March 4, 2015 • 51 mins
Slut shaming is one of society's favorite forms of policing female sexuality. Cristen and Caroline explore the history, science and psychology of slut shaming, and why it's often a girl-on-girl pattern.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and welcome to slut Shaming. One oh one.
Prepared to be shocked in a probably a depressing way. Oh,
(00:24):
let's not make it depressing. It's good for us to
understand these kinds of things like slut shaming. It is good. No,
it is good. I don't want to frame it in
terms of like, this whole episode is going to be
full of information about shaming women, but it kind of is.
But this is a topic we want to talk about
because it is something that has come up a lot
in past episodes. It is brought up a lot in
(00:47):
terms of the concept of rape culture. Listeners have requested it,
and we did an episode a way back when now
on slut Walks in which we talked about the ed
mology and the possible reclamation of the word slut, and
we'll give you a brief primer on that just to
quickly revisit it. But we really wanted to focus in
(01:09):
on this concept of slut shaming because it is I mean,
by this point it is a word that or term
I should say that comes up so much some people
even think that it's lost its meaning. Yeah, that's right.
It actually made it into the American Dialects Society's twenty
twelve Words of the Year list in the category of
(01:30):
most Outrageous. Yeah. It defines slut shaming as attacking a
woman for socially stigmatized sexual activity, to which I say,
American Dialect Society, No, it's not even It's so much
more than just that. And Ben Zimmer, though, who was
writing for the American Dialect Society, traces it to two
(01:53):
thousand and six, so it does seem like it's it's
a millennial term for sure. Right. Well, Christen, you indicated
that that definition was a little bit limited. Yes, So
let's turn to Andrea Rubinstein at finally Feminism one oh one,
who offers a succinct definition, but I still think it's
a little more inclusive. She says. It's the idea of
(02:15):
shaming and or attacking a woman or girl for being sexual,
having one or more sexual partners, acknowledging sexual feelings, and
or acting on sexual feelings. Yeah, and it usually conforms
to patriarchal norms, but it's also highly subjective, especially when
it comes to things like clothing or simply expressing opinions
(02:38):
or acting in any kind of way out in public
that people can see. And I say this because um,
slut is a word that comes up a lot in
YouTube comments and in stuff I've never told you videos. Yes,
I talked about sex rather frequently, but it's I am
(03:01):
rarely called a slut because it's assumed that I have sex,
but rather just I'm a slut, a dumb slut because
I am dispensing information out of a female face and
Christian your experience, I think falls pretty in line with
what Jessica Valenti wrote about in her essay. He's a stud,
she's a slut, and she sites off. She takes off
(03:23):
all of these reasons why she has been called a slut.
She says, I was called a slut with my boobscrew
faster than others. I was called a slut when I
had a boyfriend even though we weren't having sex. I
was called a slut when I didn't have a boyfriend
and kissed a random boy at a party. I was
called a slut when I had the nerve to talk
about sex. I was called a slut when I wore
a bikini on a weekend trip with high school friends.
And then here's here's really the kicker, she says. It
(03:46):
seems the word slut can be applied to any activity
that doesn't include knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest
any sudden movements be deemed horrish. Oh, but you could
even be a slut if you're sitting perfectly still, depending
on what you're wearing, or simply the shape of your body. Yeah,
how just how your face looks yeah, or how your
(04:08):
how your boobs and your hips and your butt look um.
So yeah, it's a lot. It really revolves around keeping
female sexuality and normative femininity in check via forms of
overt and also subtle public and private shaming. So, of course,
the most overt example of slut shaming is just calling
(04:30):
a girl who has had sex with one or one
million people a slut. But then there are also these
more subtle forms of slut shaming, which is really where
this more insidious type of rape culture starts to creep
into our day to day And one of the most
egregious examples in the mass media happened a few years
(04:52):
ago in The New York Times was reporting on the
gang rape of an eleven year old girl in Texas,
and the article commented on how she quote dressed older
than her age and more makeup and fashion is more
appropriate to a woman in her twenties. So, now that
we've established that the slut shaming can take many different forms,
(05:15):
what is a slut? Where did this word come from?
And honestly, Caroline, this is an etymology that I really enjoy,
not because it's not terrible at all, but just because
it hasn't always meant what it means today, and that
kind of stuff always gets my brain really excited. So
in six we have the first use of the word
(05:37):
sluttish in the English language, in the Canterbury Tales, to
describe a lazily dressed guy. Yeah, why it got to
be so sluttish? Take a shower, iron your clothes. My
mother is always telling me to iron my clothes. That's
not really accurate. But by the year fourteen hundred, the
word had already come to mean a slovenly woman, usually
(05:58):
of a lower class, typically a kitchen maide, someone like
a kitchen maid, and we pretty much hold on to
this meaning as the primary meaning through the eighteenth century. Yeah,
and This is where a yield slang terms uh sluts
wool for dust bunny and a sluts hole for a
trash can come into play. I love that. Yeah, I know,
(06:19):
sluts well does make me laugh. But by the time
though it takes a turn for the sexual, it's also
a white woman focused insult due to racist assumptions about
hyper sexualized black women. So from the get go, this
word has always been laden with classism and racism, right,
(06:41):
and because in other words, they were already pre existing
notions about black women being super sexual, so in that
in that way, calling them a slut wouldn't have been that.
He'll checking that it is for women who are supposed
to be exhibiting normative, uh white heterosexual proper femininity. Yeah,
(07:04):
I mean that was in the era when legally speaking,
black women couldn't be raped, right, I mean, that's that
was the extent of this, this kind of racist hyper sexualization.
And when we move though into the twentieth century, in
the fifties, for instance, slots were just called tramps, and
slot shooting was absolutely happening, but in a confusing societal
(07:28):
backdrop that we still have today. But sex was just
far more repressed because you had all of these sexy
on screen sex symbols. How many times can I say
sex in one sentence? And you had you know, dating
culture is taking off, teenage culture is blossoming. Kids are
making out their necking and petting in the backs of
cars down lover's lane, but only but not too much.
