THE LEORA LETTER

Slut-shaming matters because when people are dismissed as sluts, hoes, and thots, they are denied care and compassion as human beings and in a variety of situations, including when they are sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, victimized by image-based sexual abuse ("revenge porn"), and need an abortion.

A Black high school girl’s breast was accidentally exposed when a teacher broke up a fight. The bare breast was seen on the school’s security video footage. Two school principals created a meme, attaching an image of Janet Jackson’s face on the student’s body, and distributed the meme to school faculty.

We need to talk about this horrifying incident and what it represents. So often, girls—especially girls of color—are reduced to their body parts and treated like sexual objects, not as human beings.

To my mind, this is not an aberrant and random incident. I see a connection with school dress codes because these rules make it acceptable to openly scrutinize girls’ bodies. Even, or especially, adults in positions of authority look at girls and see nothing but legs and behinds and breasts.

To be clear, what these principals did is an act of image-based sexual abuse (sometimes known inaccurately as "revenge porn"). Yes, this act was a form of sexual abuse.

What do you think? Email me and share your thoughts.

On a lighter note

In the September 2023 Leora Letter, I shared a slut-shaming story about a woman who came of age in the 1980s, and she referenced the Jordache jeans ads that had been ubiquitous. I asked readers to share their thoughts about the tv commercials. Here’s what you wrote in:

“The commercials are so cringe, but also nostalgia-filled for those of us who absolutely HAD to have a pair growing up in the '80s. They're so cringe as to be worthy of an SNL parody, so even though they're all sorts of wrong, I love them!”

“I just recently turned 40 and have received a lot of questions on how it feels, the underpinning that I must be depressed to be aging. According to these commercials I should feel old, fat, and undesirable—a thing of nightmares. The fact that I’m still being asked this decades after these Jordache commercials aired indicates that we’ve not come far enough in how we think about women and portray them in media, but certainly there’s been progress. At least now I can see a commercial of beautiful older woman smiling…after her Botox injections.”

"It is fascinating to me how much the beauty ideal has changed in terms of hair and clothes, and yet not at all in terms of body shape/size. Hair and clothes have all gotten much smaller—and body size has stayed thin, thin, thin. Many companies are now featuring more diverse body sizes, as well as more diversity of race—I think I saw one brown man and one Asian woman in all of these commercials. In some ways they are so innocent, though, compared to advertising today. With one exception, everyone is fully clothed. I also thought about the gender roles and toxic messages to men — around ambition, earning power, creativity, love, priorities.
Oh, shout out to the actress impersonating Molly Ringwald who called herself chubby and freckled. What."