Why I Used to "Slut" Shame

I'm so excited to be writing this blog post for August McLaughlin's Beauty of a Woman Blogfest! A few months back, August interviewed me on her Girl Boner Radio show, and we've been friends ever since. Check out the other #BOAW2015 bloggers here and be sure to vote on your favorites before March 1st!

In 2013, I founded The UnSlut Project at few days after my 27th birthday. Up until about a year earlier, I had been actively "slut" shaming women and not thinking twice about it. By "slut" shaming, I mean implying that a woman should feel guilty or inferior for her real - or perceived - sexual behavior. In its worst form, it involves shaming victims of sexual assault by implying that they were "asking for it" or that they somehow deserved to be attacked.

I'll give you a few examples from my own life, which - trust me - are making me cringe as I type them. I don't really like wearing much make-up, mostly because I think it's a pain to remove it at the end of the night. So when I would go out to a bar with friends, I used to mock women who had clearly spent a lot of time on their appearance. I would say nasty things like, "How sad for her, that she has to dress up like that and wear so much make-up! It must be that she has nothing else to offer." Another example is when my best friend found out her ex-boyfriend had started dating another woman, she enlisted me to look the new woman up on Facebook. I reported back in a way I hoped would make my friend feel better: tearing the new woman down for her "slutty" pictures. For months, we referred to the new woman as some variant of "slut," "whore," or "skank." The last example I'll give is the way I treated my now-husband's ex-girlfriend, a single mom who had worked as a stripper at the only strip club in our town. When I first met him, I made fun of him for having dated her and told him I wasn't comfortable hanging out with her in a group. She had actually been a really good friend to him and had been giving him advice on how to treat me well when we first started dating, and I went and forced her out of his life because I judged her as a "slut."

I acted this way despite knowing just how painful the label "slut" could be. Back in middle school, I had been labeled the school "slut" myself, and I was sexually bullied for years. I had turned to self-harm, and even considered taking my own life because it made me feel so worthless.

But for some reason, as an adult, I didn't make the connection between what I had gone through and what I was doing to other women. The revelation for me came when I started reading news stories about girls who had taken their own lives because of "slut" shaming. They reminded me of myself as a pre-teen. Once I went back and read through my old diaries from that time in my life, the pieces started to fall into place for me. I realized that even though I wasn't personally cyber-bullying girls for having been the victim of sexual assault, my ongoing participation in our "slut" shaming culture was allowing that kind of harassment to continue. Just by smiling or nodding when a woman's sexuality was the butt of a joke, I was part of the problem.

So I made a conscious decision to change. I founded The UnSlut Project, where women and girls can share their experiences overcoming "slut" shaming, and I began production on "Slut: A Documentary Film," which is currently in the phase of crowd-funding for post-production.

It became my life's mission to change this aspect of our culture - but the first step was to start with myself. Before I could make any progress with others, my own assumptions and behavior had to change.

It's because I understand this impulse to "slut" shame other women that now, in my activist work, I try to approach the issue in an inclusive way. I believe in calling others in rather than calling them out. That is, calling them into the conversation and helping them see the damage their behavior is doing, instead of calling them out aggressively and divisively.

When it comes to "slut" shaming, I know it's not us versus them. That's because I used to be "us"... then I was "them"... and now I'm "us" again. When I meet other women who are still stuck in that middle "them" category, I know their position doesn't have to be permanent. I think the best way to make large-scale social change is to show them how awesome it is once you come out the other side.

---