(07:51):
You could, you could kiss a boy, but you still
couldn't go too far. But you also had, you know,
fashions with the cone shaped bras and supertight sweaters. I
mean girls, you know, bodies were definitely on display, and
you wanted to be attractive and you and you wanted
to be taken on a date, but you you couldn't
go you couldn't go too far because also the pill
didn't exist at this point, right, Yeah, and so without
(08:14):
accessible birth control, slut shaming did have more tangible risks
like getting pregnant. And this echoes back about to our
girls in Gangs episode, because this was also the heyday
of those girl gang movies that were which were really
all cautionary tales about sluts. Look at these women on motorcycles.
(08:36):
They'll end up going off a cliff, but knocked before
Johnny's knocked her up. Yeah, all the loose women. Well,
I mean, you still see that it's such a trope
in um like horror movies that the girl who has
sex is the first day get killed. Yeah, all the time. Um.
And so today the word slut is still a pretty
(08:57):
confusing term because not only do you have men policing
women for sexual activity or just appearing to be a
person who exists in the world, but you also have
girls calling other girls sluts and self labeling as sluts,
using it as an in group term, Hey, slut. This
(09:18):
was actually something that popped up in a recent episode
of Modern Family where the oldest daughter, Haley, who is
the prototypical fashionista a little bit ditzy to say the least,
was on the phone with her friend and she was
just you know, they were calling each other slut back
and forth, over and over and over again. And it
(09:40):
was obviously is for comedic effect, but it was so
cringe worthy for me sitting there watching it. And of
course she's sitting next to Alex, her feminist intellectual sister,
who was squinching up her nose. But I was like,
oh wow, this is also this is happening to this
is not just on TV. Well, I think I think
I mentioned I. I feel bad for always like saying
(10:03):
negative things about my freshman roommate in college, but I
mentioned her in our episode on the word bitch because
I mentioned my discomfort with that word's use as a
very casual sisterly greeting, like I'm not cool with that.
I'm knocked down with that. And it was very much
the same with her and with me, and with the
words slut. She loved to greet her her BFFs by
(10:27):
calling them sluts, and that was just something that I
was always just like, that is that's not a positive word.
I don't care how you spin it like I'll tolerate it.
I'm not gonna, you know, yell at you for it.
Maybe I should have, but you know, I didn't like it. Well.
The interesting thing is, too, with all of this more
recent self labeling and kind of adopting it as this
in group hey girl kind of term, is that in
(10:49):
the old days we had good girls and tramps, but
now we have this good versus bad slut where it's like, Okay,
I'm such a slut. I have sex outside of marriage.
Everybody knows it, but it's cool because I'm a good slut.
I'll still be your friend, but there's still the bad
slut that you can transgress into if you, I don't know,
(11:12):
do something quote unquote out of line. And it's still
all of this policing of sexuality. You know, even even
when say you're freshman, your roommate was calling her friends sluts,
it wasn't ultimately that friendly because it was still like, hey,
I know what you're doing watching. It's not just saying hey,
slut as a greeting. It's also that thing of like
(11:34):
if you are getting together with your friends and you're
talking about like I kissed a boy or I had
sex with a boy or whatever, you're such a slut.
Laughing meant in a positive teasing way, but that's that's
such like a little that's such a you know, telling
your dog to heal. Like I'm watching you. You're telling
me about this sexual thing, and I'm gonna joke with
(11:55):
you and we're gonna high five, like it's all kosher.
But I I've noticed that you're participating in sexual activity
and you better watch yourself. And speaking from experience in
my twenties in particular, that kind of joking does get
into your head. You internalize it as well, and I
just should just say me. You know, that's something that
(12:17):
came up at a couple of points. So this is
something though, that Leora Tannenbaum has written about now in
two books. The first one was slut Growing Up, Female
with a bad reputation, who really got this whole conversation going,
and she referred to slut shaming a slut bashing, And
she just came out with a new book, I'm Not
(12:37):
a Slut, slut shaming in the Age of the Internet,
and it partially inspired this episode because it has reignited
a lot of these conversations about slut shaming and this
question of what does it mean that girls are now
just calling each other sluts? And is it possible to
reclaim this? So focusing in on what Tannonbomb terms that
(13:01):
reciprocal slut shaming of girl on girl slut shaming, Why,
why does it happen? Why would we do that to
our lady compatriots, Caroline Well, she says that it's a
grasp for power and a patriarchal culture. She says it's
basically a cheap and easy way to feel powerful if
you feel insecure or shamed about your own sexual desires.
(13:24):
All you have to do is call a girl a slut,
and suddenly you're the one who is good and on
top of the social pecking order. So, I mean, it's
the idea that you know, we a lot of people
who argue to reclaim this word or words like it
are saying that it's empowering. I'm empowering myself. But then
(13:44):
you also have to keep in mind that you're you're
claiming this word within this patriarchal structure that exists. Yeah,
where in slut still very much and even a majority
of the time still has the negative aation of the direct,
you know, devaluing of women and girls, right where women
(14:07):
and girls are policing each other for their degree and
type and appropriateness of femininity. And Tannebaum takes a really
intellectual approach to digging into this question of why, especially today,
this kind of reciprocal slut shaming is happening, and at
one point she cites a French Marxist philosopher who talks
(14:31):
about how femininity is an ideology and quote, slut shaming
is a hailing mechanism that transforms females into both disciplinary
agents as well as feminine subjects. So she goes on
to write quote observation becomes a mechanism of discipline and coercion,
(14:51):
and she even gets into putting this in the framework
of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, where essentially, now, especially with so
media and smartphones and selfies, etcetera, etcetera, we're constantly being monitored,
but we don't know we're being monitored. And yes, this
is all through the framework of slut shaming, So we're
in a slut shaming pan opticon, Caroline. That's actually that
(15:14):
is literally this point is where I had to stop
reading the excerpt of her book on Salon dot com
because it just was getting so intense slash depressing. Not
that I was like, this is too hard for me
to read. It was more like, this is too upsetting
for me to read because it's so true the fact
that we just in general have internalized the fact that
(15:38):
we're being watched, that everything we do is on Instagram
or Facebook or like creepshots dot com or whatever, which
thankfully is no more. Yeah, well, websites like that things
places where people are posting terrible pictures or places where
you're expected to post a good picture. Of yourself and
we've just internalized that this is natural and normal. But
(15:58):
it also leads us to least others who aren't acting
according to whatever sort of ephemeral law we think they
should be acting according to. Yeah, because when it comes
to that abiding by the rules of normative femininity in
today's rules, part of that is presenting attractive images of yourself,
(16:18):
these like online personas that we have. But the line
of the good slept versus the bad slut comes up
a lot, for instance with the revenge porn podcast that
we did a while back, wherein sexting is a common
part of today's dating process, and it's totally fine. If
(16:40):
you are in a relationship with someone and you send
him or her a naked photo of yourself, that's being
a good slut. If it ever gets weaked, though, or
if you're not in a relationship with that person, then
you're a bad slut. Then you are asking for everyone
to see you right exactly. And then I mean speaking
(17:01):
about you know, today's kids, kids these days, these days, well, yeah,
let's be honest. That leads us to this study that
was done by UK think tank Demos, which examine the
use of the words rape, whore, and slut in tweets,
and found that accounts with male names used one of
(17:22):
those words more than a hundred and sixteen thousand times,
while accounts with female names did so more than ninety
four thousand times. Yeah, this was reported on in Time
magazine basically saying, hey, okay, here is social media proof that, Yeah,
women are calling each other whores and sluts and making
(17:42):
rape jokes or outright rape e comments to other women. Well,
it's the norm. It's become not not just like a
rape joke or saying like oh that test raped me
or whatever, but commenting and judge, commenting on a judging
women's body bodies is the norm. Judging women's sexuality, whether
(18:03):
it's it exists or not, is the norm. And so
if you look at it in terms of like a
who has the power and who's within that power? If
if the people with the power are making this the norm,
the people without the power are going to go along
with it. And that's what these researchers found, which is
that women are going along with this train in terms
(18:25):
of calling other women sluts and horse And I would
say too that again, like slut is such a powerful
word because it is shorthand for completely and immediately devaluing
someone because of the classism and racism embedded in it,
and because of just how the worthlessness implied with it.
