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.

For my research on the ways young women are sexualized in non-sexual situations, I usually speak with people ages 14-30. But I recently talked with a white woman, Janet, in her fifties. Her cultural references are from a different era, but the conflicts she describes are as fresh as a new Barbie-pink crop top or vegan leather maxi dress with a dangling price tag.

“Before I started developing,” Janet told me, “when I was eight or nine, I got my shoulder-length hair cut short. I wanted to look like Dorothy Hamill [the 1976 Olympic champion figure skater with a pixie hair style]. I remember coming home with my mom from the salon, and my dad looked at me disapprovingly. ‘You shouldn’t have cut it so short,’ he said. ‘Long hair is sexier.’”

That’s when Janet discovered that being sexy is important and valued—something she should aspire to but was failing at. After all, her father was a smart man—a teacher—and she looked up to him, so it must have been true.

When she was 12, Janet started to develop breasts and a curvy physique. “I still was letting my mother choose clothes for me. Then I started seventh grade and noticed what the girls in my class wore and realized that my clothes were boring and unflattering. Theirs were cool and exciting.”

The cornerstone of a cool wardrobe, she realized, was a pair of tight designer jeans. This was in the early 1980s, when the concept of designer, luxury jeans—an alternative to androgynous Levi’s and Wranglers—was new. The racy Calvin Klein ads with Brooke Shields were all over television, and jeans were being marketed as an item that could boost a woman’s sex appeal.

She requested a pair for her birthday and spent the fall plotting her choice, homing in on dark-denim Jordache. “I had no interest in Calvins. No interest in Gloria Vanderbilts. I don’t remember the reason, but it had to be Jordache.”

Perhaps Janet had been influenced by the catchy “Jordache Look” commercials.

(You might cringe watching these commercials now, but when I was growing up in the early 1980s, my friends and I lustily sang the “Jordache Look” lyrics in harmony while waiting for the school bus and hummed it to ourselves on auto-repeat.)

Did she want the jeans to look sexy? I asked.

“Yes and no,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about sex, but I knew that wearing tight jeans equated with being cool and pretty and someone people wanted to be around. I wanted to look sexy but not in a way that meant I wanted to have sex.”

Her birthday finally arrived, and at the local strip mall, Janet selected a pair that was the tightest she could pull up over her thighs and stomach—the way the models in the ads wore them. Success.

“I’d never had jeans that expensive,” Janet recalls, “and it was a big deal for me when I wore them the first time.” What she remembers most is her father’s reaction. He looked at her with approval—the opposite response to when she’d cut her hair short. He said, “It’s good that they are so tight.”

“After that, I lost interest in them,” she says. “They were now tainted. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, but the ickiness of my dad eyeing my behind and evaluating me on some sexiness scale—it ruined the jeans for me.”

But it wasn’t just the jeans that were tainted. “That was a transformative moment,” Janet told me. “If I looked attractive, which is something I wanted, it meant opening myself up to icky reactions from people who had no business looking at me like that.”

She continued, “Basically, wanting to look attractive became this thing that was dangerous, even though it also seemed compulsory. And I still feel that way even today. I am never unambivalently satisfied with my appearance—ever.”

I don’t know how common it is for a father to sexualize his daughter in this way (though I would guess it occurs more frequently than people want to consider). I do know that it is quite common for adults in general to comment on girls’ bodies. While Janet’s story is unique to her, it also sheds light on the experiences of many people of all ages who are never at peace with the way they imagine they appear to other people. 

If smart phones and social media had existed in the 1980s, I asked, would you have posted sexy selfies in your new jeans?

“Definitely! I probably would have done that pose all the girls do today where you see my full body from behind and my head is turned back toward the camera. But I would have done it just to show my friends that, hey, now I had a pair of designer jeans, too.”

Any advice to adults today who are concerned when they see a young woman they regard as looking “inappropriate” or “too sexual”?

Janet thought for a moment. Then she said, “You never really know why someone chooses to dress or look the way they do. And unless there’s a safety issue, why is this your business?”

Which Jordache commercial is your favorite? Which makes you cringe?