There's No Such Thing as a Slut (from The Atlantic)

Street Pattern · Jun 2, 2014

There's No Such Thing as a Slut - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic

There's No Such Thing as a Slut
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A new longitudinal study examined how college students slut-shame—and found that the practice is as illogical as it is damaging.

In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students. Like two Jane Goodalls in the jungle of American young adulthood, they did their observing in the students’ natural habitat.

The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college.

Their findings about the students’ academic success later formed the basis for Paying for the Party, their recent book about how the college experience bolsters inequality. They found that the women’s “trajectories were shaped not only by income ... but also by how much debt they carried, how much financial assistance they could expect from their parents, their social networks, and their financial prospects.”

But in the process, they began to notice that the women’s attitudes about sex were also influenced by their families’ incomes. On top of asking the students about GPAs and friend groups, the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.

“We were there on the floor when these dramas would emerge about slut-bashing,” Armstrong told me. “We saw working class girls walk out of their dorms to visit boys, and the privileged girls would say, ‘why are you wearing that?’"

As Armstrong and Hamilton write in a new study published in Social Psychology Quarterly, economic inequality drove many of the differences in the ways the women talked about appropriate sexual behavior.

All but five or six of the women practiced “slut-shaming,” or denigrating the other women for their loose sexual mores. But they conflated their accusations of “sluttiness” with other, unrelated personality traits, like meanness or unattractiveness. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure.

“If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term ‘slut’ is a sure fire way to do it,” Armstrong said. “It’s ‘she isn’t one of us, we don't like her and she's different.’”

Because most of the slut-shaming occurred in private, women were both targets and producers of it, and it was rare for the term “slut” to stick to any one woman. Instead, the other women were simply foils for each others’ supposed sexual virtue. One woman described her best friend like so:

“She just keeps going over there because she wants his attention because she likes him. That’s disgusting. That to me, if you want to talk about slutty, that to me is whoring yourself out.”

For her analysis, Armstrong divided the cohort in two, with wealthier women in one group and the working-class ones in the other. Each group tended to band together, with the poorer half feeling excluded from Greek life and other high-status social activities. Several of the low-income students, for example, balked at the cost of the $50 "rush" t-shirt, Armstrong said.

The rich women tended to view casual sex as problematic only when it was done outside of steady relationships, and even then, only when it included vaginal intercourse. Meanwhile, frequent “hooking up,” which to them included kissing and oral sex, did not a slut make. “I think when people have sex with a lot of guys that aren’t their boyfriends, that’s really a slut,” as one put it.

The poorer women, by contrast, were unaware that “hooking up,” in the parlance of the rich women, excluded vaginal intercourse. They also tended to think all sex and hook-ups should occur primarily within a relationship.

The two classes of women also defined “sluttiness” differently, but neither definition had much to do with sexual behavior. The rich ones saw it as “trashiness,” or anything that implied an inability to dress and behave like an upper-middle-class person.

One woman, for example, “noted that it was acceptable for women to ‘have a short skirt on’ if ‘they’re being cool’ but ‘if they’re dancing really gross with a short skirt on, then like, oh slut.’”

The poorer women, meanwhile, would regard the richer ones as “slutty” for their seeming rudeness and proclivity for traveling in tight-knit herds. As one woman said, “Sorority girls are kind of whorish and unfriendly and very cliquey.”

Armstrong notes that midway through their college experience, none of the women had made any friendships across the income divide.

To Armstrong, it seemed like even though the wealthy and poor women were slut-shamed roughly equally in private, it was mostly only the poor women who faced public slut-shaming. And it only seemed to happen when the poorer women tried to make inroads with the richer ones.

“There was one instance where one of the [working class] women, Stacey, was watching the show The OC and made some comment about the sexual behavior of one of the characters of the show,” Armstrong told me. “And a rich woman, Chelsea, said something like, ‘Oh, you're such a slut yourself, you shouldn't be calling her out.’ It was supposed to be a joke, but it misfired and [Stacey] ran crying from the room.”

A series of emissaries were sent up and down the hall in an attempt to make amends, but the damage had been done. “None of the other women in the room chimed in to defend Stacey’s virtue,” Armstrong notes.

By Armstrong’s tally, more rich women than poor women took part in hook-ups throughout college. The poorer women seemed to notice that their wealthier dorm-mates were more sexual, but felt they couldn’t get away with being similarly libertine. The wealthier women, meanwhile, seemed unfazed by accusations of sluttiness if they came from their lower-status peers. (Think of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, for whom public displays of sexuality were the rocket fuel on which they jetted to fame.)

“The high-status women would literally snub or look through the poorer women,” Armstrong said. “They would blow them off entirely. We spent a lot of time asking who would say hi to who; who would let the door slam in someone's face.”