(18:49):
At least when it comes to calling someone a whore
or a prostitute, that person is is earning a wage
and money at least is wielding more economic power than
a slut. Right, But let's take a little deeper, Caroline,
because we're talking about a lot of cultural forces at work,
a lot of nurture, a lot of environment. But there
are some people to who think that, hey, maybe slut
(19:11):
shaming it's just science. And we will talk about that
when we come right back from a quick break and
now back to the show. Well, so before our break,
we gave you a lot to chew on in terms
of not only where the term slut came from and
(19:33):
what it has meant over the ages, but really how
people nowadays are using it to police others. And so
let's get into some academic work that's been done on
the theory surrounding sex, sexual power, and yes, slut shaming. Yeah,
some think, well, maybe this is just evolution at work.
(19:55):
Maybe females naturally, I mean females like in the the
natural world sense of the word, we slut shame each
other for a purpose. And we talked actually about some
of this research in our podcast not so long ago
on shine theory, when we referenced primatologists Sarah Hardy's research
(20:16):
on female competition, because, as we noted, the longstanding scientific
paradigm was that females were coy passive objects of male competition.
Men are the competitors. Women are the recipients. We're just
hanging out on chaise lounges, fainting couches. Yes, wait, it
(20:37):
is waiting for a for a male male to hop
our way, that's right. But it turns out that basically
the study in the nineteen forties that a lot of
that was based on was inaccurate. Yeah, poor methodology. And
it turns out that primate research has found that, surprise, surprise,
females are actually quite competitive. And Hardy actually describes the
(21:00):
female species at one point as quote flexible and opportunistic
individuals who confront recurring reproductive dilemmas and tradeoffs within a
world of shifting options. So ladies be crafty? Is that
what that means? I think? So? I think I think
that that's what that means. So split shaming is a
part of that. Well, we are flexible and opportunistic, and
(21:25):
we are dealing with reproductive dilemmas and tradeoffs, and perhaps
splut shaming is just a tradeoff to deal with the
reproductive dilemma. Interesting, okay, So yeah, speaking of that competitiveness
and that sexual power driven competition between women, we also
talked about this issue in our Shine Theory episode. And
(21:47):
this is coming from a study from McMaster University that
was conducted by Tracy Villancourt and Anschal Sharma where they
sent a plant into basically a a lab or a
classroom where like a human plant like they sent a
palm tree with sunglasses. Yes, okay, point taken. They sent
(22:09):
a woman as a plant. She was she was part
of she was in in the in the scam, she
was helping run the scam. They sent this woman into
this room where two female friends were sitting and the
female friends had been told you're here as part of
a study on friendship. What they did not tell the
women was that they would be sending in this plant,
(22:30):
this palm tree, this ficus, wearing a bikini, dressed either
like in a T shirt, and jeans, or in a
low cut tight blouse and a short skirt. And then
they sent this woman in and they just sat back
and watched because what happened, and you can pretty much,
I mean, it's predictable. When the woman went in wearing
(22:51):
a T shirt and jeans and was like, hey, have
you seen professor so and so, the women were like, yeah,
it's down the hall didn't think twice about it. When
the woman went in, same woman where the tight clothes.
Oh boy, did the slug shaming hit the fans. Yeah,
the participants turned on her so quickly, Yeah, saying saying
(23:11):
terrible things about her, rolling their eyes, making assumptions out
loud that she was just going to go, you know,
screw the professor or whatever. Interesting to see how that
sexual competition, which is I mean unspoken, it's it's not
like directly happening, but that issue of sexual competition enters
(23:32):
this situation so fast and furious. Yeah, the the participant
responses honestly read like the intro too, sir, mix a
lot's baby got back. It was a lot of oh
my god, Becky, did you see her? But I mean, again,
using this language and these reactions to essentially discount her
as a person. Yeah. And so what these researchers think
(23:54):
is going on is that sludge shaming is guarding against
mate poaching and ensuring access to sexual resources by limiting
men's access. So sludge shaming reciprocal sledge shaming, the girl
on girl. Sludge shaming serves possibly this horrible um by
(24:16):
reproductive purpose, solving that reproductive dilemma of hey, you know what,
we need to keep him away from her because she's
going to distract him away from us. Yeah, and women
do not like other women who they perceived to be
sexually permissive. Yeah. This um came out of a study
published recently in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
(24:38):
titled Birds of a Feather Not when it comes to
sexual permissiveness. And this was really interesting because it not
only highlighted sludge shaming, but also the sexual double standard
that is intertwined with slut shaming. Right, So, these researchers
basically presented uh potential fictional friends to study participant ends
(25:00):
and had them evaluate a bunch of different characteristics, and
they found that for women and for non sexually permissive men,
having sexually permissive friends was not desirable. And then they
took it a step further and had these fictional friends
evaluated on levels like competence, emotional stability, warmth, and dominance,
(25:23):
and across the board, the fictional sexually permissive men were
seen as more competent and emotionally stable than the sexually
permissive women. Essentially, there are lots of studies like this
that have been done examining different kinds of sexual double
standards at work, where they simply interchange the names, you know,
(25:43):
John or Joan for the same kinds of qualities, and
we find that we're often far less comfortable with Joan.
