I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (34 page)

“OMG. . . . U CANNOT RAPE THE WILLING!!”

“Those kids didnt rape that girl. the stupid drunk slut got everything she deserved. Her reputation got fucked up so she took it to the courts”

“That is ridiculous, she knew the possibilities of being taken advantage of when she was under the influence. It is her fault.”

“So you got drunk at a party and two people take advantage of you, that’s not rape you’re just a loose drunk slut.”

“Steubenville rape? Lessens ‘real’ rape, maybe she didn’t consent but only cause she was too drunk she drank voluntarily lucky she’s not dead”
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These responses come from a mind-set in which a “slut” cannot be raped because she invited her assault. She had a choice in the matter. Mays, Richmond, their friends, and everyone who offered these comments on Twitter do not recognize that nonconsensual sex with anyone, regardless of whether they are considered a “slut,” is a crime. Levy writes that “the teens seemed largely unaware that they’d been involved in a crime.” Prosecutor Jane Hanlin told Levy, “They don’t think that what they’ve seen is a rape in the classic sense”—meaning a stranger jumping out from behind bushes at 3:00 a.m. and threatening to kill the victim if she doesn’t comply. And when Levy asked Richmond what he thought when he saw Mays masturbating as he stood over the passed-out victim, Richmond replied, “I wasn’t really thinking about, Oh, this is rape. I was just thinking, He talked to her, so I don’t really care what they do.” Levy explains that “talked to her” means that Mays and the girl had a flirtatious
relationship through texting.
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To Richmond, it was OK for his friend to have sex with the girl despite her inability to consent because she had demonstrated, through texting, that she was interested in his friend. He interpreted textual flirtation as sexual consent, despite the fact that a blacked-out girl not only cannot consent, she also cannot flirt.

“Steubenville happens every week somewhere in this country,” says Jennifer Baumgardner, the creator of the powerful documentary
It Was Rape
, which tells the stories of eight diverse women and their experiences with sexual assault. The most striking aspect of the film is witnessing the strategies women use to cope with being assaulted. Not one of the women profiled in the documentary screamed during her assault. Already naked and vulnerable, they were afraid to do anything that would signal they were being coerced. Two of the women ended up dating their rapists after having been raped. As one of the women explains in the film, dating her rapist was a coping mechanism that “normalized things.”

CHAPTER 8

Can “Slut” Be Reclaimed?
233

When I planned to attend New York City’s SlutWalk in October 2011, I had high expectations. I assumed the event, an antirape march
,
would be the protest rally I’d long been waiting for.

The logo for the SlutWalk was a lipstick-wearing Statue of Liberty holding up a placard reading, “No Excuse for Rape!” The tagline: “No one has the right to touch you without your consent.” As with Take Back the Night marches, an annual fixture on many campuses, the goal was to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual violence and to protest the common tendency to blame the victim because of her clothes or behavior. But Take Back the Night marches emphasize the danger of stranger rape and the need to stay safe while walking alone in the dark. This march highlighted rape committed by someone the victim knows, when the issue of consent
is complicated because the victim doesn’t express consent, yet the assaulter presumes consent is given, or just doesn’t care.

How did a movement of antirape marches get the word “slut” in its title? The first SlutWalk took place in Toronto in April 2011 after a representative of the Toronto Police told female students at a York University safety seminar that “I’m not supposed to say this” but “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”
²³⁴
Outraged students rose up in protest, and Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis, two Toronto feminists, organized the first event.
²³⁵
SlutWalks then took place in dozens of cities and college campuses across Canada and the United States and in hundreds of cities around the world. Within several months, an enormous, exciting international grassroots movement swelled. Although it largely fizzled out after 2012, SlutWalk had been the biggest grassroots feminist movement in decades.

The movement’s primary message was that sexual assault is never the victim’s fault. Simultaneously, SlutWalk also demanded that women have the right to be sexual without being slut-shamed. The genius of the movement—the reason it caught fire immediately—was that it finessed the paradox of women’s being sexual without being sexual objects while also connecting this paradox with sexual violence.

