Equally important, the abstinence train has denied us this discussion around teenage girls and sex, and it has indirectly contributed to why many girls—the loose girls—use sex as a means of self-harm. When we tell girls sex and sexual feelings are bad, when we tell them they are bad when they act sexually, they will believe us, and they will use it as a way to punish themselves on their own. If we make sex subversive, then we shouldn’t be surprised when girls use sex—something that should be, that is, perfectly natural—as though it were fraught with as many dangers as alcohol. And we shouldn’t be surprised when they wind up furious and hurt by the way our culture betrays girls in this way again and again.
THE SLUT
When Julia was twelve, her parents divorced and her mother moved them to a small town in another state so that her father would have no access to them. In her old school, Julia had a group of friends. But Julia didn’t know anyone at the new school, where the kids had been classmates since preschool. During the days, she walked through the halls, clutching her books to her chest, her head down. She had never thought before about her weight—she was just a little heavy—because she and her old friends hadn’t concerned themselves with that. But here, girls called her “fat.” Once, while she was at her locker, a boy from one of the older grades stuck his hand out and touched her breast through her shirt. Just like that. She stopped what she was doing, paralyzed. She couldn’t breathe, the heat from the place he touched spreading across her chest and into her neck and face.
At thirteen, she found a friend: Audrey. And Audrey didn’t care what the other girls thought. She was a year older. They met after school and smoked cigarettes in Audrey’s living room. Audrey’s parents didn’t care. Audrey introduced Julia to beer, too, and sexy clothes, and she introduced her to boys. They went to the movies and came on to the older local boys, boys already out of high school, boys who were eager to take Julia’s large breasts and ass into their hands. She was eager, too. Eager for their attention, for what felt like caring, maybe even like love. Later, when they left, often not even taking her phone number, she felt like garbage, like the nothing she believed she really was. But she went back again and again, chasing that feeling.
It didn’t take long for Julia to be labeled the school “slut.” Every school has one. The slut is so well known that she’s become an archetype—a product of a Jungian collective unconscious—as Emily White noted in her book Fast Girls.{37} The slut is always the same: desperate, dirty, curvy, asking for it. She is all desire, all sex. She is as bad as a girl can get.
The narrative of the slut has been repeated so often that I almost don’t have to note it here. She has sex with lots of boys. She teases lots of boys. She wears sexy clothes. She will do anything boys want her to do. She gives blow jobs, hand jobs, rim jobs. She usually has big breasts. And everyone knows she is a slut. In fact, they are the ones who named her. White noted that when she interviewed girls, this slut myth, the belief in the slut as a real thing, was so powerful, so all-encompassing, that it overwhelmed any of the women’s stories.{38} I had the same experience with the girls I interviewed. They called themselves sluts, “blowjob queens.” They joked about being amazing in bed, how they perfected their techniques.
They joke, but the truth beneath the myth is that these girls hurt. Virgin, slut, or (as we’ll soon see) empowered, all are limited by the outlines of their role, but none is as harmed by her title as the slut, for society heavily and thoroughly ostracizes the slut. Put any celebrity slut’s name into a Google search—Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton—and see the parents who rally against them and the endless blog writers who are disgusted by their behavior. Girls in middle and high schools exclude one another from their cliques with that label, reminding one another what is acceptable behavior or not. Parents don’t allow their daughters to dress in slutty clothing, fearing that doing so means that their daughters are indeed sluts. Even in horror movies—all the classics, such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street—the promiscuous girls are always the first to die.
Milburn High School in New Jersey made headlines in 2009 when thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls were put on a “slut list.” Every year a group of senior girls created a slut list of incoming freshman girls, including degrading comments, such as, “I’m so desperate and hairy that I’ll give you drugs for free if you get with me.” More shocking to me was that this story made news. Ask your daughters: some equivalent humiliation of girls, because of their sexuality, takes place at plenty of schools throughout the nation. One of the girls who cowrote the list at Milburn High even said, “Really it’s all fun.”{39}
One of the more contemporary examples of highlighting the school slut is “sexting,” sending dirty electronic messages and/or revealing photos or videos through phones. Thirty percent of all teens have reported sending naked pictures of some sort through their phones, and 17 percent of recipients admitted to passing that photo along to others.{40} Most any girl you talk with will tell you that she regrets sexting for that reason—she never meant for the message to get around (see chapter 8 for more on sexting).
Fourteen-year-old Fiona thought that she and Brian were girlfriend and boyfriend, or at least that he was her friend. They had been having sex. It wasn’t either of their first times. She decided one night to send him a picture of her naked torso. She wasn’t dumb. She had heard about what could happen to photos like that. But she honestly trusted Brian. At least that is what she said, crying, to her best friend, after the photo made its way through the school. In just one day, most everyone had seen the picture, and Brian acted like he didn’t even know her. She had never regretted anything more. Over the next few months, much of the school ostracized Fiona, calling her a slut. Boys approached her to ask for sexual favors, and when she tried to ignore them, they high-fived one another. That was a few years ago. Things have since settled down, but Fiona doesn’t think she’ll ever feel safe around these classmates again. Fiona asked me outright, “Why are so many kids so cruel when it comes to this stuff?”
Amanda, who is now in her twenties, has a slightly different story. She didn’t do anything back in high school, she feels, to earn the label of “slut.” She just had a lot of energy and verve, which she thinks, looking back, got misinterpreted for sexual energy. Unlike many girls she knew, she didn’t get quiet and submissive when she hit puberty. Her mother worked hard to keep that from happening. Her mother spoke loudly about what she thought. She gave Amanda books to read about puberty. She took her to festivals that celebrated girls and their power in the world. At the same time, though, Amanda’s mother didn’t have great boundaries when it came to this sort of education. She had sex with her boyfriends with the bedroom door open when Amanda was home. She had parties—where everyone shared their art and poetry and music—that sometimes turned into orgies. And, again, Amanda was home.
As a teenager, confused and aroused by all this activity around her, Amanda imitated her mother. She dressed like her mother did with low-cut tops and long, flowing skirts. She took off her shoes in class so she could be barefoot. She wore no makeup and let her hair dread. When she spoke, she did so loudly and with passion, just like her mother. And she did things that were shocking to her classmates, such as pulling a breast out of her shirt and shaking it at a boy or dancing provocatively on the school green. Her classmates didn’t understand her at all, and because there was some expression of sexuality in her oddness, they branded her a slut. When Amanda talks about it now, she gets teary and angry. She feels irreparably scarred by that time in her life. She’s furious still at her mother for being so inappropriate and narcissistic, and at her classmates for being so insensitive and cruel. She’s also furious at herself for not having learned the rules about womanhood the way everyone else seemed to at the time—don’t be different, don’t be loud, don’t have passion.