Joan is always being sent to the corner or Joan well,
and it's because that sexual permissiveness, which is just a
fancy way of saying like, hey, yeah, I've hooked up
with people, people who are honest, Yeah, but no, I
(26:04):
shouldn't just say that, people who are more open to
maybe non monogamous relationships and hookups and things like that.
That was interpreted as a form of dominance, and so
that the researchers think is what made the traits so
undesirable for these fictional women, even when being evaluated bisexually
(26:25):
permissive women. I think that issue of dominance is so interesting,
and I think that plays so well into that Evo
bio explanation of well, not only the evo bio explanation,
but also just our historical understanding of the words slut
and what that means to different people, because because if
you're going to judge someone for sexual permissiveness or what
(26:48):
you perceive to be sexual permissiveness, that means that he
or in this case, she is not acting according to
how you think she should be acting, and maybe whether
you want to be free to make these choices. Also,
you're there could be some issue of being threatened by
someone's behavior being outside the norm. Perhaps, I think there's
(27:11):
maybe the threatening factor at work, and also to the
fear of being associated with someone. It's like, well, if
I'm hanging out with quote unquote slotty Jane, then maybe
they'll think that I am like they They'll think I'm
a Joane too, a gang of slutty Jones. No one
wants to be slotty Jane. But let's split the script
(27:33):
and talk about slutty John for a second, because one
of the more recent questions with this whole slutge shaming
thing is, well, can men be slut shamed, because it's
rather debatable because the entire existence of sludge shaming, in
this concept of sledgehamming is based on the patriarchy, and
(27:54):
within that embedded in it to it is normative femininity
and heteronormativity and all of as many women's studies buzzwords
as you can fit into one sentence, all adding up
to a sexual double standard that is permissive for John's
and restrictive for Jones. Right, I mean, can men be
(28:14):
shamed about certain behaviors or made to feel embarrassed, Yeah, sure,
But in terms of the very specific realm that we're
discussing right now, in terms of calling them a slut, no,
men can't really be slut shamed in the same way
that women are because, you, guys, the root of this
word is it's a female gendered insult, and man slut
(28:39):
just arguably doesn't carry the same weight that calling a
woman a slut does. Because I mean, you mentioned the
sexual double standard, slut shaming sort of hinges on that
the idea that female sexuality is inherently bad and male
sexuality is inherently awesome. Well, and this was something that
you and I, Caroline were just talking about casually before
(29:02):
the podcast in terms of the man slut not carrying
as much weight because the threat of being labeled as
a man slut or a man whore is that he's
just probably not going to make a very good boyfriend.
But if you are a woman and you are called
a slut, then that means that your body is dirty
(29:23):
and you're a bad person. You're a bad person, and
that's someone who you probably shouldn't you shouldn't even really
be interested in having sex with that person because it's
just you know, used goods. So there's so there's usually
so much more to it. And it's interesting too to
look at the gendered language of sexually promiscuous people. And
(29:45):
I'm pretty sure that we've talked about this before on
the podcast. Um, but there's this often cited nineteen three
study looking at the words the gendered words for promiscuous people.
They identified to hundred in the English language relating to
sexually promiscuous women and only twenty for men, just twenty.
(30:07):
And I would really love if there are any linguists listening,
if you know of a more recent study, or if
you could just conduct an updated study. I want to
know there is one slightly more updated but still dated
study from in Finland that identified four hundred Finnish words
for promiscuous women and only a hundred and twenty for
(30:30):
promiscuous men, which often tended to be more tolerant. And
I laughed out loud when I got to the part
where they were listing various terms for men and women,
and men had names like bore and stallion, but women
were called village hors, and I, from the from the
(30:50):
sheer surprise of it, just laughed out loud because they
they don't play around. They cut right to the chase
on that one. Yeah, yeah, I mean you have men
could be make be called pimps, which again it's reflective
of his ownership of other women players, similar thing Casanova's
and Don Juans. That sounds that Depp, Yes, and you're
(31:11):
just a Johnny Depp. I mean, at worst, you can
call a man a dog, but a lot of times
to those those male pointed insults usually have some kind
of female ricochet effect back to say a mother or
a son of a or a you know whatever kind
of word I can't say on the podcast, right, but
(31:31):
I mean, even the word dog, however derogatory. You mean
it or you intended to be. It's still more of
a way that he's treating other people rather than a
commentary on how many people he's having sex with. Yeah,
I mean there is no what's the word for a
male mistress? There is none? You know, yeah, kept man,
Even that sounds like if I just envisioned pools and cabanas,
(31:55):
So it doesn't even seem that bad. So so, even
in our flut shaming language, it's still so female focus. Um.
Although we did find a two thousand thirteen dissertation written
by Michael Flood called Male and Female Sluts Shifts and
Stabilities in the regulation of sexual relations among young heterosexual men. Yes,
(32:19):
there's a lot. There's a lot in that title. Um.
And he was focusing though on college men in Australia,
and his research did find concerns among those Aussie blokes
of being labeled a male slut. Yeah. And so he
proposes that this concern itself signals a slight weakening of
(32:39):
the sexual double standard and an increased policing of male
sexual behavior, which to that I say, great, But I'll
believe it when I see it. I mean, well, it's
I mean, the keywords there's a slight weakening. Um and
I do think hearing especially from men directly on YouTube,
because that's where I hear the most directly throughout the comments,
(33:00):
there is a lot of there, There is a lot
of concern out there. I think that men men feel
police in certain ways as well. But it's almost the reverse.
