julie Zeilinger, the
FBomb
editor, “You can’t be invisible, and you need to look perfect all the time. And you’re always being compared with everyone else. You have to worry about the way you look every single moment of every day. I know that body image was an issue for women of previous generations too, but for my generation it’s just constant.” The inescapability and relentlessness of surveillance, combined with the sexual double standard and the need to perform femininity, have collided to lay the foundation for reciprocal slut-shaming. When I call another woman a slut in a casual way, I am entering into a tacit agreement with her. I am affirming her sexual attractiveness, and I expect her to affirm mine. I am colluding with her in the understanding that I live in a time of economic
uncertainty, when top grades in school may not lead to a good job, or any job, and my parents may be under- or unemployed at any moment; therefore, my sexuality may be the only ticket I have to any semblance of success. But I also am policing her sexuality, which is all too easy with social media, and I know that she will feel entitled to police mine as well. But what else can I do? I recognize that I am sharpening both ends of the stick, and that someone, perhaps myself, will get hurt . . . but this is the way femininity is performed, and if I want to perform femininity, this is how the show goes.

Posing for Evidence

The early days of the Internet offered the promise of identity reinvention. Women and men alike could experiment with their online identities, and this was acceptable and normal behavior in the playhouse of Multi-User Domains, or MUDs. Users constructed selves that had no connection with their offline lives. In 1995, Sherry Turkle, a visionary in contemplating the intersection of personal identity and technology, wrote joyfully about this promise in
Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
. Back then, as a famous
New Yorker
cartoon put it, an animal could be online without worrying that his identity would be found out: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
⁹⁰
People logged online and assumed multiple fake identities, knowing that everyone else online was playing a role too. Turkle’s book teemed with optimism and hope about a “decentered self” on the Internet, a lively space where we are “encouraged to think of ourselves
as fluid, emergent, decentralized, multiplicitous, flexible and ever in process.”
⁹¹

By 2011, the year she published
Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other
, Turkle had thrown in the towel. The self had changed—and not for the better. Anonymity was over. Privacy had evaporated. The world now is one of “rapid response” in which there is never enough time “to sit and think uninterrupted.”
⁹²
Turkle’s primary concern now is that people become depersonalized in the flood of emails, texts, messages, posts, photos, and videos. We now treat those we meet online as objects, and we treat ourselves as objects that need to be “branded” to gain recognition.

Teenagers are most vulnerable because they are developing their sense of self within an environment without privacy or personal space, and because they’re forced to work overtime to keep their social media image “sleek” like a “gym-toned body.”
⁹³
Turkle offers the example of a fourteen-year-old girl who has just joined Facebook. The girl is fraught with anxiety over her profile. She keeps tweaking it. Should she list herself as single if she has a boyfriend? What if she and her friends post their status as being in relationships, but their boyfriends don’t? Even the act of confirming or ignoring a friend request makes her nervous. Another girl tells Turkle that her preference is to include only her “cool friends” and not the “more unpopular ones,” but she can’t because she’s “nice to a lot of other kids at school.” So she decides to include everyone who asks on her friend list, but she’s unhappy about it because this isn’t the identity she wants to project.
⁹⁴

All the high school students Turkle spoke with told her
that they update their Facebook profiles incessantly. They post comments multiple times a day because if they don’t, and someone sees that they’re not communicating all the time, they fear they will look like a loser. Therefore, they write on other kids’ walls so that those kids respond on their own walls. They must reveal information about themselves because the more they post, the more attention they’ll receive online.
⁹⁵
Now with the app Klout, the stakes are even higher: Klout ranks users with a numerical value based on their level of social media engagement. Communicating online often and with many is the ticket to appearing popular. “Comments are not simply a dialogue between two interlocutors,” notes danah boyd, “but a performance of social connection before a broader audience.”
⁹⁶
As Katherine Losse, an early Facebook employee, observed about her colleagues’ socializing techniques, commenting on someone’s post “was better than speaking to them, because everyone saw it. Everyone wanted to see everything. This was all justified under the company’s corporate buzzword,
transparency
.”
⁹⁷

Teenagers know that even when they’re alone, they’re not really alone. Because of “transparency,” other people are stalking them online by looking at their photos and comments without making their presence known. Their lives are not dissimilar to those of celebrities. If a teenager gets drunk at a party, someone will snap a photo with her phone, upload it to the Internet, and tag (publicly identify) it, so that other people will see it and comment on it. Any time they go out in public to do anything at all, teenagers are at risk of being photographed and tagged. They can never relax in public. They must always be on guard. They are always being watched.