As my excitement escalated in the weeks before New York City’s SlutWalk, I hoped that the point of invoking “slut” in the title was to prod people to think twice before using the term. I figured that the term “slut” was finally going to get the critique it deserved. Lots of people would now have the chance to ponder the meanings of “slut” and would refuse to use the word ever again.

Yet when I arrived, I discovered that in fact the word “slut” was celebrated. Approximately three thousand people—mostly young white women—milled around Union Square with placards reading “Sluts Say Yes” and “I’m Only a Slut for My Man” while the band Witches in Bikinis (yes, they wear bikinis—along with wigs in neon colors) sang over and over, “If I wanna be a slut, so what? So what?” Humorously dismissing anyone who argues that a woman dressed in sexually provocative clothes is issuing an invitation to be raped, many marchers arrived wearing little more than boots, tights, and bras. They walked around the neighborhood for an hour chanting, “However I’m dressed, wherever I go, yes means yes and no means no.” Soon the bras were discarded; a number of women remained topless. On their chests, many had written in marker slogans such as
CONSENT IS SEXY
. One woman penned,
I AM MORE THAN THESE
with arrows pointing to her breasts.

Is Reclamation the Best Strategy?

Is the time ripe to reclaim “slut”? Forgive me, sisters; I don’t think so.

Since the Riot Grrrl feminist punk rock movement of the early 1990s, when Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill wrote
SLUT
on her stomach in lipstick, there have been localized feminist efforts to wrest control of the label. Instead of being shamed for our sexuality, the thinking has been, let’s take ownership of this label and subvert its meanings. It’s a brave, saucy move with doses of irony and humor mixed in, and one that’s been gestating for a while. Years before the
movement sought to rehabilitate the term, I started amassing a closet full of
SLUT
T-shirts given to me by campus groups after my lectures on slut-bashing. But I’ve never worn them. Simply put, most people aren’t in on the joke, which creates more issues than it solves.

Certainly at the SlutWalk, everyone was in on the joke. I asked a young woman named Sonya, dressed in a Superwoman costume with
SUPERSLUT
printed on her chest in marker, what the word “slut” means to her. “Female empowerment,” she told me. “Being proud to be a woman.” Another woman held up a sign reading, “I Am a Rape Survivor—No One Deserves It.” I asked her what she thought about the word “slut.” She too advocated reclaiming the term. “It’s naive to think we can ever eradicate it,” she told me. “I was called a slut in high school and later on my boyfriend raped me. I never thought of myself as a slut, because I was not promiscuous. Reclaiming the word is good. We can take it back by changing the tone and the attitude.” Another woman, wearing a
SLUTS EVERYWHERE
T-shirt, told me that “the ideal is to get rid of the word but we can’t, so let’s embrace it.”

SlutWalk NYC, like the movement as a whole, was a serious call to action. Organizers chose to hold the event at Union Square to raise awareness of a nearby rape of a woman by an NYPD officer. The victim had approached the officer in 2008, asking for help getting home because she was drunk. The officer assaulted her in her apartment while his colleague stood watch. At one point during the trial, the officer’s defense attorney likened the victim’s genitals to a Venus flytrap, suggesting that the victim was a dangerous predator rather than prey, and that her menace emanated from her sexuality.
²³⁶
The officers were charged only
with official misconduct. In one way, this particular assault was anomalous: the victim and the rapist did not know each other. Although most people don’t realize it, rape rarely involves strangers. But in other ways, the NYPD rape was all too typical: the defense claimed that the victim couldn’t have been raped because her body showed no signs of physical force. Again, although most people don’t know it, rape rarely involves physical violence. In this particular case, the victim was drunk, and therefore could not give consent.

The SlutWalk movement was an attempt to educate people about the realities of rape and to dispel the myths. Marchers wanted everyone to know that women should be able to wear what they want, drink alcohol, and be sexually active without the threat of sexual violence and, if assaulted, without blame for being a “slut.” The movement was as much about women’s right to be sexually active as it was about sexual violence. “By demanding sex without rape and insisting that consent distinguishes the two, [SlutWalk participants] are in effect declaring their sexual agency,” writes Deborah Tuerkheimer, a professor of law at DePaul University College of Law.
²³⁷
SlutWalkers were saying that the best strategy to educate people about the nature of sexual assault is for women to showcase their “sluttiness”—to take ownership of their sexual selves.