It's more, uh, you're not having enough sex? Yes, yes,
a feeling like they need to meet up to these
standards of masculinity rather than you know, and being like
(33:22):
what if I what if I don't want to well
hook up all the time. But I mean there's also like,
if you look at all the cultural and social ideas
behind calling a woman a slut policing her sexuality, if
you look at like Rush Limbaugh talking about Sandra Fluke
and her campaign for birth control, affordable birth control. I mean,
(33:43):
one writer, I can't remember if it was Valenti, but
one writer brought up the fact of like, okay, well,
if men and young boys are being encouraged to go
out and have all the sex, and women are being
told that they're bad people if they go out and
have any sex or even think about it, Like, what's
happening in that in that interim, like who are these
(34:04):
women that men are supposed to go out and be
so virile with? And like what are women? Like, who's
nobody's talking, Let's let's talk about this. What's in the
middle ground? Yeah, I mean, and this is where we
get to the impact of sledgehaming, because I think that
middle ground is a lack of sexual communication issues with
consent of people not knowing what we're so often, especially
(34:27):
in US culture, I'll be very interested to hear from
international listeners about this. We are so openly sexual and
yet so simultaneously repressed that it I mean, I think
it reaks so much havoc in the bedroom or the
backseat or wherever sex sexual contact is happening. It leads
(34:48):
to so many kind of nasty expectations on both sides exactly. Yeah,
I mean it is. It is absolutely a lose lose
situation for women and men alike because it is constantly
rein forcing the sexual double standard, and it also handicaps
healthy sexual exploration and growth in young women who are
(35:08):
terrified of being labeled sluts to the point that they're
not even going to masturbate because they feel like that's
going to make them This thing, it's sturdy thing. Yeah,
and that also means that you're getting a lot of
ill informed kids out there who are afraid of STDs,
but who might end up contracting them because they don't
have they're not equipped with the right info. And it
(35:30):
also is going to inhibit sexual communication and disclosure between
partners or just between friends or healthcare providers, and engaging
in other kinds of sex that isn't penis in vagina
intercourse that would therefore constitute sluttish behavior in the modern
sense of the term, and thinking that that's not sex
(35:52):
as well. So it's yeah, it just we really just
have this this brimming sluts hole of garbage thanks to
this thing. And of course we have to talk about
in the context of rape, because slutge shaming quickly spirals
into victim blaming, right, Yeah, the thought that, oh, she's
(36:16):
she's dressed a certain way, she's acting a certain way,
she looks a certain way, so you know, she deserves
whatever bad thing happened to her. You know, if the
girl in Steubenville who was drunk and say she's somehow
deserved to be sexually attacked, exactly, women always have to
not only apparently police other women's bodies, but police their
own body as well. We are constantly in charge of
(36:37):
we We are both the prisoners and the guards of
our own pin opticons, Caroline, that's exhausting to think about it. Well,
it is, it's exhausting to live it. But also one
thing that has gotten a little exhausting too for some
people is the constant use of slutt shaming as sort
of the jumping off point to comment on things. And
(37:02):
that is a really ineloquent way of this question of Okay,
are we not overusing this term? Is everything now flut shaming?
Can we ever critique female sexuality in a healthy way
and it not be slut shaming? Right? I mean? A
couple of writers have talked about this, including Callibuseman over
(37:24):
at Jezebel, who wrote that all too often slut shaming
is used to police women for policing other women, which
is just hypocritical abusement, and others call for a more
open dialogue and an acknowledgement that Okay, you're doing one
thing and you think it one way, and you're doing
another thing and think another way, and it's okay if
(37:45):
people disagree, it's better too. Like you said, open that
dialogue and actually have a healthy critique of you know,
whether it's pop culture or just sexuality or whatever. It's
better to have that conversation and say, okay, well I
disagree with you, but here's why and what do you think,
then to just immediately shut down the conversation with well,
that's sled shaming, so your opinion doesn't matter, right because
(38:07):
it always points the finger to the woman. And I
mean the the examples where this really came up big time,
where after Sned O'Connor wrote that open letter to Miley
Cyrus post MTV v M as with with the Twerking
as the kids say, and then when Rashida Jones went
on a bit of a tweet fest and also wrote
(38:29):
a Glamour essay all about how uh you know, female
celebrities of pop stars essentially need to cover up and
that is very much paraphrasing her, And so that was
then flipped around on both Shond O'Connor and Rashida Jones
as saying, hey, stop being so sledge shaming and sex negative, right,
(38:51):
And I mean you could argue that certain things could
have been phrased better and either one of those essays,
but I mean, the point remains that you have two women,
Shenad O'Connor and Rashida gents who have very certain types
of perspectives, and they're allowed to have those perspectives, um,
but certain other people definitely felt attacked when those opinions
(39:13):
were presented. Yeah. For instance, one of Rashida Jones, the
tweet really that started this whole Rashida Jones debacle involved
her calling referring to these women as dressing like horrors.
So doing the whole like horror thing not a not
a great move, but I think that it is valid
for her and say Shenat O'Connor and whomever else to
(39:36):
critique representations of women in pop culture like what is
what are we kind of collectively worshiping? Right? Because they
both do, however, eloquently or ineloquently, bring up the idea
that you can't forget the context in which these conversations
are occurring, and in which these music videos or fashion
(39:57):
shows or whatever you're looking at are occurring, which use
that same patriarchal structure. I'm just I'm picturing like a pergola, uh,
patriarchal pergola uh, in which we're all having some sort
of awful patriarchal cocktail party where we think that if
we dress a certain way or act a certain way,
we are freeing ourselves and being empowered. When people like
(40:20):
Sennt O'Connor saying, you're just playing to those puppet masters,
those patriarchal Pergola puppet masters, Yeah, because that's the thing too.
We we haven't even and won't have time to even
get into the clothes issue. But cover up is never
the answer to any of this. I think it's it's
a lot more instructive perhaps to dig into let's let's
(40:45):
remember where this words slot comes from and where the
problem really arises. And to me that comes up a
lot with the classism and racism inherently tied up with it.
And when it comes to this question of like, well,
why don't we just reclaim this word, why don't we
It's fine, We're we're just women on the go, we're
(41:08):
on birth control, we have our I U D s.
We can be sluts do and it can be fine.
