I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (20 page)

“The girls dress this way because they’re rewarded,” notes Katie Cappiello of the Arts Effect. “It makes them popular and appealing and desirable and attractive to boys. They say they feel great in these clothes. They say they feel confident. They would rather get rewarded for looking hot than for getting an A on their midterm. They put more time and energy into what they’ll wear the next day than studying or doing homework. Guys tell them they look hot; they’re not telling
them, ‘Good job on that history paper.’ For these girls, it’s like they’re on the pages of
Us Weekly
every day of their lives. Their lives are tabloid.”

“But,” I pointed out, “the girls don’t admit that they’re wearing these clothes to be desirable and attractive to boys. They say, ‘Well, I’m wearing them to be comfortable.’”

“But they
do
feel comfortable,” Cappiello told me. “It’s true. They feel comfortable because they feel they look great. It’s
that
sense of ‘comfortable.’”

They feel “comfortable” because they look sexy. But looking sexy is not easy, which makes their choice to describe their clothes as “comfortable” ironic. To girls and young women, “comfort” is not necessarily about physical ease. It is a state of mind, and it is also an expression of an attitude of effortlessness. After all, “comfortable” clothes imply that no thought or labor was put into wearing them. The wearers are not
trying
to don something that makes them look like a “good slut.” It just sort of
happens
. They choose clothes that they
like for themselves
, that make them feel at ease because they feel confident
.
In the narrative these girls tell themselves, they erase the labor they expend in putting together their slutty outfits. Therefore, when school administrators call them to task, they are quick to deny any agency—because they are denying it even to themselves. Through this strategy, they can be sexual and asexual, prude and “good slut,” sexy and virgin, all at once.

The college students I spoke with behave similarly, although they don’t have to contend with dress codes. Nevertheless, they have their own ways to assert their sexuality through clothing without crossing the line into full-scale
sluttiness. They too choose sexualized clothes that give the impression that not much thought has been put into them. In my interviews, two words cropped up repeatedly: “yoga pants.” Wearing yoga pants—with material thinner than denim but a touch thicker than tights—is widely regarded on college campuses as a safe way to appear sexually attractive. Such pants reveal the contours of the body without displaying any skin. Yoga pants are sexy but extraordinarily casual, and therefore make the wearer appear to have demonstrated little or no thought into her sexually charged appearance. “Yoga pants,” by the way, have had different iterations over the years. Had I spoken with college students ten years earlier, no doubt they would have mentioned the body-hugging velour tracksuits that had been popular in the early 2000s. Whether the fabric is velour, spandex, Lycra, or Modal, the effect is the same: revealing the shape of the body. (Perhaps it is a coincidence, perhaps not, but the rise of sexy athletic clothes occurred when Britney Spears, the famous “sexy virgin,” became an international sensation.)

“I find that the women here wear tight-fitting pants that look almost like tights,” Jalisa, a black senior at an elite college on the East Coast, tells me. “The default is to be sexy, even if they’re not thinking about it all the time. People say they’re wearing yoga pants because they’re comfortable, but they know their ass looks a certain way in them. They project a coolness that says, ‘I don’t care about anything.’ They are putting in effort, but they want you to think that the effort is really easy.”

Brittany, a nineteen-year-old white college student from the East Coast, agrees. “So many girls walk around in yoga
pants every single day. You wear yoga pants to get attention. That’s what you wear when you want to look hot. Chances are, you’re not on the way to the gym. It’s a way to look hot and attractive for guys. It’s a way to wear tight clothes but there’s less of a chance that someone will call you a slut because you’re not wearing a miniskirt.” Since yoga pants convey the pursuit of fitness or athletics, they convey a sense of purpose, even if the wearer never steps inside a yoga studio.