My friend Alix Kates Shulman, the author of the bestselling novel
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
and an early radical feminist who helped organize the 1968 Miss America protest, in which feminists crowned a live sheep, believes in the power of the extravagant gesture in political protest. “My gut feeling,” she told me, “is that the more outrageous the protest, the more attention it gets and the more awareness rises. When
done with humor, it’s like pricking a balloon. In my experience, the reclamation of a negative term—such as ‘bitch’—defuses it. It might help people laugh at someone so dumb as to use the ‘S’ word as an epithet.”

Shulman is right: The reason SlutWalks were so successful is that they were called, well, “SlutWalks.” And contrary to the stereotype of the humorless, strident woman’s libber (“How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One, and that’s not funny!”), SlutWalk participants were playful, even zany.

Still, I pause and question the strategy of organizing around “slut” as a unifying identity.

After a member of Femen, a Ukrainian women’s rights group known for baring their breasts, staged a topless protest in Berlin in front of Russian president Vladimir Putin, calling him a “dictator,” he smiled in amusement and put up two thumbs of approval.
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“If you’re a feminist and a stripper, and the guys watching you don’t know that, does it really matter?” asks Andi Zeisler, the cofounder and editor of
Bitch
magazine.
²³⁹
You may think that your feminist message, or your feminist identity, is obvious, but chances are it’s not only not obvious, it’s an object of ridicule.

Cultural context is everything. When Shulman’s women’s lib cohorts threw off their bras in 1968, going braless was effective as a form of protest because women were expected to wear girdles and hosiery. In the 1960s, dressing in an overtly revealing manner was taboo. The contrast between convention and protest was jolting; eschewing a bra or going topless definitely made a statement. But in a culture where females are hypersexualized, embracing the word “slut” does not seem like a radical protest. It seems like a capitulation. Today,
girls are pressured to dress and behave in an overtly sexual way, despite the conventional understanding that a “slut” is a woman who does just that. In this milieu, calling oneself a “slut” doesn’t allow you to wrest the term away from those who would use it to judge and control women. Rather, it just confirms negative stereotypes of what it means to be female. You’re merely adding ammunition to the arsenal.

From Slut Pride workshops at Harvard to the anti-GOP Rock the Slut Vote political movement to the social media campaign Sluts Unite, reappropriation of “slut” in a “good” way is fashionable. Yet when Yale fraternity pledges hold a sign reading “We Love Yale Sluts” or when millions of us receive spam emails advertising the availability of “Hot Local Sluts,” the term is used in the traditional “bad” sense, referring to females as nothing more than sexual objects. A twenty-year-old male student at Brown University told me that an acquaintance, a male athlete, posted on his Facebook wall a photo of a woman from a SlutWalk with this caption underneath: “I like to pretend I was raped, but I was asking for it.”

To feminists, “slut” means “sexually liberated woman.” But to most people, “slut” means “disgusting woman who deserves to be shamed or even assaulted.” This contradiction exposes the tension between different meanings associated with the word “slut.”

I fear that that the weight of this contradiction is too much for the word “slut” to bear.

Yes, language is inherently unstable. It is constantly shifting, as we know from the etymology of “slut”; Chaucer used “sluttish” to refer to a man who was untidy, and the word has picked up a motley of meanings on its journey over the last
six hundred years. Different people associate different meanings with specific words, and nobody can pin the meaning of any word as if on a museum display. I hope that the injurious meanings of “slut” will erode over time, and I look forward to the day when the word is either not necessary or is translated with positive associations. Yet I am deeply concerned that right now may not be the most strategic time to wrestle over the meanings of “slut” because the space for misunderstanding is cavernous. When you reclaim “slut,” it’s not clear to most people what exactly you are reclaiming.