I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (36 page)

Yet some women of color openly embrace the “slut” label. Favianna Rodriguez, a Latina queer artist known for her politically charged work focusing on immigration and
globalization, has created a series of “Slut Power” posters featuring brown women, bold colors, and eye-opening text reading
POLITICIANS OFF MY POONTANG
!
MY UTERUS IS MINE
and
I
’
M A SLUT. I VOTE. SO DOES EVERYONE I SLEEP WITH. AND YOU
’
RE ABOUT TO BE MORE FUCKED THAN I AM. KEEP UR GOVERNMENT OFF MY PUSSY
. Explaining the message of these posters, she writes, “Politicians and conservatives are waging an all-out war on women, our bodies, our access to health, our right to birth control, and our right to free, accessible and safe abortion. Everywhere you turn, the right wing is attempting to further limit and hinder our access to our reproductive rights through anti-contraceptive measures. I am fed up . . . I decided it was time for some slut positivity.”
²⁴⁵

The first time I spoke with Rodriguez was in 1997, when she was nineteen and a student at the University of California, Berkeley. She reached out to me to share her story of slut-bashing when I was conducting research for my 1999 book
Slut!
. She had been beaten up by her peers, who called her “slut,” “whore,” and “ho.” In
Slut!
, I protected her identity by changing her name to “Rosalina Lopez,” and I quoted her as saying, “I really think that being called a slut empowered me. The more people are marginalized, the more they see things in a critical way. You start to have almost a double consciousness: You see the role you’re supposed to be in, but you also see that you’re not in it.”
²⁴⁶

The Favianna Rodriguez I spoke with sixteen years later is a respected and popular artist who travels around the world talking about her art and her politics, yet in many respects she hasn’t changed at all. She cuts a bold appearance with thick, curly hair, bright lipstick, and doorknocker earrings; her face is
tempered by an inviting smile and soulful eyes. I asked her if, as a woman of color, she is concerned about describing herself as a slut. No, Rodriguez emphatically told me. Reappropriation of “slut” is central to her work, she explained:

P
recisely because I’m Latina, there’s an expectation that I’m sexually conservative, and a lot of Latinas have an unhealthy view of our sexuality. There’s a lot of slut-shaming. But I am very sexually open. I am nonmonogamous; I have open relationships. I embrace the slut identity. This is my liberation. I challenge how women of color should be perceived, and it really messes with people’s heads. They’re like, Whoa! Which is why I keep doing it. People shouldn’t assume that women of color all think about sexuality in a certain way.

I believe in the power of framing. I have lived on both sides of this issue, from slut-shaming to slut empowerment. Labels are used to disempower people, but I got to the point where I could turn this word around and make it something I could embrace. There is a power in satire and flipping things. There is a space for us to turn away from the “bad girl” narrative into a narrative of humor and satire. You know, a lot of moms buy my Slut Power posters for their daughters, and SlutWalks are very powerful. In the long term, the word will change because of these things.

Rodriguez’s argument, that we need to wrest control of labels to void them of their power to hurt us, is important and seductive. She’s right that we can’t sit back quietly and passively while others define and name us.

What concerned me about the SlutWalk movement was not that “slut” was flipped around but that the act of flipping was presented as something feminists had to embrace to show support for women’s sexual equality. Jaclyn Friedman, the author of the essay “My Sluthood, Myself” and an editor of the book
Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape
, told me that she felt uncomfortable with the prescriptive undertone at some of the marches. “I have claimed the term for myself some of the time,” she said. “I find it useful in a way that takes the sting out of it. OK, what if I am a slut? What does that even mean? I’m not ashamed. But this is not the right strategy for everyone. Many women of color have said that this is not a safe strategy for them. There are different consequences for me than there are for other people.” Embracing the “slut” label, then, works for some people, but those who support women’s sexual equality should not be made to feel that calling oneself a slut or reclaiming the term is a required feminist entrance ticket.

Hurtful Words

Another eloquent rumination on the subject of reappropriating hurtful words is Judith Butler’s book
Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.
Butler, the acclaimed poststructuralist philosopher at the University of California, Berkley, who is white, Jewish, and queer, questions whether censorship of hate speech eliminates the wounds of hate speech. She observes that as painful as it is to be referred to by a slur, the
slur opens opportunities to disrupt and subvert dominant assumptions. She writes,

O
ne is not simply fixed by the name that one is called. In being called an injurious name, one is derogated and demeaned. But the name holds out another possibility as well: by being called a name, one is also, paradoxically, given a certain possibility for social existence, initiated into a temporal life of language that exceeds the prior purposes that animate that call. Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response.
²⁴⁷

Using a hurtful slur is a method of telling someone that she is not as good as you. But using the slur does not cause her to become less good than you. To Butler, injurious speech is not conduct. She rejects the idea that hate speech is a form of doing, such as a judge stating, “I sentence you.” Rather, Butler argues, hate speech merely initiates a set of consequences, such as when someone yells “Fire!” and others hurriedly exit a building. Most people understand “Fire!” in the context of an enclosed space as a persuasive statement meaning, “You guys really ought to hurry out of here if you want to be safe!” But yelling “Fire!” does not cause a fire. Likewise, Butler argues, a negative slur does not cause the slurred individual to become the thing she is called.
²⁴⁸
Therefore, we can tinker with the word’s meanings and contexts. Hurtful words hold an “ironic hopefulness,” Butler says, and “the conventional relation between word and wound might become tenuous and even broken over time.”
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Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor and the author of
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
, affirms that the “N” word can be reappropriated successfully—though usually only by members of the in-group. When used by blacks among themselves, the word can convey warmth, affection, and a shared historical sensibility, he says. It was considered off-limits until the comedian and social critic Richard Pryor created performances that liberally used the “N” word to examine racism. Many entertainers—Chris Rock, Jay-Z, Ice-T, N.W.A—have deliberately imbued the word with positive meanings.
²⁵⁰
“To proclaim oneself a nigger is to identify oneself as real, authentic, uncut, unassimilated, and unassimilable—the opposite, in short, of a Negro, someone whose rejection of
nigger
is seen as an effort to blend into the white mainstream,” writes Kennedy. The “N” word is a way to “keep it real.”
²⁵¹