To hide their effort, these women say they are wearing clothes to please themselves—and it’s just a
coincidence
that they are sexy. Repeatedly the college students I spoke with assured me, “I just like to wear these clothes”; “This is just my style”; “I like to look good for myself.” Molly, the twenty-year-old white college student from Kentucky, explained her choice completely with regard to the fabrics involved. “Yoga pants are really comfortable,” she told me. “They’re not a tough material on your body, and I like that. Sometimes I just don’t want a thick material on my body.”

Some women are refreshingly honest about their clothing strategy. They admit that they choose clothes that make them look sexy but that don’t scream “slutty.” Maria, the twenty-one-year-old Latina student, told me, “I wear tight skinny jeans to show off my curves. If someone saw me on the street, they wouldn’t think I’m dressed in a slutty way. I don’t wear short skirts. The sluttiest way a woman will dress here on campus is heeled boots, not actual heels, and a sheer top with a bra showing.” Vicki, a white twenty-two-year-old senior, sums up the students’ thoughts succinctly: “Yoga pants are super comfortable, but also it feels good to get attention. Your ass looks nice in those pants.”

My argument is not that young women need to cover their bodies, although I do believe that high school girls should follow their school’s dress code if one exists. I reject the idea that sexual assault can be blamed on the victim’s attire. Nevertheless, it’s time we had an honest conversation about the sexual messages that high school girls and young women send out to the world when they wear clothes that call attention to their bodies as sexual objects.

Everyone gets dressed with the intent of making herself or himself look attractive. But if you’re female, especially a young female, you interpret looking “attractive” as looking “sexy” more than “pretty” or “cute.” The pressure to look sexy can pose a huge problem if you’re trying to manage your sexual reputation, because as we know, one person’s sexy is another person’s slutty. The goal for most young females is to look like a “good slut”—sexy but not too much so. (Even fashion designers are aware of women’s conundrum; Anni Kuan, who designs dresses worn by, among others, Chirlane McCray, the wife of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, describes her clothes as “sexy but not slutty.”)
¹²⁵

Young females worry that if they own up to their intentions and effort, they run the risk of being perceived as “too slutty.” And they are right to worry. Yet the strategy of deliberately sexualizing their appearance with the intention of molding others’ perception that they are “good sluts” and nothing more is doomed to backfire. The bottom line is that they are unable to control how their appearance is interpreted by others. I believe, therefore, that the female students at Stuyvesant truly were shocked to be stopped by administrators for wearing skirts that were deemed excessively short.
Although the girls intellectually knew that they were exposing much of their legs, they erroneously believed that they alone had the power to determine if and when they would be perceived as sexualized in appearance. They thought that if they pretended (perhaps even to themselves) that they didn’t put in a lot of effort into their attire, no one could accuse them of appearing hypersexual.

High school girls in particular are not mature enough to recognize their inability to control how others will interpret their clothing choices. They don’t know that even though wearing X-rated clothes never gives anyone permission to sexually assault the wearer, many people in the world at large assume that a half-naked female is “asking for it.” We must guide high school girls to understand the limits of their ability to control others’ perceptions of their sexual identities. A girl may wake up in the morning intending to present herself as casually attractive—a “good slut”—but if she misses the mark in even the most subtle way, there is a high likelihood that those she encounters will conclude that she looks like a “bad slut.”

Strategy #2: Send Naked Pictures

Sexting is another strategy in which girls and young women mistakenly believe that they can control their sexual reputation as a “good slut” and nothing more. The first alarm sounded in 2004, when an eighth-grade girl at the prestigious Horace Mann School in New York City sent a digital video of herself masturbating to a male classmate she liked. Her
face was clearly visible. He (or someone he forwarded it to) uploaded it to a file-sharing network that students used to trade music. Hundreds of students saw the video, which then became available to an audience of millions.
¹²⁶
Soon stories of the circulation of similar videos, as well as photos of girls either completely naked or naked from the waist up, became impossible to ignore. Again and again, girls were humiliated when a boy they naively thought they could trust betrayed them. Again and again, girls became known as “bad sluts” by dozens, hundreds, even thousands of kids within their social orbit.

