School's Out: Slut Shaming and the Empowered Young Woman

So I said in my last post that in this blog series I wanted to look at, among other things, where young people receive their most influential messages about the values around sex, sexuality, and gender, and their proper performance. And I’m especially interested in doing this by thinking about education as something that doesn’t just happen inside the classroom. One partial and powerful answer to this question is, of course, that kids learn from each other—especially for the ever-lengthening amount of time that a lot of us find ourselves in school.

There have been countless observations made here at Bitch and elsewhere about how the term “slut” has been used, abused, and reclaimed with varying degrees of success. In this post, I want to explore a topic that I’ve been having a lot of conversations about lately with a friend who works full time at my university. Her position happens to be managed by the undergraduates in the student government. She’s said that while few undergrad students would raise their hands if asked “are you a feminist?,” many more seem to feel like the work of feminism is done and what they’ve taken away from it is a message of sexual empowerment and freedom. What I wonder about is how much this message is a product of second wave feminisms and how much it is a reflection of the rampant oversexualization of women in the media. My friend hears this version of empowerment in watercooler talk about whose “number” is higher and who “got” whom after the bar last night.

I can’t say whether these voices represent any kind of statistical majority, and that’s not the point. Ariel Levy and others have already written provocatively about “raunch culture” and the “female chauvinist pig.” I simply wonder: What does it mean in a frustratingly static culture of heteropatriarchy (for anyone) to equate casual sex with female empowerment or female empowerment with casual sex?

First, though, I want to note: I’m totally opposed to slut shaming. And it’s important to note that slut shaming often occurs even in the same breath as sexual bragging. Instead of writing these kinds of conversation off as just “girl talk” or “gossip” I want to think of them as important ways that girls come to know themselves and what others think of them.

As we’ve seen through the many debates about SlutWalk, this issue is in some ways mainstreamed as a young hetero woman’s fight. From a queer perspective, one of my first thoughts is that in part, for queer people, it’s not our sluttiness that we’ve been most frequently attacked for in contemporary debates, although oversexualization is part of the overall stigma associated with non-normative sexualities. Admirably, with organizations of black feminists, Aboriginal feminists, and other feminists of color, SlutWalk has been publicizing the connections between slut-shaming and other forms of sexual violence that are visited on all sorts of people located differently because of their class, ability, race, sexuality and so on.

Nonetheless, in a climate where social relations are overwhelmingly defined in masculine terms, what is the likelihood that young women are having their liberating sex with men (and perhaps women—queers aren’t above sexism) who understand their political intent? How does this change the misogynistic narratives that we see overrepresented among young men about sexual conquest? How can we account for the ways that our sexual partners interpret and perhaps brag about the meaning behind these sexual relationships?

We can’t account fully for other people’s reactions and opinions, and that’s not something that young women should have to be hypervigilant about. I’m not suggesting that such young women aren’t “really” empowered or that their politics of personal relations aren’t making a change. I mean to raise questions about whether, instead of replacing the trope of men using women with something more equitable, the figure of the “no-strings-attached” woman might signal a growing cool factor attached to the idea of both parties (more or less self-consciously) using each other. If we are taking feminist ideas of relationality and relational selves seriously, then nowhere are we more clearly responsible for the meanings and values formed out of relation than in our intimacies. It takes, after all, at least two to tango.

What I’m suggesting is that it will be productive to see sex-positive movements like SlutWalk and others attend to the formation of critical feminist consciousness for young men, women, and, as trans theorist Kate Bornstein said, the rest of us. In expanding the conversation beyond the very important work of mobilizing the already politicized and critiquing outright opponents, what will happen to the availability of feminist self-identification and new ways of being sex-positive in all of our classrooms and campuses?

Related: Kristen Rawls wrote on SlutWalk in an October Bitch blog post, and Melissa Petro discussed the perils and power of reclaiming controversial words in a great post from November

Previously: School’s Out: Popular Media and the Gay Teen Martyr