I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (22 page)

BOOK: I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet
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As an adult in her mid-twenties with a feminist consciousness and a master’s degree, Diane possesses the maturity to laugh about the way these men relentlessly demand more and greater sexual access without really knowing her. But high school girls usually do not have the same amount of confidence.

One of the most disturbing aspects of sexting is that many girls seem resigned to the situation. They have become so accustomed to hearing, “I sent you one; now it’s your turn” that
they don’t question or fight it. Besides, as scary as the prospect is of having their photo forwarded and shared, they don’t see any other way to get the male attention they desire. Mara explains, “Some girls are just naive. The boy always promises to never show the picture, and they think that he will like them if they send the picture, and they believe that he won’t show it to anyone.”

But even after they wise up and shed their naiveté, many girls send their photo anyway—because they so much want guys to consider them sexually attractive. “There are girls who realize that the guy will show the picture to everyone, and they are OK with it,” says Mara. “They are so desperate for male attention they would do anything.”

Sharon, the twenty-year-old differently abled white student whom we met in chapter 3, observes that in her high school, “a lot of girls had disabilities worse than mine. So they wanted sexual attention even if it wasn’t positive sexual attention. There were girls who wouldn’t mind if a picture of their boobs was forwarded to lots of guys. They figured they would never get a boyfriend, so this was a way to get sexual attention.” In the messed-up logic of the prude-slut conflict, being a slut—even a “bad slut”—is better than being a prude or being alone. Even social humiliation is preferable to invisibility.

Sending a naked photo may seem like a smart way for a girl or young woman to prove that she’s sexually sophisticated and in control—without actually engaging in sexual activity—but as we have seen, the moment she hits Send, she loses control over her image. As with wearing sexually provocative clothes, the sexual suggestiveness of the
photographic image cannot be contained. Girls and young women who think they are capably manipulating their identity as a “good slut” invariably discover that in fact they have put themselves at risk for being labeled a “bad slut.”

Strategy #3: Hook Up with a Random Guy—Drunk

Young women who want to have sex but are not in a committed relationship sometimes choose to “hook up”—to have what we used to call a one-night stand. But wait a minute—if they have sex with guys they’re not committed to, won’t they be slandered as “bad sluts”? Indeed they will. To mitigate this outcome, many female college students, and high school students as well, turn to a well-worn coping mechanism: alcohol. They drink excessively not only to deal with the fact that affectionless sex can be demoralizing, they also drink excessively with the hope that being drunk offers evidence that they never intended to hook up in the first place—and therefore cannot be held accountable as a “bad slut” for doing so. Hooking up while drunk is yet another strategy to hide one’s effort in being sexual. If you’re drunk, you appear not to have planned your hookup, and therefore you can pretend that you put no effort into it. You’re exerting agency, but not really. Thus, slut-bashing and slut-shaming are intimately connected with drunken hookups. If slut-bashing and slut-shaming didn’t exist, young females would be less likely to initiate sexual activity while drunk.

Let’s get the numbers out of the way, since conventional wisdom is that hooking up is far more common than it
actually is. At the high school level, we don’t have data about hooking up, only about sexual intercourse, which often occurs within the context of committed relationships. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the average age of first intercourse is about 17 for American teenagers. At the age of 15, 20 percent have had first intercourse. At 16, a third of teens have done so, and at 17, nearly half (48 percent) of teens have had intercourse. When they arrive at college at 18, the numbers jump to 61 percent.
136

Meanwhile, hooking up on campus is prevalent but not universal. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of college students hook up at least once during college, report Caroline Heldman, a professor of politics at Occidental College, and Lisa Wade, a professor of sociology at Occidental College. Heldman and Wade define “hooking up” as including any or all of the following: “onetime sexual encounters (a ‘random’); multiple encounters, generally on the weekends, often without any contact during the week (a ‘regular’); infrequent sexual encounters with an acquaintance or friend late at night (a ‘booty call’); and repeat hookups with a friend that do not involve a dating relationship (‘friends with benefits’ or ‘fuck buddies’).”
137

The ambiguity of the term “hook up” leads to a great deal of confusion—just as ambiguity over the meanings of “slut” puzzles so many of us. For this reason as well, hooking up and slut-shaming dovetail. When we hear that a young woman “hooked up” with someone, we don’t quite know what occurred: Oral sex alone? Intercourse? Neither? Other? Likewise, when a girl is labeled a slut, we also don’t quite know what led to her reputation. I believe it’s not an accident that
young females who hook up are called sluts: one ambiguity is substituted for another in a fruitless effort to make sense of what has occurred.

Of those students, male and female, who do hook up, over four years 40 percent do so three or fewer times, 40 percent do so between four to nine times, and 20 percent do so ten or more times during their college years.
138
So of the students who do hook up, the vast majority do so approximately two times a year, on average. To put things in clearer perspective: By their senior year of college, four in ten students are either virgins or have had intercourse with only one person, according to the Online College Social Life Survey of twenty-four thousand students at twenty-one universities.
139
Many college students, then, are monogamous or minimally sexually active.

Many young women claim that they aren’t looking for a committed relationship, that hooking up is exactly what they want. Hanna Rosin argues in her book
The End of Men and the Rise of Women
that women in college increasingly eschew serious relationships and delay looking for a spouse to protect their future professional goals. Yet being career-oriented doesn’t mean that they want emotionless sex. Anna Latimer, a literary agent, writes that when she was in college several years ago, she did not seek a romantic commitment, but she still wanted sex to “come from a loving place—a desire to enhance intimacy.”
140
Erica, the twenty-one-year-old sophomore at a New England college, emailed me the link to Latimer’s article. She included a note telling me that Latimer had nicely summarized her own desires, adding that “at this point in my life, I’m not looking for ‘hookups’ or ‘relationships’ but just
sex with friends that I genuinely love and appreciate.” But the situation Anna Latimer and Erica describe is not easy to find. Hooking up with guys they don’t care much about, and who don’t care about them in return, may be collateral damage on the journey to sex with intimacy.

For women who truly don’t want a relationship, or at least wish to postpone being in one, “I think hooking up can definitely be looked at as an act of feminist empowerment and as a sign of gender progression,” writes Julie Zeilinger in her book
A Little F’d Up
. “Stereotypically, women are supposed to be the ones trying to trap men into relationships. . . . But hook-up culture proves to the world that girls (especially teen girls) are just as horny as guys.”
141
In other words, the fact that girls have sexual desires just as boys do is becoming more accepted because so many of them hook up.

However, many heterosexual young women
do
want a boyfriend, and they see hooking up as the only way to initiate a romantic relationship. One of the girls in the group of Manhattan teens I met with insists that hooking up is an essential first step toward building a relationship. She says, “You don’t start a relationship unless you’ve hooked up. So you hope that if you keep hooking up with a guy, at a certain point he will feel connected to you and want you to be his girl. And sometimes that does happen.” In her mind, if a girl never hooks up, she will never become romantically involved with anyone; therefore, hooking up is not optional.

Many girls also worry that if they’re honest about their desire for a boyfriend, they may appear to be emotionally desperate. Hooking up, then, is the best they can hope for under the circumstances. They are making a rational compromise.
Meanwhile, most guys don’t approach hooking up with the same attitude. They aren’t making any compromises. Women’s expectations, then, are one-sided, and they often lead to anxious, hurt, or confused feelings. Hooking up within the framework of the sexual double standard means that the positive aspects are overshadowed by the negative. The guys, who are more likely than the women to be reluctant to commit, call the shots.

“For many girls, hooking up is the means to an end. For most guys, hooking up is hooking up,” writes Zeilinger. “Even when they are participating in hook-up culture, girls still brag when they ‘get’ boyfriends (because, obviously, it’s an achievement, just like they ‘got’ a reward . . .), and they still call other girls sluts for hooking up, even if they’re doing the same thing. Whereas guys brag when they hook up.”
142
Zeilinger continues, noting that hooking up “is still a largely male-controlled practice. It’s a guy’s game, and even when we tell ourselves that we’re doing it for us, for our own reasons, and that we feel good about it, guys are still in control. They are the ones who dictate that they will not be in relationships, but that they will hook up.”
143

Zeilinger’s insight is echoed by the
New York Times.
Despite an optimistic headline—“Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too”—the
Times
found that sixty female University of Pennsylvania students surveyed by the paper repeatedly noted that guys at Penn controlled the foundational presumptions of hookup culture. In fact, women at college
can’t
play the game that men at college do. One interviewee explained, “The girls adapt a little bit, because they stop expecting that they’re going to get a boyfriend—because if
that’s all you’re trying to do, you’re going to be miserable. But at the same time, they want to, like, have contact with guys.” So they hook up and “try not to get attached.” The Penn students said that the many females on campus change their romantic goals from finding a boyfriend to finding a “hookup buddy”—“a guy that we don’t actually really like his personality, but we think is really attractive and hot and good in bed.”
144
Their expectations diminish as they realize that what they want is out of reach. They want the same sexual agency that guys have, but they discover that sexual equality does not actually exist.

Guys tend to control the direction of romantic heterosexual relationships because of the traditional belief that that’s what guys are supposed to do. Rachael Robnett, a doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, together with Campbell Leaper, a psychology professor, refer to this dynamic as “benevolent sexism.”
145
Although benevolent sexism (the principle that women should be protected and given special treatment) seems preferable to “hostile sexism” (the belief that women should conform to stereotypical femininity), in fact it is a mechanism for men to direct women to take a passive role within romantic relationships. Benevolent sexism reinforces the idea that women are weaker than men, even though this idea is usually wrapped up in the guise of chivalry or polite manners.
146
As a result of benevolent sexism, men overwhelmingly are the ones who initiate marriage proposals. Even students at University of California, Santa Cruz, who are known for liberal attitudes, are “driven by a desire to adhere to gender-role traditions,” Robnett and Leaper write with surprise.
147
This desire enables “men’s hidden power” in
heterosexual relations.
148
With hookups, men likewise exercise hidden power: they determine if a sexual encounter is a one-off event or if it is the initiation of a relationship.

When I met up with Zeilinger in person, she repeated her skepticism about how wonderful hookup culture is for most young women—although she was respectful toward those who find it satisfying. “Some girls feel empowered by hooking up, and that’s a great thing for them,” she said. “But a lot of girls feel they
have
to hook up. The refrain is, ‘You should hook up because that’s how relationships develop.’ It’s seen as a necessary evil. We’re supposed to be virginal, but at the same time no guy wants us to actually be a virgin.”

Gloria, the twenty-two-year-old Latina on the West Coast, confirms that hooking up can blossom into a relationship, because it happened to her. She saw a guy she knew at a dance club in Los Angeles, and “I pursued him because I just wanted casual sex,” she tells me. “We went back to his apartment, where we had oral sex and intercourse. When I woke up the next morning, I felt good about it. We continued to hook up, and we established a relationship after that, and decided that we would only hook up with each other. I don’t think this was an ideal way to start a relationship, but it happens.” After that relationship ended, Gloria assumed that the next man she hooked up with could also become her boyfriend, but she was mistaken. “I got really screwed over,” she says.

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