Should We Ban The Word 'Slut'?
With the dawn of the Internet the term ‘slut’ has become a particularly sharp double-edged sword. (Photo: Corbis)
On Monday, the new Chief Technology Officer for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, Ethan Czahor, was caught frantically deleting tweets from his personal Twitter account after the announcement was made that he had signed on to the Bush camp. Some of the now 177 deleted tweets had him referring to women as sluts, including the two below:
Via Twitter: @czahor
Via Twitter: @czahor
A spokesman for former Governor Bush clarifies that the candidate, and brother of former President George W. Bush and son of former President George H.W. Bush, “believes the comments are inappropriate.”
But Some Would Argue That In This Day And Age, ‘Slut’ Is Much More Than An ‘Inappropriate’ Word.
This event adds to growing buzz in the last week around the term “slut” that has coincided with the release of writer Leora Tanenbaum’s book I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet, 15-years after her groundbreaking 1999 seminal: Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation was published.
“The whole experience of being labeled a slut has metastasized” Tanenbaum tells Yahoo Health. Back in the late 90s, when she conducted research for her first book, every high school or middle school has “one to two girls who were labeled as the school slut”.
But now, it’s different.
Tagged, Tracked, Tagged, and Liked.
“Cut to 2015,” Tanenbaum says, “I have to say that we should be so lucky for schools to have only one or two girls who are singled out in this way” as the so-called school slut.
“I have yet to find a woman in the U.S. 25 and under who hasn’t been labeled a slut at some point in her life,” Tanenbaum says, noting that the word — and its repercussions on female identity — are “omnipresent and ubiquitous.”
The biggest factor contributing for this huge uptick in the use of the word — and a culture that both celebrates feminine sexuality and is quick to attack it — is the Internet. “ We exist in a world with wall-to-wall surveillance,” Tanenbaum notes. The advent of social media has led to a whole new means for the objectification of women’s bodies, which are constantly tagged, tracked, tagged, and liked.
Boys Will Be Boys, Girls Will Be Sluts.
“There is enormous pressure on young women to be sexy but not slutty,” Tanenbaum explains, “This is not a new pressure.” The change, however, comes with the way that social media has put all youth — male and female — on constant display.
But there’s a difference when it comes to women. “Heterosexuality pressures sexiness [in women] in a way that doesn’t for men,” says Tanenbaum. As a result, “many young women have come to believe that sexualized bodies are their sole source of power,” evident and reinforced on a daily basis by the way that they get “’likes’ when they look hot on social media.”
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And their conclusion is perfectly rational. “If someone thinks that looking hot is a primary source of power, of course she is going to flaunt that,” Tanenbaum says, adding, “I have nothing against sexualizing yourself. The problem is that we don’t live in a world with sexual equality. We live in a world with a sexual double standard — boys and men are expected and encouraged to be sexually active while girls and women are expected to be sexually minimal.”
Tanenbaum distills this double standard in a simple phrase: “Boys will be boys, girls will be sluts.”
Playing “The Good Slut.”
Girls feel the pressure to play the part of “the good slut,” a role that is “practically compulsory to perform … in many peer groups,” Tanenbaum says. When a young woman is “slutty in a good way,” we perceive her as someone who has sexual equality with men. Which is why these young women feel obligated to frantically document themselves through their social media presence. It’s a way for them to build an indisputable pile of evidence of what they want to be — the good slut.
Yet it’s this same photographic evidence that can lead to these very same young women being harassed or bullied by their peers, both male and female.
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“It is so much easier to damage the reputation of a girl or a woman,” notes Tanenbaum, especially in the face of so much self-produced imagery that insists on her own sexual desirability. Furthermore “on the other side of the coin, it’s so easy not to be a bully or a harasser and take all this evidence and use it against a girl…anonymously.”
Slut-Bashing Is Replaced By Slut-Shaming
These factors contribute to what Tanenbaum sees as a rise in slut-shaming, a uniquely nuanced phenomenon that’s distinct from what she refers to as slut-bashing. Tanenbaum coined the latter term in the ‘90’s to refer to the very specific act of repeated harassment with hostile intent conducted by peers.
But slut-shaming can be more casual. It might occur only once or twice — Exhibit A: Ethan Czahor’s texts.
Tanenbaum also points to the way that young women often refer to one another as “slut” as a term of alleged affection; the behavior is superficially not malicious and yet even though the intention may be positive, the effects are harmful.
Presumed Guilty
The unifying factor among the girls and young woman who had been called a slut was their having been “presumed guilty of having actively done something to provoke [that kind of] reaction to her own behavior.”
The girl who is called a slut by her peers, whether with affection or derision, is perceived to have “failed to “understand the rules of her own sexiness” by somehow “calling attention to the efforts of being sexy” and “refusing to hide the evidence” of the work it takes for her to craft this public persona.
How We Can Make “Slut” A Term of the Past?
Tell your kids that bad words are bad.
Parents in particular need to take an active role in helping fight the reinforcement of this double-standard to which young women are held, talking with their children in an age-appropriate way from an early age. “Young kids, these kids are exposed to words like ‘slut’ and ‘ho,’” Tanenbaum says. “If they don’t know how damaging and horrible these words are, they are going to repeat them. It’s our job as adults to educate them.”
Watch what you say about their friends.
Parents should be aware that even if they express judgment against their child’s friends’ sexuality, “even if the intent is to protect,” the effect ultimately ends up reinforcing sexual double standards, which in term reinforce slut-shaming culture.
Don’t make your daughter feel ashamed of herself.
With daughters in particular, parents should know that if you make a daughter feel ashamed of herself, it will always backfire. Rather, Tanenbaum encouraged parents to “make her feel good about herself and her body and her creativity.” And when it comes to outfits that a parent might find questionable, “try without judgment to help her understand that even though she looks amazing, if she presents herself in an overly sexualized way, other people will come to certain conclusions and they will objectify her — which is wrong, but that’s the world we live in.”
Teach them to be a responsible bystander.
Tanenbaum also makes clear how important it is for parents to teach children to be responsible bystanders and know that “it’s their job to help the victim” when they see bullying or harassment taking place around them. “It’s hard for kids to understand,” Tanenbaum says, “Often they’ll say, ‘But I don’t like her,’ or ‘But she’s not nice to me, why should I help her.’ They don’t grasp the idea of collective responsibility.” This is why it’s so essential to teach that it’s not about liking, but rather that everyone has to watch out for everyone else. Hopefully that behavior will be reciprocated if your child becomes the target.