But yeah, yeah, I think my feelings can can definitely
be summed up about the multifaceted negative connotations of this
word by Fairitanus. She's the executive director of Black Women's Blueprint,
and she wrote, if people really put their minds to it,
(41:30):
they could probably reclaim the word slut. But for me,
I wouldn't want to because reclaiming means that it was
yours in the first place. And the word slut is
not something that I created for myself. It's something that
was created for a particular purpose, and the purpose wasn't
to serve me. And I think that touches on issues
of class and race, which are so inherent in the
(41:52):
word and its use and evolution. And when it comes
to that class factor too, it's very much alive and
well in its usage today. It's by actually when it
comes to reciprocal slut shaming, And this was demonstrated by
a pair of sociologists who essentially tracked girls on a
college campus and found highly class stratified patterns of slut shaming,
(42:16):
where you have wealthier girls who are usually in sororities,
who would tend to specifically slut shame less wealthy girls
who were in sororities, but then also the less wealthy
women doing the same thing to the wealthier women, saying
they're just rich sluts whatever. But when it came to
the power dynamics, those wealthier women's slut shaming was more damaging. Yeah,
(42:44):
and it's it's interesting to look at the hierarchies that
these sociologists reported on, because the wealthier or better off
college women considered sluts to be trashy, lower class women,
whereas if you look at the less wealthy non sorority
women on campus, they considered sluts to be the rich
(43:04):
bees in sororities. Because each of them had a different
definition of what was trashy and slutty that did not
include themselves, and so this freed them up to act. However,
they so chose to act while still being able to
police the behavior of women who were different from them. Well,
and then too when we I mean, you've already touched
on this, but when you move into the race factor.
(43:27):
This came up big time with the slut walk movement
that was really on fire a few years ago, and
we did a podcast about it, and black women really
wanted nothing to do with it because of how that
word has related to them historically as black women. And
we cited in that podcast on slut walks Susan Britton's
(43:50):
open letter from Black women to slut Walk organizers, which said, quote,
we do not have the privilege or space to call
ourselves slut with validating the already historically entrenched ideology and
recurring messages about what and who the black woman is.
We don't have the privilege to play on destructive representations
(44:10):
burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls
for generations. And that's a big reason why. In a
more recent article in The New York Times by Annah
Holmes asking this question of can we reclaim slut, and
she interviews Lee or a Tannon Bomb about her new book,
and the answer is still kind of shakes out to
be no, for these same kinds of reasons of Hey,
(44:32):
this is this is loaded with a lot of garbage.
It is letter with a lot of garbage. Just it's
it's it has never ceased to be an ugly word.
And I and I understand, I absolutely understand the impetus
behind wanting to reclaim it and grab it from the
hands of the people who use it to try to
oppress you or check your behavior or police the way
(44:53):
you look at, think, feel whatever. But I just don't
know that calling yourself and your friends or anyone a
slut is the answer to that, and it's certainly not
going to be our path to eradicating slut shaming. And
this is a poor analogy, but to me, it's like
telling women that, hey, you know what's gonna cure rape culture?
(45:15):
I was just telling rape jokes all the time. If
we just like make it funny, then it'll be fine.
Then it'll just stop because we'll be like, it'll take
the sting out of it. Like Nope, that hasn't happened
at all. So I I don't know the answer to
what's gonna stop slut shaming. I think that us stopping
calling each other sluts as Tina Fey told us to
do and mean girls a long time ago. It's a
(45:36):
good start. Yeah, I think that's a good start. But
I mean, we have so much sort of digging to
do in terms of really unpacking how we feel about
sexuality of both men and women and and trying to
trying to um not change how people think, although that
would be nice, but but just to just to become
(45:58):
aware that we even have these prejudices, these these feelings,
these negative feelings about how women even moved through this world,
and on an individual level, keeping ourselves accountable for the
policing behavior that we may consciously or even subconsciously an
(46:19):
act right because, like you said at the beginning of
the podcast, Kristen, slug shamming does not have to involve
me calling someone a slut. All it has to do
is involved me criticizing someone's skirt for being too short
or something along those lines, and then I have effectively
slut shamed someone and I have played into this patriarchal pergola.
Not the patriarchal pergola. Carol, Well, we definitely want to
(46:43):
hear from listeners about this. Mom Stuff at how Stuffwork
dot com is our email address. Do you have the
brilliant plan of how we can finally end slut shaming?
Do you think that it's a term that can be reclaimed?
And I'm curious too for parents with kids, is this
something that you think about as well, especially if you
have girls like to slut shaming play any role in
(47:07):
your at home sex education. I want to know all
of your thoughts and perspectives. Mom Stuff at how stuff
Works dot com again is our email address. You can
tweet us at mom stuff podcast or messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. Well, I've got a letter here about
(47:29):
our episode on lady lawyers and hal of they dress,
speaking of slut shaming that definitely happens in the courtroom.
And this was from Monique, who is currently a law
student in her third year of law school, and she said,
I was so happy to hear that you decided to
tackle the lady lawyer dress issue. I too have faced
the frustrations around what to wear in the courtroom and
(47:50):
even at work. But there were a couple of issues
I think you missed out on. First, the regional differences
in what is appropriate for court wear. For example, in Florida,
what would be appropriate in a Miami courthouse is much
different than what would be appropriate in a Jacksonville courthouse
or a courthouse in the Panhandle. This is also true
between states. I recently went to a conference with students
(48:12):
from different states and found that in some areas, wearing
brightly colored suits or shoes is not frowned upon. The
general rule of thumb is a more liberal a location,
the more liberal the rule address. I was told by
mentors to always, if at all possible, sit on a
court case for the judge you will be trying a
case before to get the general rules of that courtroom.
Every judge is a bit different, and it's best to
(48:33):
be prepared with the clothing that they will receive you
the best. In The other issue I think you missed
on is hair. As a woman of color, I'm especially
sensitive on issues of hair in the courtroom. The general
argument I've heard is that nothing in your appearance should
distracting the law you are presenting. This means that for
most women of color, you must have your hair permed.
While I've seen a few black female attorneys with natural hair,
(48:55):
it's few and far between. Perming my hair was a
decision I made on my own early my wife, so
continuing it isn't as much of a hardship as for
women who come to law school and then decide they
have to do it. The legal field is uniquely behind
the times, but as the influx of more females come
into the field, hopefully some of these issues will be fixed.