According to Armstrong, one sorority member said, “I only see people who are Greek; I don't know who the other students are. They are like extras.”

The rampant slut-shaming, Armstrong found, was only a symptom of the women’s entrenched classism. But more importantly, the allegations of sluttiness had little to do with real-life behavior. The woman with the most sexual partners in the study, a rich girl named Rory, also had the most sterling reputation—largely because she was an expert at concealing her sexual history.

“Rory was going to lie till the day she died,” Armstrong said. “She would only have sex with guys who didn't know each other. She constantly misrepresented what she was doing and didn't tell people where she was going.”

One of the most striking things Armstrong learned was that, despite the pervasiveness of slut-shaming, there was no cogent definition of sluttiness, or of girls who were slutty, or even evidence that the supposedly slutty behavior had transpired. In the study, she notes that though “women were convinced that sluts exist” and worked to avoid the label, some of their descriptions of sluttiness were so imprecise (‘‘had sex with a guy in front of everybody”) that they seemed to be referring to some sort of apocrypha—“a mythical slut.”

“The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that,” she told me. “It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.”

Perhaps no recent example of slut-shaming is as horrifying as the shooting in Santa Barbara last week. Before killing seven people in his rampage, Elliot Rodger vowed to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut”— all while complaining that those very same “sluts” refused to sleep with him.

To Armstrong, the shooting highlighted that “slut” is simply a misogynistic catch-all, a verbal utility knife that young people use to control women and create hierarchies. There may be no real sluts, in other words, but there are real and devastating consequences to slut-shaming.
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redravin · Jun 2, 2014

Why am I not a bit surprised that most of this BS breaks down along class lines?
It makes sense that women would judge each other based on their experiences and modeling.
The cliques that develop would be the source of the worst of the name calling and shaming.

snowy · Jun 2, 2014

Wow, that was a really interesting read. I'm also not surprised it breaks down along class lines. This is how what Annette Lareau describes in Unequal Childhoods plays out at the collegiate level, I suppose. Bear in mind that the wealthier girls are also ones that have spent years under what Lareau calls concerted cultivation: Concerted cultivation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

rogue49 · Jun 2, 2014

I've been saying I don't believe in the word for years. Hate it.
It's a bullying tactic...like "faggot" or "gay" between men.

Glad you found it @StreetPattern - I read it too and was planning on posting, but forgot.

Besides, I love sluts...not the word, but the idea of them. The more the merrier, more merry for them, more merry for me.
Sex should be as common and fun as ice cream.

Now how do you think poorly of ice cream?

snowy · Jun 2, 2014

rogue49 said: ↑

Sex should be as common and fun as ice cream.

Now how do you think poorly of ice cream?
Click to expand...

Amen, brother.

ASU2003 · Jun 4, 2014

That is a study that I would read. Lifestyles of the college female...

I know I wasn't expecting anything like that when I went to college. In my hometown, if you did get into a relationship, it would last years, maybe even lead to marriage a high percent of the time. The stakes were that high that the girl you asked out would be with you for a long, long time. I know more people who are married to the first person they went out on a date with, then who 'played the field'. I think there might be some small town vs. big city stuff going on when it comes to slut-shaming.

And I wonder what the study would find if they followed guys around and asked them the same types of questions? I was able to make a good friend who was in the upper class, but I never really considered that much when I was a teenager/young adult.

Plum · Sep 21, 2015

This is sad.

Levite · Sep 21, 2015

Very interesting. And actually not surprising. "Slut," "whore" (when used colloquially, rather than literally), "tramp," etc., all always struck me as suspicious labels, because no one could ever consistently define what constituted meriting them. In my experience, girls called other girls those things when they didn't like them, or when they were being catty. Guys called girls those things when they were either being generally misogynistic or when the girl in question had rejected them. Any use seldom seemed to have any perceptible connection to the actual sexual behavior of the person in question.

One more reason I have never been one to use such terms in earnest.

But it also doesn't surprise me that there's a connection to class. In high school I was always astounded at how a lot of upper-middle-class and wealthier students (not that we had many wealthier students at my public high school) were dicks to lower-middle-class and poor kids. There were a lot of double standards flying around, too. No surprise that sexual behavior and judgment should be one of them.

Speed_Gibson · Sep 21, 2015

I never use the term "slut" but if you are going to use it or the idea, then don't apply a double standard and use it both for male and female. The classic "she slept with 10 dudes, she is such a slut" vs "He scored with 10 chicks, he is such a stud" is ridiculous.

Chris Noyb · Sep 22, 2015

Since slut--a term I really don't like-- is used primarily for females, here's my .02:

What I'm saying applies to males as well.

If a female is having frequent sex with many males (certainly not limited to just males) because she wants to and enjoys it, she has has much right to do so as any male.

