Dirty Little Secrets

Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton—and see the parents who rally against them and the endless blog writers who are disgusted by their behavior. Girls in middle and high schools exclude one another from their cliques with that label, reminding one another what is acceptable behavior or not. Parents don’t allow their daughters to dress in slutty clothing, fearing that doing so means that their daughters are indeed sluts. Even in horror movies—all the classics, such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street—the promiscuous girls are always the first to die.

Milburn High School in New Jersey made headlines in 2009 when thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls were put on a “slut list.” Every year a group of senior girls created a slut list of incoming freshman girls, including degrading comments, such as, “I’m so desperate and hairy that I’ll give you drugs for free if you get with me.” More shocking to me was that this story made news. Ask your daughters: some equivalent humiliation of girls, because of their sexuality, takes place at plenty of schools throughout the nation. One of the girls who cowrote the list at Milburn High even said, “Really it’s all fun.”^{39}

One of the more contemporary examples of highlighting the school slut is “sexting,” sending dirty electronic messages and/or revealing photos or videos through phones. Thirty percent of all teens have reported sending naked pictures of some sort through their phones, and 17 percent of recipients admitted to passing that photo along to others.^{40} Most any girl you talk with will tell you that she regrets sexting for that reason—she never meant for the message to get around (see chapter 8 for more on sexting).

Fourteen-year-old Fiona thought that she and Brian were girlfriend and boyfriend, or at least that he was her friend. They had been having sex. It wasn’t either of their first times. She decided one night to send him a picture of her naked torso. She wasn’t dumb. She had heard about what could happen to photos like that. But she honestly trusted Brian. At least that is what she said, crying, to her best friend, after the photo made its way through the school. In just one day, most everyone had seen the picture, and Brian acted like he didn’t even know her. She had never regretted anything more. Over the next few months, much of the school ostracized Fiona, calling her a slut. Boys approached her to ask for sexual favors, and when she tried to ignore them, they high-fived one another. That was a few years ago. Things have since settled down, but Fiona doesn’t think she’ll ever feel safe around these classmates again. Fiona asked me outright, “Why are so many kids so cruel when it comes to this stuff?”

Amanda, who is now in her twenties, has a slightly different story. She didn’t do anything back in high school, she feels, to earn the label of “slut.” She just had a lot of energy and verve, which she thinks, looking back, got misinterpreted for sexual energy. Unlike many girls she knew, she didn’t get quiet and submissive when she hit puberty. Her mother worked hard to keep that from happening. Her mother spoke loudly about what she thought. She gave Amanda books to read about puberty. She took her to festivals that celebrated girls and their power in the world. At the same time, though, Amanda’s mother didn’t have great boundaries when it came to this sort of education. She had sex with her boyfriends with the bedroom door open when Amanda was home. She had parties—where everyone shared their art and poetry and music—that sometimes turned into orgies. And, again, Amanda was home.

As a teenager, confused and aroused by all this activity around her, Amanda imitated her mother. She dressed like her mother did with low-cut tops and long, flowing skirts. She took off her shoes in class so she could be barefoot. She wore no makeup and let her hair dread. When she spoke, she did so loudly and with passion, just like her mother. And she did things that were shocking to her classmates, such as pulling a breast out of her shirt and shaking it at a boy or dancing provocatively on the school green. Her classmates didn’t understand her at all, and because there was some expression of sexuality in her oddness, they branded her a slut. When Amanda talks about it now, she gets teary and angry. She feels irreparably scarred by that time in her life. She’s furious still at her mother for being so inappropriate and narcissistic, and at her classmates for being so insensitive and cruel. She’s also furious at herself for not having learned the rules about womanhood the way everyone else seemed to at the time—don’t be different, don’t be loud, don’t have passion.

If nothing is more frightening than a woman’s desire, then a young girl’s desire is even more horrifying. We ostracize because we are jealous; the slut is the one getting all the male attention. Or we ostracize the slut because we want to protect our girls, because there is some sense that all sex-related behaviors for girls will lead to harm. Or we ostracize simply because we are afraid of what feels different and unfamiliar. Whatever the reason, when we banish the slut, more often than not it’s the punishment that harms her, not her behavior.

In fact, if she embraces her behavior, it can earn her a different label. Where for years no one wanted to be called a slut, more recently, being a slut can be a self-proclaimed badge of honor. Meet the “empowered” girl.

THE EMPOWERED GIRL

Seventeen-year-old Ramona wrote me this: “All my family knows about my sexual history since I got expelled from two schools. They have taken me to three shrinks, and I see one every week. They disapprove of my sex life, but now if they forbid me to go out, I’ll sneak out as I used to. In the city I live, many men from different countries come to visit and all my friends and I have a list of nationalities we kissed and had sex with, and I’m winning of course. I’ve had thirty-two different nationalities and want to have more. In four years I have had sex with fifty-six men. I know I’m taking risks and the number is terrible for my age, but I’m not the only one or the worst. I just like having sex.”

Something new has entered the culture of women. Lynn M. Phillips, in Flirting with Danger, calls this the “together woman discourse,” in which women are “sassy” and free in their sexual agency, but in actuality, that “freedom” is limited to a heterosexual stance, one that aims to attract men.^{41} In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy refers to it as “raunch culture,” a culture in which some women have co-opted what men think is sexy and made it supposedly empowering.^{42} She includes such examples as Girls Gone Wild, pole-dancing lessons, striptease marathons, and women who buy Playboy. Tied up with this is the idea that being a slut is a good thing. It means you’re strong, in control of your sexuality. The notion starts in the right direction—women can own their sexuality—but it’s almost as if, more often than not, women fall back into the familiar tire grooves of what men desire about women’s sexuality.

Certainly, this empowered-girl culture has invaded adolescence as well. Thirteen-year-old girls proudly extol their abilities to give blow jobs, which they do in the bathrooms at parties or at school. Middle and high schoolers have sex parties. Girls compete with one another to dress as slutty as possible. In Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, Laura Sessions Stepp notes that, in our hookup culture, teenage girls have abandoned dating and courting altogether and are simply engaging in sexual acts with others.^{43} They don’t have to want to be boyfriend and girlfriend. They don’t have to even like each other.

This may sound empowered, but think about how it would be perceived if such a girl didn’t have a male partner, or at least didn’t attract one, or if she gave off the vibe that she needed a man. Would she be seen as empowered—or pathetic? Such sexual behavior smacks of the same intentions Levy identified in her interviews with women about raunch culture. If girls have no interest in boys beyond getting their attention and giving blow jobs, then what exactly are they getting out of the arrangement other than the reputation that comes along with it? If they don’t need boys’ sexual attention, why are they competing for their attention? How exactly is this empowering for them?

The month before Loose Girl hit the bookshelves, Marie Claire published an interview with me about the book. The interview noted what I’ve come to call my “number,” which was forty-something. I had slept with some forty-odd boys and men during my loose-girl years.^{44} Soon after, one of the Jezebel bloggers posted about the interview. She wrote that I was just another person who felt I earned the right to have a memoir when clearly I was just like any other woman. She noted that forty men was not very many at all and that plenty of women had many, many more men. How dare I try to make money off the fact that men didn’t want more than casual encounters with me, as though that were something I experienced and no one else did. And she made it clear that I could not be both a feminist and a person who had had sex mostly because I felt badly about myself.