I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (37 page)

I
f you’ve ever been called a slut, stand up now and say together—I am a slut. If you love someone who’s been called a slut—stand up now and say, I am a slut. If you’ve ever been afraid of being called a slut, stand up now and say, I am a slut. If you’ve been blamed for violence that someone else did to you, stand up now and say, I am a slut. If you’re here to demand a world in which what we do with our bodies is nobody’s business, and we can all live our lives and pursue our pleasures free of shame, blame, and free, stand up and say it with me: I am a slut. I am a slut. I am a slut.
²⁵⁵

Friedman used “slut” as an identity marker to create solidarity, she explained to me, because “If you’re going to call one of us a slut, then we are all sluts. I was suggesting that if you come after one of us, you’ll have to come after all of us. None of us deserves to be singled out and maligned.”

Friedman’s rhetorical strategy was successful in that moment because she was addressing people who had chosen to attend an event called “SlutWalk.” She was speaking to the in-group. But outside the context of a SlutWalk, the in-group is not stable and identifiable. Women slut-shame each other, after all. Even feminists sometimes slut-shame other women. (Alexandria Goddard, the blogger who exposed the
Steubenville rape case, turning it into a feminist cause célèbre, has referred to the female prosecutor as “Gravy Legs” because, as she told Ariel Levy of
The New Yorker
, “gravy spreads easily.”
²⁵⁶
) With “slut,” there simply may be no in-group outside the SlutWalk movement, which has lost momentum.

In addition, we have a mountain of evidence that reclamation of “slut” does not work. We have heard the voices of multiple girls and young women who attempted to embrace sluttiness to reclaim the term and the identity, and repeatedly we have seen the failure of this strategy. Girls and women nearly always lose control over their “good slut” image as it transmogrifies into a “bad slut” identity.

Still, many women feel empowered by taking back this hurtful, horrible term. Reclaiming the word may be a coping mechanism for some who have survived sexual violence or slut-bashing. No one can control the fluidity of linguistic development, and the meanings of “slut” will shift over time organically. And yes, activism
should
be fun, humorous, and joyous. Nevertheless, there is a real possibility that mass reclamation will trigger a terrible backlash against women.

I fervently hope for the day when we can all use “slut” as a feminist punch line that exposes the absurdity of the sexual double standard, but we are not there yet. First we must provide broader education about slut-shaming and sexual violence. Only when we have some degree of certainty that most people would agree that “slut” is a dangerous epithet can we begin taking back the word and making it ours.

CHAPTER 9

Creative Solutions to Eliminate “Slut”

If reclaiming the word “slut” isn’t the answer, what is? The most strategic solution is to open up dialogue with girls and young women about the meanings of “slut.” Through conversation and analysis, we can sharpen awareness that “slut” is a violent label; when females are called sluts, sexual assault and self-assault all too often lurk nearby.

But first there is an important distinction to make here: it’s not female sexuality that is dangerous, but the sexual double standard
.
The way women are treated, not the fact of being a woman, is the problem. We must discard the sexual double standard, which cultivates “slut” as an acceptable label, without rejecting female sexuality. In a world without “slut,” everyone would know that women and men both have
sexual desire, that healthy sexuality requires active consent, that sex without consent is assault, and that victims of assault are never responsible for what has been done to them.

At this moment, it is not possible for a young woman to assert her sexuality outside of a monogamous relationship and not risk being called a slut. She should not have to change her sexual expression to avoid the label. Instead, all others must change their attitudes. Around the country, girls and women are taking matters into their own hands and chipping away at the mind-set that slut-shaming is acceptable and necessary.

Internet Activism

Social media and the Internet, which can help to oppress girls and women, can also serve as tools of liberation. The anti–street harassment group Hollaback! showed what was possible in 2005, back when a tweet was the sound a bird made, and “pinning” meant affixing a material item to a corkboard. One day a blond-haired man sat across from twenty-two-year-old Thao Nguyen on the R train in New York City, looked her in the eye, opened his pants, and began to mastrubate. Nguyen was alone and scared for her personal safety. She happened to have in her bag one of the early mobile phones with an attached camera. Nguyen snapped his photo, and left the train the first chance she got. She took the photo to the police to report the incident, but officers told her there was nothing they could do.

But Nguyen didn’t want to dismiss what had occurred. This wasn’t just a creepy interlude with a fellow commuter.
It was an act of sexual harassment. The masturbator wanted Nguyen to see him so that she would feel frightened and vulnerable. Chances are, he figured he would get away with his act, because in a culture with rampant slut-shaming, men have become accustomed to treating women as sexual objects and worthless “sluts.” In fact, as a result of street sexual harassment, many women blame themselves after an incident of sexual harassment or assault for what they were wearing or for believing they could walk in certain public spaces. Street sexual harassment isn’t a trifling matter; it undercuts girls’ and women’s sense of safety and makes them question what they can and can’t do in public. It makes girls’ and women’s world smaller.

Nguyen decided that if the police weren’t going to do anything about it, she would. She uploaded the photo online, and it went viral. It turned out that the masturbator, Dan Hoyt, was a well-known chef and a co-owner of a chain of restaurants specializing in raw food. Two other women recognized him and came forward to say that the same man had exposed and fondled himself in front of them, too. The story ended up on the front page of the New York
Daily News
, and Hoyt was sentenced to two years’ probation after being convicted of public lewdness, a misdemeanor.
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One thirty-one-year-old woman told the newspaper, “When it did happen to me I was in shock. It’s a violation of my space and my sense of safety. It angered me that he thought he could get away with it.”
²⁵⁸

Another young New Yorker, Emily May, was fascinated with Nguyen’s quick-thinking street activism. May talked about the incident with several of her female and male friends. When May revealed how commonly she encounters
public acts of sexual harassment, one of her male friends said, “Emily, you live in a different city than we do.” May and her friends set up a blog, which they named
Hollaback!
, and reached out to everyone they knew to submit stories and photos of street harassment and responses to it.