If a female is having frequent sex with many males because she is attempting to "catch" a guy, "keep" a guy, has self-esteem issues ("They have sex with me, therefore I must be attractive, right?"), then I see a problem.

That promiscuity (a loaded word) can cause problems. If she and a guy are considering a monogamous LTR, which could include marriage, and she's honest about her sexual activities, the double standard (boys will be boys, nice girls don't sleep around) can come into play.

I personally think that if doubts about of future fidelity areraised because of promiscuity, it should apply to both sexes. And I think that it's natural for a person, male or female, to wonder if their potential LTR partner with a very active sex life is ready to settle down.

Plan9 · Sep 22, 2015

So, basically, "slut" is just another canned general purpose pejorative oh-no-she-didn't that everybody from the ivory tower side is getting their post-Sticks-n-Stones panties in a twist over. Again. For the xth time.

Hell, we're running out of names to call people. "Pussy" is sexist. "Retard" is off the table. I think "shithead" is still safe but who knows?

For the record, these kind of social meanderings are for bitch-ass dipshits.

CinnamonGirl · Sep 22, 2015

I don't know. "Slut" seems like a not-cool-anymore insult that we all used in middle school, but learned how dumb it was once we all started having (and enjoying) sex. It seems weird to me that people in college are using it.

Maybe that's just me, though.

Lindy · Sep 27, 2015

First of all, I wonder if slut shaming might not just be a kind of girls version of what boys would call 'trash talking.' Like boys call each other a wuss or pussy, girls use slut. Hmmm, all of those feminine terms. Interesting.
And of course sociologists would see things breaking down along class lines. That's what sociologists do. With everything.

Sadly, there just isn't a complimentary or even neutral term for sexually profligate women/girls that is analogous to the term 'stud.' Especially if that profligate sexuality is precocious. Slut is the convenient default term for women/girls that engage in sex, (which women still aren't supposed to) beyond the margins of mainstream monogamy. But slut has, in my mind anyway, pejorative connotations totally unrelated to the sex act itself. Slut usually implies tight and/or revealing clothing, drugs and/or alcohol, heavy makeup, and a generally contemptuous, libertine, rebellious, bohemian lifestyle.

I have sometimes called myself a (recovering) slut because when I was a junior and senior in high school, ages 15-17 in the early nineties, I was not only sexually available, but just so totally non-selective. I look back on it now with some disbelief, but there it is, even in my diary/journal, in my own handwriting. I'm at this point amazed that I didn't get an STD, pregnant, or gang raped.

But other than sexually, I wasn't slutty. I didn't look the part. I dressed mostly modestly. I rarely drank, and didn't do drugs at all. I was an honor student band geek. I was highly aware of my body, and secure enough that I didn't need to flaunt. I'd get laid on Saturday, and I'd go to church on Sunday. Reference to country song, there, anybody get it?

I really want that term for women who love the physical part of sex.

Plan9 · Sep 27, 2015

Lindy said:

I really want that term for women who love the physical part of sex.
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Yeah, we call them "taken," because inevitably some guy gets a taste of that wild ride and doesn't wanna give it up. Something about him having (enough) money. The End.

#RingFingerShackle
#MyFirstMarriage
#CrazyHotMatrix

Shadowex3 · Sep 28, 2015

This is in line with [previous research](Slut-shaming and class: A study on how college women decide who’s trashy and who’s classy.) on the subject. The way I see it everyone bringing up soggy knees is massively overthinking this, they're shoehorning an observed effect into their pre-existing ideological beliefs and expectations. Slutshaming is bullying. And like all bullying it's an intelligent, context sensitive, and feedback based process. Bullies (like trolls) actively seek out what they believe to be the most effective means to attack their target, to find what they believe is that person's greatest weakness.

Right now in the west in this era of femsploitation and sexual hysteria the best way to hit anyone below the belt is with accusations of sexual impropriety. For women that's promiscuity, for a man it's deviance. If we were in a different cultural context you'd likely see different social weapons being employed.

The behavior will continue for a long time to come, the words used will change as our culture changes.

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There's No Such Thing as a Slut (from The Atlantic)

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redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

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There's No Such Thing as a Slut (from The Atlantic)

Street Pattern Very Tilted

redravin Cynical Optimist Donor

snowy so kawaii Staff Member

rogue49 Tech Kung Fu Artist Staff Member

snowy so kawaii Staff Member

ASU2003 Very Tilted

Plum New Member

Levite Levitical Yet Funky

Speed_Gibson Hacking the Gibson

Chris Noyb Get in, buckle up, hang on, & be quiet.

Plan9 Rock 'n Roll

CinnamonGirl The Cheat is GROUNDED!

Lindy Moderator Staff Member

Plan9 Rock 'n Roll

Shadowex3 Very Tilted

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