(49:16):
So thanks Monique and good luck with the rest of
law school. And I have a letter here from Rachel.
She says, I live in Morganton, West Virginia, and I'm
a regular listener and lover of your podcast. I have
so many favorites and recommend your podcast to almost everyone
I know. Thank you, Rachel. She goes on to say,
this Valentine's Day, a lot of women are going to
(49:37):
see Fifty Shades of Gray, which got me and my
gal pals chatting about the series. So I've only read
the first book. I found the story to be just
as Lisa Wilkinson put it, quote, domestic violence dressed up
as erotica. I personally thought it was poorly written and
have read accounts from b D s M community members
stating that it's a completely wrong portrayal of their community.
(50:00):
The pre ticket sales for this movie are record breaking,
which had us all talking about rape culture, and we
all agreed that this would be something awesome to hear
from you gals. Well, Rachel, you'll be happy to hear that.
Not only of Chris and I received a lot of
letters about this very same topic, but we have now
put it on our two podcast lists and that episode
(50:20):
will be coming to you very soon. That's right, Kink
Week is happening in March on Stuff Mom never told you,
so tune in or maybe just now be a little
weird about so if you have letters or requests for
us moms, Steven house Stuffworks dot com is our email
addressed and links to all of our social media as
well as all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including
(50:43):
this one with our sources so you can read up
as well. All about sledge shaming. Head on over to
stuff mom Never Told You dot com. Little more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it house stuff
works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and welcome to slut Shaming. One oh one.
Prepared to be shocked in a probably a depressing way. Oh,
(00:24):
let's not make it depressing. It's good for us to
understand these kinds of things like slut shaming. It is good. No,
it is good. I don't want to frame it in
terms of like, this whole episode is going to be
full of information about shaming women, but it kind of is.
But this is a topic we want to talk about
because it is something that has come up a lot
in past episodes. It is brought up a lot in
(00:47):
terms of the concept of rape culture. Listeners have requested it,
and we did an episode a way back when now
on slut Walks in which we talked about the ed
mology and the possible reclamation of the word slut, and
we'll give you a brief primer on that just to
quickly revisit it. But we really wanted to focus in
(01:09):
on this concept of slut shaming because it is I mean,
by this point it is a word that or term
I should say that comes up so much some people
even think that it's lost its meaning. Yeah, that's right.
It actually made it into the American Dialects Society's twenty
twelve Words of the Year list in the category of
(01:30):
most Outrageous. Yeah. It defines slut shaming as attacking a
woman for socially stigmatized sexual activity, to which I say,
American Dialect Society, No, it's not even It's so much
more than just that. And Ben Zimmer, though, who was
writing for the American Dialect Society, traces it to two
(01:53):
thousand and six, so it does seem like it's it's
a millennial term for sure. Right. Well, Christen, you indicated
that that definition was a little bit limited. Yes, So
let's turn to Andrea Rubinstein at finally Feminism one oh one,
who offers a succinct definition, but I still think it's
a little more inclusive. She says. It's the idea of
(02:15):
shaming and or attacking a woman or girl for being sexual,
having one or more sexual partners, acknowledging sexual feelings, and
or acting on sexual feelings. Yeah, and it usually conforms
to patriarchal norms, but it's also highly subjective, especially when
it comes to things like clothing or simply expressing opinions
(02:38):
or acting in any kind of way out in public
that people can see. And I say this because um,
slut is a word that comes up a lot in
YouTube comments and in stuff I've never told you videos. Yes,
I talked about sex rather frequently, but it's I am
(03:01):
rarely called a slut because it's assumed that I have sex,
but rather just I'm a slut, a dumb slut because
I am dispensing information out of a female face and
Christian your experience, I think falls pretty in line with
what Jessica Valenti wrote about in her essay. He's a stud,
she's a slut, and she sites off. She takes off
(03:23):
all of these reasons why she has been called a slut.
She says, I was called a slut with my boobscrew
faster than others. I was called a slut when I
had a boyfriend even though we weren't having sex. I
was called a slut when I didn't have a boyfriend
and kissed a random boy at a party. I was
called a slut when I had the nerve to talk
about sex. I was called a slut when I wore
a bikini on a weekend trip with high school friends.
And then here's here's really the kicker, she says. It
(03:46):
seems the word slut can be applied to any activity
that doesn't include knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest
any sudden movements be deemed horrish. Oh, but you could
even be a slut if you're sitting perfectly still, depending
on what you're wearing, or simply the shape of your body. Yeah,
how just how your face looks yeah, or how your
(04:08):
how your boobs and your hips and your butt look um.
So yeah, it's a lot. It really revolves around keeping
female sexuality and normative femininity in check via forms of
overt and also subtle public and private shaming. So, of course,
the most overt example of slut shaming is just calling
(04:30):
a girl who has had sex with one or one
million people a slut. But then there are also these
more subtle forms of slut shaming, which is really where
this more insidious type of rape culture starts to creep
into our day to day And one of the most
egregious examples in the mass media happened a few years
(04:52):
ago in The New York Times was reporting on the
gang rape of an eleven year old girl in Texas,
and the article commented on how she quote dressed older
than her age and more makeup and fashion is more
appropriate to a woman in her twenties. So, now that
we've established that the slut shaming can take many different forms,
(05:15):
what is a slut? Where did this word come from?
And honestly, Caroline, this is an etymology that I really enjoy,
not because it's not terrible at all, but just because
it hasn't always meant what it means today, and that
kind of stuff always gets my brain really excited. So
in six we have the first use of the word
(05:37):
sluttish in the English language, in the Canterbury Tales, to
describe a lazily dressed guy. Yeah, why it got to
be so sluttish? Take a shower, iron your clothes. My
mother is always telling me to iron my clothes. That's
not really accurate. But by the year fourteen hundred, the
word had already come to mean a slovenly woman, usually
(05:58):
of a lower class, typically a kitchen maide, someone like
a kitchen maid, and we pretty much hold on to
this meaning as the primary meaning through the eighteenth century. Yeah,
and This is where a yield slang terms uh sluts
wool for dust bunny and a sluts hole for a
trash can come into play. I love that. Yeah, I know,
(06:19):
sluts well does make me laugh. But by the time
though it takes a turn for the sexual, it's also
a white woman focused insult due to racist assumptions about
hyper sexualized black women. So from the get go, this
word has always been laden with classism and racism, right,
(06:41):
and because in other words, they were already pre existing
notions about black women being super sexual, so in that
in that way, calling them a slut wouldn't have been that.
