Free I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet by Leora Tanenbaum

City myexperience is that pretty much everyone gets called a slut for something that they’ve done.”
    “The word is used as justification,” explains Stephanie, the fifteen-year-old girl who had explained that girls don’t want to be seen as prudes. “It’s so easy to label a girl—positively and negatively. It’s not always bad. It’s not always, ‘Oh, she’s a slut, don’t talk with her.’ Sometimes it’s”—Stephanie switches to a perky, upbeat tone—“‘Oh, she’s so slutty!’ It can be used differently in a positive way”
    “In the sixth grade,” chimed in Rachel, “I literally hadn’t even started wearing a bra yet, and my friend said, ‘All the boys think you’re a slut.’ I took so much offense to that! I didn’t know what it meant. I had never gone out with a boy. I had never kissed a boy. It’s really murky.”
    “My sister’s twelve,” Jocelyn, fifteen, told us, “and it’s like, if she even talks to a boy at recess, she gets called a slut.”
    Nicole continued where she had left off a moment earlier. “It brings you power, and it gives you social status. That’s all really true. But no girl goes to a guy thinking, ‘Oh, hooking up with him is going to get me power.’ It’s a very blurred line between good and bad results from being called a slut. A girl kind of weighs the odds.”
    “OK,” I said. “I understand that on the one hand, you need to prove to everyone that you’re sexually sophisticated, but on the other hand, you can’t be seen as too sexual So you have to do something to prove that you’re sexy and desirable, but you have to be careful about what you do.”
    “Right!” exclaimed Nicole, brushing away a lock of hair that kept falling into her face. “But there’s a blurred line, and you take one step too far and it’s like, ‘Wow, that was insanelyslutty of you to do that.’ And it’s not clear what the line is until it’s crossed. If you’re at a party, you can’t figure out where the line is, but the next day you’re looking back and you think, ‘Oh, that was a bad idea,’ but you didn’t know that when you were doing it. You know what I mean? Because I mean, if the night’s not finished yet, how could you know if what you’re doing is the worst thing that will happen? So you’re a slut if you go farther than you were supposed to, not because you did something that’s specifically slutty.”
    “What if you’re really popular?” I asked. “Does that make you immune from being called a slut in a bad way?”
    “Not necessarily,” said Nicole, and the others agreed. Jocelyn elaborated, saying, “Well, slutty behavior might seem more normal if you’re very popular. The word means something different depending on so many different things. If everyone hooks up with three guys, and one girl hooks up with six guys, she’s the slut even though everyone else should be too.”
    But, I pointed out, she was talking mostly about girls who were known to hook up with boys. What about girls like Rachel, who was called a slut when she had never kissed a boy? Or Jocelyn’s twelve-year-old sister, who gets slapped with the label simply for talking with a boy? Wasn’t it true that you can be called a slut even if you’re not doing anything sexual at all?
    All the girls agreed, and I asked them to explain how the same word could be used in such vastly different circumstances—to describe the not-yet-sexual twelve-year-old and the older teenage girl who flaunted her sexual exploits—and how it could also be used alternately as a hurtful insult or as a badge of honor. For the first time, they were silent.
    I checked in with Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney, the two dynamic women who run the Arts Effect, at a café in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village to talk about the group interview. Although she hadn’t mentioned it during the interview, one of the girls, Cappiello told me, had recently decided to have sex.
S he came over to my apartment