Within six months,
Hollaback!
was featured on
Good Morning America
. Activists in other cities got in touch, wanting assistance to set up similar websites across the country. Today, there are Hollaback! sites in over sixty-four cities and twenty-two countries, and you can download a Hollaback! app for your phone. Visit ihollaback.org, and you will find not only photos but testimonials, such as this one:

I
was walking from class home when these two guys yelled at me from the car, something about wanting to “break me.” I just gave them a dirty look and kept walking. By the time they had circled back I was livid. When they yelled more obscenities at me I flipped them off. That’s when they threw the bottle at me. I was so shocked at being hit and worried about the broken glass when it hit the concrete that I didn’t get the license plate number. It pisses me off that they got away with it.

May is quick to explain that her motivation has never been simply about shaming harassers. Rather, it has been to encourage women to stand up to harassment that is never their fault. “We live in a world where, when women tell stories of sexual violence, it’s assumed that they are lying, exaggerating, or being oversensitive,” she says. “By sharing our stories,
we are able to turn the lens away from ourselves and onto the people who are harassing us.”
²⁵⁹

Hollaback! shows the feminist potential of mobile technology. Because of smartphones, anyone victimized by street slut-shaming can document the act and share the details—visually or narratively—with others. All women feel safer because they recognize that women are part of a community that collectively is taking action. Although mobile technology and social media are often used against women by tracking and objectifying their bodies, these tools can be turned around to liberate women from being denigrated as “sluts.”

Wagatwe Wanjuki also turned to the Internet to share her story and to rally others to share theirs. In 2007, Wanjuki filed a campus police report at Tufts University in Boston, alleging that she had been raped by another student with whom she had an abusive relationship. Tufts refused to investigate the charge, to move her into different housing, or even to provide counseling. Wanjuki believes that because she is a woman of color, she was looked at with suspicion; the administration did not take her claims seriously. They regarded her as not only a troublemaker but as a slut. She was expelled for not making academic progress, even though her GPA was above the minimum threshold; she told me that she believes the school expelled her because they considered her a troublemaker who, by speaking out, was tarnishing its reputation. (The irony is inescapable: a young, powerless woman whose reputation was ruined after being raped was considered a menace for holding the potential to ruin the reputation of a university with more than a billion-dollar endowment.)
²⁶⁰
Had she not been kicked out, she would have received her diploma in 2008.

“I was treated differently from white students,” she told me. “I had asked if I could finish my schoolwork at home because being on campus and seeing my rapist was a trigger. They said no to me, but they said yes to a white girl with anorexia who made a similar request. I don’t know why they made the exception for her. She was allowed to return home and finish her Tufts degree at another institution close to where she lives. But they wanted to get rid of me.” Wanjuki created a website, RapedAtTufts.info, so that other survivors had a safe space to share their personal testimonies. One former student wrote,

I
never really wanted to put this much of my own personal experience with Tufts into this website, but I think it is very important for it to be put out there. . . . The school refused to be understanding of my situation. Instead of asking what is wrong or instead of checking in to see how I was faring in such a harsh environment (being at a school that thought my rape is a joke created a hostile environment for me), the school remained silent until they saw it ideal to push me out of the door.
²⁶¹

Wanjuki created the site anonymously because she knew that if the administration could identify her as the webmaster, they would refuse to help her case go forward. As it happened, they refused anyway. Since Tufts did not bring justice to her case, she took her complaint to the federal government. Wanjuki filed a Title IX complaint, alleging that Tufts violated her equal right to an education, with the federal Office of Civil Rights. Title IX prohibits gender-based
discrimination, including harassment and assault, in any educational program receiving federal funding. Colleges are mandated by the federal government to have a system for dealing with sexual assault complaints, and they can lose millions of dollars in federal funds if they are found to violate the law.
²⁶²

Meanwhile, women at other universities—Amherst; Dartmouth; Swarthmore; University of California, Berkeley; University of Connecticut; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Southern California; Yale; to name just a few—experienced the same thing.
²⁶³
They were raped on campus, but when they appealed to their university to investigate and to bring justice by exposing and punishing the rapist, they were accused of making a false accusation. They became aware that their universities cared more about protecting their endowments than ensuring the safety of female students. Students at dozens of schools filed complaints with the US Department of Education under Title IX, documenting that perpetrators were given a slap on the wrist, if that, while victims were blamed for being assaulted. They also filed complaints under the Clery Act, which requires schools to issue crime reports.

Joining with other activists, Wanjuki became a leader in the “Ed Act Now” movement for increased enforcement of Title IX and the Clery Act. In 2013, she and other activists met with Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, to demand that the Department of Education hold colleges accountable in preventing sexual violence on their campuses. In January 2014, the White House formed a task force to address rape on campuses, declaring that too many colleges were not in compliance with federal laws, and warning that
they must curb campus sexual assaults and respond better to student complaints. In May 2014, the Obama administration released a list of fifty-five colleges and universities (now more than seventy) under federal investigation for mishandling sexual assault complaints, and the White House issued recommendations to colleges on how to eliminate sexual assault. A dozen members of Congress sent a letter to
U.S. News & World Report
asking the magazine to include sexual violence statistics in its college rankings. Meanwhile, the Department of Education concluded that Tufts had failed to comply with federal law by allowing a sexually hostile environment to persist on campus. Wanjuki’s voice, along with those of other activists, was heard.