We don’t know exactly how many teenagers are involved in sexting. According to an Associated Press/MTV survey conducted in September 2009 by Knowledge Networks, 24 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds, and 33 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, have been involved in “some type of naked sexting,” either by cell phone or on the Internet. Yet according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in December 2009, only 4 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds have sent and 15 percent have received “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images via text messaging” on their cell phones. However, the Pew numbers most likely are so small because teens were questioned only about cell phone sexting.
¹²⁷
Chances are that the AP/MTV numbers are more reliable. The numbers suggest that so far, the majority of teenagers are not sexting, although this may change as the practice becomes more routine and commonplace.

There’s nothing new about taking a naked photo of yourself. “I myself am entirely guilty. In going through a box of Polaroids that I took in high school, I stumbled across a
series of photos that I took after having acquired a copy of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
,” says danah boyd. “Taking a picture seemed like a much more reasonable way of figuring out what was ‘down there’ than trying to get a mirror angled right. Thank goodness my mother had no idea that she was housing child pornography produced by her daughter. In talking with adults from various communities, I was surprised to learn how many had taken photographs of themselves as teenagers, trying to be sexy or sexual.”
¹²⁸
Ah, the predigital days of Polaroids, when you didn’t have to bring your film to the photo shop for development, and your image could not be duplicated or circulated. Even with regular film, photographic images were contained. Unless you actively gave someone the negatives, you could keep your pictures private.

Today, girls often believe that as long as they send their photo to someone with whom they are in a relationship, they can rest assured that their photo is safe. And in fact, boyd says that most teenagers who do sext are doing so within the confines of a relationship, and that most images are not mass-fowarded. “I’ve done ‘Skypesex’ with a boyfriend,” Vicki tells me matter-of-factly. “You masturbate while you’re on the phone with Skype and show him the images. I’ve done photos also, but always in relationships, not with random hookups.”

But projecting yourself in this way ushers in myriad problems for girls in particular. Girls want to look perfect, hot, and effortless. “In a relationship, there’s now pressure to send videos and pictures,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a twenty-eight-year-old white feminist writer, tells me. “One guy asked me to send him video and photos, and it really stressed me out. I ended up taking lots of photos, over and over, rejecting them
because they weren’t good enough. Especially since we don’t see each other very often, I wanted him to preserve an image of me as really attractive. But it was so much effort and pressure, and I decided I didn’t want to do it. And then I think of these young girls in high school doing the same thing. It’s hard to fulfill this expectation of representing yourself.”

In addition, although boys also send photos of themselves—girls and young women refer to them as “dick pics”—only girls’ photos are mass-forwarded. When a boy sends a picture of himself, girls tend to laugh. His “dick pic” is regarded as humorous but not shameful. Girls tend not to perceive the self-photographed naked penis as erotic. They also tend to regard the act of photographing one’s penis as being within the bounds of acceptable male behavior, so they don’t see it as scandalous.

When a girl sends a picture of herself, however, she’s at risk for being slut-bashed. Her photo or video is seen as pathetic, shameful, and disgusting. Although she is eroticized, paradoxically the act of photographing herself is perceived to be unfeminine; it is evidence of one’s sexual agency—even though many girls use sexting as a way to avoid actually engaging in real sexual activity.
His
photo may be forwarded to a few select girlfriends for a little laugh.
Her
photo may go viral to teach her a lesson. Molly, the twenty-year-old white college student, tells me that in her high school in Kentucky, “A girl sent her boyfriend a picture of her breasts—her face was in it too—and everybody saw it. She had dated him for a month. I felt bad for her. I would never want that to happen to me. The picture ended up getting forwarded to one of the teachers, and there was a big investigation. The guy was not
punished. There were so many people who had the photo, so the school couldn’t pinpoint who had been responsible for forwarding it.”