Image via Feministe. On one end of the spectrum you have the self-identified sex worker on the street corner and on the other end of the spectrum you have the wife who has sex with her husband knowing they are going to the mall tomorrow. Between the two you have a range of different scenarios. All are women/girls exchanging sex for material goods. “Who do you put in jail”, the image asks? The answer says a lot about the patriarchy (and classism). (That link is well worth the read, and this link too).
Plus, the more effort women put into distinguishing ourselves from whores, the less effort we put into actually working on the issues that harm women. Or making common cause with, say, sex workers who aren’t women and therefore get completely disappeared during all this anxious finger-pointing.
When we will acknowledge that whore stigma makes no sense, that it’s insane and divisive and harmful? What does it take? All women’s appearance and activities — especially our sexuality — are attacked, limited, and kept in line by the threat of “sluthood” and “whoredom”. In that sense, we all pay. We all have a stake in taking down these social structures.
No woman gets out of this alive. Participate in whore-shaming and you only help erect the walls of your own prison. Or to put it another way… I could write my sexual history and depending on what aspects I chose to emphasize I could be described as a slut or as boringly modest. Both records would be completely truthful.
Who gets labelled a slut, who gets to do the labelling, and the consequences of being labelled a slut are the first questions of whore-shaming. A lot is at stake. You can bet that I am careful to ensure that I am the one who gets to make the public record of my own sexual history. And a basket-load of privilege means that mostly I have been successful in that.
I have often wondered how social media is going to affect women’s ability to control their own sexual narrative. I’m only 25, but it seems like the half-generation below me (those who have grown up with a constructed internet persona) have much less concern over privacy. In some ways, I see these young women as more liberated, but at other times I worry for them.
When Facebook updates show the moment you break up with someone or start seeing someone else, when an angry ex can post on your wall for all of your friends and acquaintances to see, when there are a constant barrage of quizzes titled “What sex position are you?” “What kind of Bitch are you?,” what is at stake? How much control do these girls and women have over the way they are viewed sexually.
I also think about the pictures they post. Many of my students have added me as a friend, and I look at their profile pictures (drink in hand, short skirt, bare belly) and wonder how much they’ve thought it through. Of course, I’ve worn a short skirt with a drink in hand, but I’ve never sent that picture to my teacher. I’ve never shown it to my boss. They’re cutting themselves out of the ability to control sexual narratives. As you point out, almost any woman can be a slut if the facts are viewed in the right(wrong?) way, but what happens when you can’t control the facts at all?
Jane, I kind of hope that social media will end up vindicating sexual equality, because after enough of an entire generation has posted embarrassing photos of themselves online, the stigma frankly just won’t be that strong and people will relax. Maybe I’m dreaming, but I think that’d be preferable to now.
I just caught about half an hour of Gidget Goes Hawaiian. My lord, was there some whore-shaming. I never got to see what happened in her group of friends and parents talking about how she HAD (done “it”). I’d love to hear someone’s much more articulate response to it, if anyone caught it.
Female sexuality is such a loaded issue, and we have few role models of sex-positive women. The Madonna/Whore thing is alive and well, and many people fail to find a middle ground, to make peace with their sexuality and to feel that there are possibilities other than these two extreme roles. But as long as these polar opposites (the Madonna and the Whore) are used for reference, then there is no way out of the prison of hierarchy and shame and “us” vs “them”. There must be other ways to define sexuality, but I’m not sure what they are.