SpartanSpectator

Slut Shaming

January 2015

By Bernadette Daley

            I first realized the connotation of the word ‘slut’ was when I was eight or nine years old. It was summer, and my family was in Welland for one of my brother’s countless paddling regattas. As the youngest sibling there with nothing to do for hours on end, I made friends with several of my brother’s girlfriends. I would spend hours sitting in the tents with them braiding their hair and making bracelets. One time in particular, a girl from an opposing club walked by wearing small spandex shorts and a sports bra. Being mid-July and sweltering hot, and paddling being a water sport, this was not an unreasonable choice on her part. But, once she had passed, one of the girls I was particularly close to turned to the group and said, “She’s such a slut. Why can’t she just put on a shirt?” I remember being confused, because a lot of the girls in the tent with us walked around in sports bras and spandex regularly. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, it was hot so you wore fewer layers. It just made sense.

            As I grew older the word became a staple in my vocabulary when I was talking to other girls. Without even realizing why, we threw the word around like a ball. That girl wore leggings and a tank top today? Slut. Amy sat with the boys at lunch and didn’t talk to girls very much? Slut. It even became a term of endearment; “cover up, slut” was common during middle school banter between my friends. The meaning of the word had grown from a girl who shows a little too much skin or has too much fun on the weekend, to represent anyone we disliked or who crossed us the wrong way. We had fallen prey to the classic female trap: viewing other women as the enemy; the competitor to be disdained.

            There are several reasons I take issue with the word ‘slut’. Firstly, it betrays the inherent double standard permeating our society regarding sexual activity. A slut is, technically, “a woman who has many casual sexual partners.” Her male counterpart is a “player”. The connotation attached to each respective term is vastly different. Generally, men get kudos and are revered by other men for having many sexual partners. Whereas when women do, they get labeled as “easy”. Even the term easy implies that sex is a game and different women are different types of challenges. The harder the challenge, the better. On the other hand, if a woman is too hard to get, she’s a prude and not worth the energy. The term “damned if you do damned if you don’t” is horribly cliché, but in this case, also horribly accurate. From a very young age women are placed in an impossible predicament. They’re constantly being told to dress appropriately and to have respect for themselves, but every form of media shoves scantily clad women down their throats constantly. The messages are polar opposites and both are wrong. The combination of intense objectification of women in the media and the countervailing norms of prudishness demanded of young girls serve to undermine both their autonomy and integrity. The message young girls need to be hearing is to dress in what makes you comfortable. If it’s 30 degrees outside and you want to wear short shorts, go ahead and do it. If it’s -30 degrees outside and you want to wear shorts, go ahead and do it.  Women should be able to dress in what makes them comfortable and happy without being harassed for dressing like a ‘slut’, or not showing enough skin.

            Slut shaming is not always explicit and can often be cooped into seemingly innocuous institutional policies. At my middle school I was once called to a meeting for all the grade eight girls. Upon arrival the head of our guidance department told us about a new policy they were implementing prohibiting girls from wearing leggings without a long shirt or dress. This was necessary, she argued, to prevent “distracting” our male teachers and fellow students. Suffice to say there was no equivalent declaration prohibiting young boys from wearing tight pants for fear of “distracting” their female teachers. I was, along with many of my friends, deeply uncomfortable after the assembly. Several girls who protested to the guidance department were told that we could wear whatever we wanted in high school, but while in middle school we had to dress appropriately and respect the male teachers.

            If I had been a male teacher or student at the school at this time I would have been insulted by this argument, as it was reducing men to dogs with no sense of self control. But more shocking to me was the fact that the school’s response to the concern that male teachers were “distracted” (a crass euphemism) by thirteen and fourteen year old girls was not to decry the objectification and sexualization of young women, but to blame the girls. When girls continued to wear leggings with no long shirt or dress the guidance department began forcing them to change into something picked from the lost and found bin. Once again the way girls dressed was being used against us. Leggings had always seemed as a preferable alternative to sweatpants. Sweatpants resembled pajamas, and it seemed as though leggings would be a more appropriate for school. It had nothing to do with being provocative or “distracting” to male teachers.

            Another problem revealed by this disturbing situation was the implicit assumption that women must be dressed in a manner satisfactory to the men around them. After the meeting in the auditorium the girls returned to class, and obviously began discussing the rule change. Several of the boys in our class came up with the brilliant point that we shouldn’t care because the only reason we wear leggings is to get their attention. When the girls argued back saying that the reason we wore them was for comfort, the boys resolutely refused to listen to what we had to say. Insisting that they were right, and even going as far as to say that it was the girls fault that we had this dress code forced upon us because we were dressing like ‘sluts’.

            A woman’s body is hers to do what she wants with. You wouldn’t tell a painter what to paint, or a singer what to sing. A woman’s body is her canvas and her life is her own. She can do with it as she wants. To completely eradicate the use of the term slut to demean women, women will have to stop using it to demean one another. This can only happen when we stop viewing one another as competition and begin viewing each other as allies in a battle for equality.