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

drastic consequences for the decisions they make, and now those decisions are permanent because there’s an online record.”
    The “Bad Slut” Violates Feminine Norms
    I wondered if college-age women who are labeled “sluts” agree with their younger cohort about the contradictory meaningsof the term. I theorized that women ages eighteen to twenty-two may feel less pressure to prove they’re not prudes, since 71 percent of nineteen-year-olds have had sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute, with seventeen being about the average age of first sexual intercourse. 27 Therefore, I guessed, college-age women may not feel as compelled as younger teenage girls to behave like a “good slut.” I figured that they might have less to prove.
    It turns out that women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two narrate slut stories that contain similar tensions between proving oneself to be not a prude and presenting oneself as a “good slut.” However, these young women express the tension with different language. They talk about sluttiness within a discourse of sexual freedom. They told me that being sexually active, especially outside a romantic relationship, is perceived as an issue of “pride.” It is “liberating.” But is liberation really liberating when it’s compulsory?
    “Women at my college are very comfortable sexualizing themselves,” reports Min, nineteen, an Asian American woman who grew up in New York City and now attends an elite university in the Northeast. “They see being sexual as a feminist statement. To them, being liberated is being sexual. So they do sexual things even if they don’t want to in the name of feminism.” Echoing the high school girls, Min continues, “The women here sexualize themselves but not necessarily to please themselves. Often it’s just to please the guys.” Is this what feminism today looks like to college-age women—mandatory sexualization? I believe it’s fair to say that the positive connotation of “slut” has led at least some young women to embrace a warped vision of feminist sexualliberation. Certainly many young women actively choose to be sexually active because they want sex. It’s simply not true that every sexually active female is coerced into being sexually active. But either way, the “slut” label wreaks havoc.
    Maria, twenty-one, tells me that she had sexual intercourse for the first time when she was a freshman in college. In her sophomore year, she says, “I was single and became sexually active with more than one person. I also realized that I was bisexual. It was the first time that I recognized that my desires were not dirty, and since my relationship with my boyfriend had ended, I wanted to act on my desires. But I noticed that other women did not accept me and did not want to invite me to parties because they thought I would sleep with boys they liked. I started to notice jealousy. In high school, it was the girls with confidence who were called sluts regardless of their sexual activity. I started to see the same thing here at college too. This was hard for me because I was in the process of figuring out that I needed to have pride over my sexuality.”
    As Maria notices, sluttiness is more about attitude than behavior—a key element that holds true for both teenage girls and young adult women. I asked Maria why she thinks the other women find her threatening. “I ask myself this question all the time,” she responds. “Partly it’s because of my bisexuality. Being bi is not taken seriously. People think it means you’re easy, that you could be with anyone. There’s a stereotype that you’re not discriminating. But another reason is that I make it clear that I’m not looking for romance. A lot of women hook up with guys with the hope that the hookup will become a relationship. Even when they’re hooking up casually, they try to do it with the same person again and again. And I’m not doing that.”
    “Normal” females are