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, and need an abortion.

What is the number 1 ingredient of sluttiness?

After speaking with over a thousand girls and women about their experiences with slut-shaming for close to three decades, I have found that agency lies at the heart of this harmful form of name-calling.

Those who point a finger at the slut claim that she actively did something to provoke her reputation—dressing in a sexually provocative manner, signaling sexual neediness, being sexually active in a manner regarded as promiscuous, and so on.

Never mind that much of the time, the targeted person is not actually engaging in any of these behaviors, that they are fabricated or presumed, or that her intention is not to call attention to herself sexually at all. (And if she is an older teen or young adult and is engaging in sexual behavior, so what?)

Or, she has been the victim of sexual harassment or assault, and people don’t believe her when she says that she said “no”; they say she is lying to protect her reputation (see the circular reasoning here?) and that she consented to sexual behavior that in fact was forced upon her.

But there is another ingredient of sluttiness that often is mistakenly associated with agency: physique. Repeatedly, girls tell me that they are presumed to be sexually active simply because they are early developers. Even teachers and parents—who obviously should know better—think that if a girl looks sexual (to their eyes), then she must be sexual.

Girls of color, especially Black girls, most regularly face this faulty logic. The National Women’s Law Center has shown that schools are more likely to remove Black girls from the classroom than other girls because their clothing is regarded as too revealing, and therefore violates the school’s dress code. This may be because, as a Georgetown Law study has demonstrated, adults see Black girls as young as five as more sexual and less innocent than their White peers.

In her new book Butts: A Backstory, author Heather Radke writes about eugenicist efforts to classify people, and determine their character, according to their bodies. The repugnant treatment of Sarah Baartman, the Indigenous Khoikhoi woman forced to display her naked behind to White British and French audiences in the early 1800s, “offered a kind of evidence for the belief that Black women were, by their nature,” writes Radke, “sexual, a logic that many used to justify the rape of enslaved women.”

Ultimately, women’s bodies are regarded as sexualized even when we are doing nothing sexual at all. Just existing marks us as sexual agents. And this means, the thinking goes, we are not entitled to say “no,” and that we are culpable for whatever happens to us.

Key takeaway: Any girl or woman can be called out as a slut for any reason or no reason at any time—and, we are meant to believe, it is our fault.