Kennedy believes that the “N” word today is not inherently racist; context is everything. In a nonracist context, even a white person, he believes, can use the word. However, he warns, it can be very difficult to make sense of the way the word is used and what precisely the context is. “This complexity has its costs. Miscues are bound to proliferate as speakers and audiences misjudge each other,” he concludes.
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Jabari Asim, a writer and editor, also cautions that the spelling “nigga” in gangsta rap has opened a door that white people have entered, even though they’re often not invited into the room. Because the new spelling seems playful and therefore acceptable, Asim writes in
The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why
, racist white people use it interchangeably with the traditional spelling.
²⁵³
Using the “N” word with
either spelling is a risky endeavor for non-blacks because if the speaker and audience misjudge each other, negative stereotypes about African Americans are preserved rather than smashed. Kennedy and Asim point to the fact that in-group members often don’t trust out-group members’ linguistic savvy. Because of their history of oppression, people of color presume that those outside of their communities will wield the reappropriated slur as a new model of an old weapon.

To Butler, censoring or eradicating injurious words is a lost cause: “Keeping such terms unsaid and unsayable can also work to lock them in place, preserving their power to injure,” she warns. Instead, those who are injured by hate speech should take on their “performative power” by appropriating the terms and turning the degrading meanings on their head.
²⁵⁴

But censorship of the “N” word is sometimes necessary, particularly in mixed-race groups. Raediah Lyles, a graduate of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, served for two years as a resident adviser of a residence hall that was predominantly composed of white students, although there were African American and Latino students as well. The only woman of color in the hall, she immediately created a new rule: Absolutely no racial or gender slurs would be tolerated. “I grew up in inner-city Pittsburgh,” she tells me.

M
y family used the “N” word all the time. But I noticed that students, including whites, were using the “N” word. In one instance, I could tell they were using it in a blatantly racist way. In the other instances, I honestly didn’t know their intentions, but I would say that the
racism was subtle. Perhaps they did not believe they were racist, but they were inconsiderate in not even thinking about how their words can affect others around them. They used the word to be “cool,” and their justification was that their African American friends were using it. I wasn’t alarmed when a student of color said it, but I spoke to them and explained, “I get that
you
use it as a term of endearment, but now whites think it’s OK.” When I spoke to the white students, they would defend and explain their reasons. I was friendly about it, but stern. I explained that there was a zero-tolerance policy for any derogatory slurs used by anyone, including racial slurs used against whites, which sometimes was done as a joke. Usually my scolding the student was enough, and the student would stop, although I did have to ask one white student to leave the hall. I had the same policy with “slut.” If you hear your friends use it among themselves, you start to think it’s OK to use it, and you just don’t know any better. “Slut” was not tolerated in my hall.

Lyles distinguishes between in-group and out-group usage of slurs. She understands that when used exclusively among members of an in-group, a slur can be reappropriated and used safely. But when in-group and out-group members mingle, and out-group members conclude that they too can reappropriate, harmful stereotypes are resurrected.

I want to be hopeful about the transformative possibilities of recontextualizing injurious words. Alas, I am not—at least not right now. We have reached a historical point at which most people recognize that the “N” word creates and reopens
deep trauma. (The white women at the SlutWalk who held the sign with the “N” word did not intend to send a racist message, although the meanings of their sign had racist effects. They erased black women out of ignorance, which is no small problem, but had they been educated about white privilege, they most likely would not repeat the gesture.) But others use the “N” word strategically to express racial prejudice or hatred. As Kennedy and Butler both point out, the context is central when reappropriating racialized hate speech.

Unlike the “N” word, however, “slut” in its negative, judgmental sense is regarded by the majority of Americans as a useful and necessary punitive term. It has never been seen as exceedingly inflammatory, despite its often disastrous and damaging impact—a disconnect that perhaps buoys its continued power. Because of the force of the sexual double standard, many people have internalized the belief that female sexual shaming is a good thing, that women (but not men) who enjoy sex with more than one partner, or who drink at parties, or who wear sexually provocative clothes, or who otherwise fulfill the stereotype of the “slut,” deserve to be shamed. While racism is almost universally denounced—even by some people who may themselves be racially prejudiced—the sexual double standard is largely upheld, which is why feminism remains essential. In this climate, reappropriating “slut” may be riskier than reclaiming the “N” word because the pejorative meanings can’t be pulled away. It’s simply too likely that the effort will backfire, that bias against women believed to deviate from accepted conduct will result, and that violence against these women will escalate rather than diminish.

It’s true that among members of a feminist in-group, the
“slut” label can serve as a poignant marker of solidarity. At the 2011 Boston SlutWalk, Jaclyn Friedman delivered an electrifying presentation in which she drew from the power of the word to unite women. She called on everyone present to identify as “sluts”: