I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (26 page)

Some girls also take drugs. Mia, a white twenty-nine-year-old woman living in Nevada, was harassed “incessantly” as a slut during her middle school years, even though “I was not sexually active.” The entire grade of girls turned against her, she speculates, because she was a cheerleader and was considered popular and pretty with a curvy but athletic body and blond hair. In the summer before seventh grade, there was a party and everyone was talking about sex. The conversation went like this:

“Oh, I’m not a virgin; are you a virgin?”

“Of course I’m not a virgin.”

“Nobody was telling the truth,” Mia points out dryly, “because we were all virgins. So then they get to me and ask, ‘Are you a virgin?’ and I say, ‘Of course I’m not a virgin.’ So then they say, ‘Who with?’ and I led them to think it was my guy friend who lived down the street with me.” A week later, when seventh grade started, word got around that Mia was having sex. One girl wrote a petition saying that Mia was a slut and deserved to die. She went to all the girls in the grade during
lunch to sign it—over two hundred signatures. Mia still can’t understand why the girl was so extremely aggressive. “She just wanted to create drama,” she says.

When the school administration found out about the petition, everyone who signed was punished with after-school detention, which led to a backlash, and Mia was physically beaten up. “I’d be walking home from school, and a group of four girls would punch me. They also would do it in the locker room during gym. I was their punching bag,” she recalls.

Mia fell into a deep depression. She turned to drugs, starting in the seventh grade. “I was hanging out with kids in high school and high school dropouts. I knew them from the neighborhood. I used ecstasy, acid, pot, and a little cocaine. I’d been beaten up on the way home from school, and I was crying, and this older guy came up to me and said, ‘Have you ever smoked pot before? Because you really look like you could use some.’ So I went with him to his friend’s, and that’s how the whole thing started. I enjoyed doing drugs because they were a great escape, but also I wanted to be part of a group that accepted me, that wanted me, and that didn’t beat me up.” Mia hung out with them until the end of her junior year of high school, at which point she graduated early and moved away to college.

Mia’s new friends were sexually active, but—ironically—she was not for many years. As a result of her experience, she explains, “I’ve had problems with touch. Even today I have a sort of bubble around me, almost a phobia, with any kind of touch—even a hug or someone touching my arm.” While she does now have sex, she elaborates that her issue is “more with everyday touching or cuddling or hugging. Being beaten up at school conditioned me to not want physical contact.”

Throughout high school, after she had been slut-bashed, Mia also wore baggy clothing and refused to wear makeup. “The word ‘slut’ completely transformed my life,” she says. “I had been an early developer and I was very physically fit, so I had a very good body. But I wanted to look tomboyish. I did not want to draw attention to myself. I did not want to be seen as sexual at all. I wore big, baggy jeans so that no one could see the outline of my legs. I wore men’s medium or large T-shirts. It was like I was saying, ‘Please don’t look at me!’ I have naturally blond hair, but I started dying it black. I’ve been dying it ever since; I never went back to blond.”

Today, Mia has to dress professionally for her corporate career, but she never wears skirts or dresses. “I dress in a guarded way” is how she describes her adult style. “I don’t want to attract attention. I still have a good body, but I don’t like to show it.”

When a woman is so profoundly uncomfortable with her body that she refuses to eat, shuts down her natural and developmentally appropriate sexual urges, takes drugs to escape the harshness of her life, does not allow even people she’s close with to embrace her, or deliberately hides her body, something is severely wrong. These are among the short-term and long-term consequences of being labeled a slut.

Lying About the Number

College-age women, whether or not they personally have been singled out as a slut, tell me the consequences of feeling
ashamed of their sexuality. Many recognize that the easiest and best way to avoid being called a slut is to lie about their sexual history. They lie not because they are untrustworthy people, or because they have a pathological problem. They lie because under the circumstances, it is the smartest, shrewdest way to navigate the sexual double standard. Lying in their circumstance is rational and understandable.

In the 2011 movie
What’s Your Number?
, Anna Faris plays Ally Darling, a woman in her thirties desperate to ensure that her number of sexual partners never exceeds twenty. She has read a magazine article stating that women whose number is over twenty have little chance of marrying, and she’s terrified. The problem is that she’s already had twenty different sexual partners. She decides to go through her list of ex-boyfriends, looking them up one by one, hoping that one could become her future husband. If she marries someone she’s dated in the past, she figures, her lifetime number will never exceed twenty. By the end of the movie, she comes to her senses and realizes that none of her previous boyfriends is right for her, and she ends up with number twenty-one.

Women college-age and older express the same terror Ally Darling does over their number. One of the Penn students interviewed by the
New York Times
regarding college hookup culture refused to tell the reporter the number of people she had slept with because even though her real name was not used in the article she still didn’t want the number to appear in print.
¹⁶¹
Her anxiety was so great that she would not even say her number aloud in a completely anonymous context. I found the same distress among my interviewees.

“I have a bad feeling about my number, but it’s external, not internal. The number is getting higher,” says Vanessa, a white twenty-one-year-old student. “The other day I asked a guy friend, someone who’s really cool, if he thought I was a slut. He said, ‘You’re not a slut, but you have a slutty number.’ He said it jokingly, but it made me feel bad. He said, ‘You don’t seem like a double-digit girl!’ He wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings.”

She continues, “Almost everyone lies about their number. In my mind, there’s no such thing as an ideal number. But in terms of what most people think, the ideal for either a guy or a girl is between four and six. If you’re a guy, your number shouldn’t be lower than four, and if you’re a girl, seven seems like too much. Also, guys tell me that they don’t want to be with a virgin, because they say that a virgin will get too emotionally attached. So the preferred number for a girl is one or two.”

Since her awareness of her number is causing her so much unease, I asked Vanessa if perhaps she should stop keeping track. Maybe not knowing would make her feel better about herself. It turns out that my suggestion is completely untenable, because women (and men, as we will see) can’t stop themselves from keeping count. Besides, she told me that it’s
worse
not to keep track. The implication is “Like, wow, you’ve had sex with so many people that you don’t even know your number anymore!” she explained. “I have a friend who keeps a list on her BlackBerry of everyone she’s ever made out with, although in my circle, generally blow jobs [alone] are not counted in ‘the number.’ In high school, girls are more eager to please, so they give blow
jobs, but in college, at least in my circle, that’s not done as much.”

So if oral sex alone does not get counted in “the number,” what does? Unsurprisingly, women tend to be as restrictive as possible so that their number will remain as low as possible. Heterosexual vaginal intercourse gets counted. Oral sex and—yes, this is going to sound strange—anal sex are not counted. In one large-scale survey, approximately 71 percent of adolescents considered themselves virgins even after having oral sex, and 16 percent considered themselves virgins after anal sex.
¹⁶²
Therefore, when a woman answers “What’s your number?,” chances are that she is excluding everything that’s not traditional heterosexual intercourse. Even guys play this game. A University of Texas alum told his college paper, “I usually give the vaginal sex number first, but if asked, I’ll give the oral number. Oral sex can’t get you pregnant, so it’s not that big a deal.”
¹⁶³
These discrepancies are not surprising since the definition of “sex” is far from uniform. Researchers at the Kinsey Institute asked nearly six hundred students, “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was . . . ?” and found that there is no general agreement regarding which sexual acts aside from penile-vaginal intercourse constitute “having sex.” Only 40 percent of respondents said that oral sex counts as “having sex,” while 81 percent of respondents said anal intercourse means “having sex.”
¹⁶⁴

Aaron, the white twenty-one-year-old college student in California, revealed that many guys also have insecurity regarding their number. “The number” was one of the first things he asked me about when I told him that I was interviewing
young women about their sexuality. He wanted to know what kinds of numbers I was hearing. I told him the range I’d heard at that point—from several to the mid-twenties, with a few outliers. He audibly breathed with relief. “I feel so much better knowing that,” he said. “My number is in the mid-twenties. Except for the guys at the fraternity, nobody talks about this, so I don’t really know.”

Aaron continued that at his fraternity, the guys rank each other by their number. He ranks number two, “right behind my cousin, who keeps track of the girls he’s been with in a little leather notebook. He’s very obsessive about his number. But I reject the number concept.” Aaron is embarrassed to tell me that he “used to judge girls based on their number.” He believed that a woman’s number should never exceed four. “I don’t know how I came up with the number four, which is kind of arbitrary, but that was the number I decided on.” But then he realized two things. “Sometimes I’m with a girl for months, and another time I’m with a girl only one time,” yet each counts as one notch on his total number. That didn’t sit right with him.

Also, Aaron recognized that it’s not possible for guys’ numbers to be higher than women’s numbers. “If I’m making out with lots of girls then obviously they’re doing the same thing,” he explained. “If my number keeps going up, then girls’ numbers have to keep going up too. For the math to work, the numbers have to go up for guys
and
girls. It’s not like one girl is hooking up with all the guys, and I’m assuming that there’s the same number of lesbians as gay men, more or less. So once I started thinking about the numbers that way, I stopped judging girls.” Although some
individual women or men have sex with more partners than others, his overall point is sound: it’s not fair or realistic to presume that women’s numbers will always be lower than men’s numbers.

Unfortunately, many college-age women tell me that the men in their lives make relationship decisions based on the number of the women they’re interested in. Gloria, the twenty-two-year-old Latina student, tells me that before she started dating her current boyfriend, she hooked up with another guy while they attended a skiing trip during their school’s winter break. Her current boyfriend was on the same trip and suspected what had occurred. Before they started dating, he asked Gloria if his suspicions were correct. “I lied and said no, because I knew that if I had said yes, he would have thought that I hook up all the time, and he wouldn’t have wanted to date me,” she explained. But a week later, her boyfriend asked her again, and this time she told him the truth and admitted her reasons for lying. Her boyfriend agreed with her. He would not have wanted to date her had he known the truth from the outset. Yet now that they were dating, he realized that Gloria’s previous hookup didn’t really matter, and he didn’t want to break up with her because of it. What will she do in the future when she’s asked about her number? I asked. “I understand that there could be potential consequences if I went above a certain number,” Gloria told me, “although I don’t know what that certain number is. I’m sure to some people two is too many, and to other people ten is too many.”

Many boyfriends reject their girlfriends because they believe that their number is too high. Erica tells me about a “regular hookup guy, not a boyfriend,” who knew that she
had hooked up a great deal during her first semester at college. A few weeks after they started sleeping together, he told her, “This isn’t working. I’ve slept with five people in my whole life, and you’ve slept with five people
I know
.” So he broke up with her.

Similarly, Ella, the twenty-four-year-old student in Pennsylvania whose mother is black and whose father is white, dated a Chinese American guy during her sophomore year who told her that he wasn’t looking for a relationship, he just wanted to have regular sex with her. She agreed to see him with this condition. But after they had been together for two months, “he told me that I wasn’t girlfriend material because I had been with ten guys. I couldn’t believe he said that because his number was also ten!” Ella explains that her boyfriend apparently had looked up information on the Internet about “the number,” and based on what he read, he concluded that her number was too high.

H
e compared me with Chinese women, and said that they didn’t sleep around as much, that their number is lower than mine, or at least that is what he thought was true. I had never heard anyone talk like that before, so I didn’t know what to say. First of all, why was it OK that his number was ten but not OK that I had the same number? Also, I told him that from my point of view, most of the guys I’d been with had used me, so it didn’t seem fair to take them seriously as part of my number, and that he should have been bothered about the fact that they had used me, not about the fact that they added to my number. But he was going to use me too, so he didn’t care.