Online identity is no longer fluid as it had been fifteen years ago. To the contrary: identity is constrained—often into something that does not resemble the image we want. Femininity is also a constraining performance. And femininity in the age of social media is the most constraining performance ever.

In this environment, girls and young women are doing something rational and understandable. “All they want is evidence to prove that they’re sexually empowered without crossing the line into being sluts,” says Katie Cappiello, the artistic director of the Arts Effect in New York City. “One girl told us that the reason she goes to parties is so that she can be documented being at parties. Girls’ sexuality is just another thing to document.”

For the people who create and control social media, girls’ sexuality is also just another thing to exploit. Social media would collapse, it seems, without images of sexualized females. According to Katherine Losse, “women’s images drive” Facebook. Losse worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010 in a series of jobs culminating as Mark Zuckerberg’s speechwriter and is the author of a memoir,
The Boy Kings
, about the company’s work culture. On Facebook, she writes, “the most popular content has always been intimate, personal photographs of women.”
⁹⁸
Mikolaj Piskorski, a professor at Harvard Business School, confirms Losse’s observation. He has found that women receive two-thirds of all page views on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. “People just love to look at pictures,” he says. “That’s the killer app of all online social networks. Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles.” Most photo
viewing is done by men looking at women they don’t know, followed by men looking at women they do know, followed by women looking at other women they know.
⁹⁹

Posting photos of oneself is excessively popular, Piskorski speculates, because it’s a way to represent yourself as a well-liked, high-status person without having to boast outright. I would add that for females, it’s also a way to perform femininity without demonstrating a lot of effort. Posting a photo of oneself looking amazing in a killer dress (especially if you can tell that someone else snapped the photo) is a way to enact the femininity rule of “effortless perfection.” Even so-called selfies have become so casual they appear effortless. Ironically, these photos of oneself are rarely candid shots; they are nearly always posed, and it’s obvious that the subject is striking a sexy pose because she’s aware of the photographer or at least of the camera. She is working very hard in her performance, but she tries to make it seem as though she’s phoning it in (which she’s literally doing with her smartphone). It’s crucial to pretend that it’s all effortless, that she doesn’t really care. That way, if she fails at femininity, at least everyone will think she never really tried all that hard. If she succeeds at exaggerating her sexiness without crossing the invisible line into sexual excess, she is then complimented by her peers on her sexiness. Grateful, she returns the favor.

Of course, all this image control does require effort. It requires shrewd manipulation. According to a survey conducted by the late Stanford professor Clifford Nass, teenage girls sometimes digitally alter the photos of themselves they post online to make themselves appear thinner than they really are.
¹⁰⁰
Girls also ask their friends to post positive
comments about their Facebook photos with the hope that these comments will spur others to post similar compliments.
¹⁰¹

Julie Zeilinger meets me at an Upper West Side café in Manhattan. A twenty-year-old student at Barnard College, she has come of age with social media and has never known anything else. She remembers vividly when she and her friends excitedly discovered MySpace in the sixth grade. “Finally, a way to know how popular we
really
were!” she writes in her book
A Little F’d Up
. “We could actually
count
our friends and compare them to other people’s. We could flaunt our inside jokes by writing on our friends’ profiles for all to see. We could post a profile picture that captured our cuteness at its ultimate peak, and flaunt it to all! Rejoice! O, happy day!”
¹⁰²

But first, everyone needed an amazing profile photo. So they set up a photo shoot during their lunch period and practiced their poses. “We asked each other, ‘Should I pose like this?’” she tells me. “Our photo became synonymous with our identity and personality.” But she and her friends realized that that as flattering as their profile photos were, one was never enough. They needed a new picture
every day
. So they started skipping lunch and heading to the girls’ bathroom, “our little preteen bodies positioned on top of toilets, blowing kisses to a friend who stood below with a camera.”
¹⁰³

To make themselves look sexy, Julie and her friends perfected what is called the “duck face.” You have no doubt seen the duck face, even if you didn’t realize that it had a name. “To perfect the duck face, you must make your eyes as big as possible.” Zeilinger explains. “Your lips must resemble, as the name implies, a duck. You must purse them and then shove them away from your face as far as you possibly can. . . . I
think this is supposed to emphasize one’s cheekbones, and admittedly, it does.”
¹⁰⁴
It also makes the lips appear pouty in a sexually charged way. The duck face is supposed to look authentic, but it is entirely manufactured, the way models pose in front of a fan so that their hair looks naturally windswept. But at least every once in a while in real life, the wind does sweep our hair back in a pleasingly attractive way. When was the last time you saw an unposed teenage girl and thought she resembled a duck—and that this was a good thing?