He'll checking that it is for women who are supposed
to be exhibiting normative, uh white heterosexual proper femininity. Yeah,
(07:04):
I mean that was in the era when legally speaking,
black women couldn't be raped, right, I mean, that's that
was the extent of this, this kind of racist hyper sexualization.
And when we move though into the twentieth century, in
the fifties, for instance, slots were just called tramps, and
slot shooting was absolutely happening, but in a confusing societal
(07:28):
backdrop that we still have today. But sex was just
far more repressed because you had all of these sexy
on screen sex symbols. How many times can I say
sex in one sentence? And you had you know, dating
culture is taking off, teenage culture is blossoming. Kids are
making out their necking and petting in the backs of
cars down lover's lane, but only but not too much.
(07:51):
You could, you could kiss a boy, but you still
couldn't go too far. But you also had, you know,
fashions with the cone shaped bras and supertight sweaters. I
mean girls, you know, bodies were definitely on display, and
you wanted to be attractive and you and you wanted
to be taken on a date, but you you couldn't
go you couldn't go too far because also the pill
didn't exist at this point, right, Yeah, and so without
(08:14):
accessible birth control, slut shaming did have more tangible risks
like getting pregnant. And this echoes back about to our
girls in Gangs episode, because this was also the heyday
of those girl gang movies that were which were really
all cautionary tales about sluts. Look at these women on motorcycles.
(08:36):
They'll end up going off a cliff, but knocked before
Johnny's knocked her up. Yeah, all the loose women. Well,
I mean, you still see that it's such a trope
in um like horror movies that the girl who has
sex is the first day get killed. Yeah, all the time. Um.
And so today the word slut is still a pretty
(08:57):
confusing term because not only do you have men policing
women for sexual activity or just appearing to be a
person who exists in the world, but you also have
girls calling other girls sluts and self labeling as sluts,
using it as an in group term, Hey, slut. This
(09:18):
was actually something that popped up in a recent episode
of Modern Family where the oldest daughter, Haley, who is
the prototypical fashionista a little bit ditzy to say the least,
was on the phone with her friend and she was
just you know, they were calling each other slut back
and forth, over and over and over again. And it
(09:40):
was obviously is for comedic effect, but it was so
cringe worthy for me sitting there watching it. And of
course she's sitting next to Alex, her feminist intellectual sister,
who was squinching up her nose. But I was like,
oh wow, this is also this is happening to this
is not just on TV. Well, I think I think
I mentioned I. I feel bad for always like saying
(10:03):
negative things about my freshman roommate in college, but I
mentioned her in our episode on the word bitch because
I mentioned my discomfort with that word's use as a
very casual sisterly greeting, like I'm not cool with that.
I'm knocked down with that. And it was very much
the same with her and with me, and with the
words slut. She loved to greet her her BFFs by
(10:27):
calling them sluts, and that was just something that I
was always just like, that is that's not a positive word.
I don't care how you spin it like I'll tolerate it.
I'm not gonna, you know, yell at you for it.
Maybe I should have, but you know, I didn't like it. Well.
The interesting thing is, too, with all of this more
recent self labeling and kind of adopting it as this
in group hey girl kind of term, is that in
(10:49):
the old days we had good girls and tramps, but
now we have this good versus bad slut where it's like, Okay,
I'm such a slut. I have sex outside of marriage.
Everybody knows it, but it's cool because I'm a good slut.
I'll still be your friend, but there's still the bad
slut that you can transgress into if you, I don't know,
(11:12):
do something quote unquote out of line. And it's still
all of this policing of sexuality. You know, even even
when say you're freshman, your roommate was calling her friends sluts,
it wasn't ultimately that friendly because it was still like, hey,
I know what you're doing watching. It's not just saying hey,
slut as a greeting. It's also that thing of like
(11:34):
if you are getting together with your friends and you're
talking about like I kissed a boy or I had
sex with a boy or whatever, you're such a slut.
Laughing meant in a positive teasing way, but that's that's
such like a little that's such a you know, telling
your dog to heal. Like I'm watching you. You're telling
me about this sexual thing, and I'm gonna joke with
(11:55):
you and we're gonna high five, like it's all kosher.
But I I've noticed that you're participating in sexual activity
and you better watch yourself. And speaking from experience in
my twenties in particular, that kind of joking does get
into your head. You internalize it as well, and I
just should just say me. You know, that's something that
(12:17):
came up at a couple of points. So this is
something though, that Leora Tannenbaum has written about now in
two books. The first one was slut Growing Up, Female
with a bad reputation, who really got this whole conversation going,
and she referred to slut shaming a slut bashing, And
she just came out with a new book, I'm Not
(12:37):
a Slut, slut shaming in the Age of the Internet,
and it partially inspired this episode because it has reignited
a lot of these conversations about slut shaming and this
question of what does it mean that girls are now
just calling each other sluts? And is it possible to
reclaim this? So focusing in on what Tannonbomb terms that
(13:01):
reciprocal slut shaming of girl on girl slut shaming, Why,
why does it happen? Why would we do that to
our lady compatriots, Caroline Well, she says that it's a
grasp for power and a patriarchal culture. She says it's
basically a cheap and easy way to feel powerful if
you feel insecure or shamed about your own sexual desires.
(13:24):
All you have to do is call a girl a slut,
and suddenly you're the one who is good and on
top of the social pecking order. So, I mean, it's
the idea that you know, we a lot of people
who argue to reclaim this word or words like it
are saying that it's empowering. I'm empowering myself. But then
(13:44):
you also have to keep in mind that you're you're
claiming this word within this patriarchal structure that exists. Yeah,
where in slut still very much and even a majority
of the time still has the negative aation of the direct,
you know, devaluing of women and girls, right where women
(14:07):
and girls are policing each other for their degree and
type and appropriateness of femininity. And Tannebaum takes a really
intellectual approach to digging into this question of why, especially today,
this kind of reciprocal slut shaming is happening, and at
one point she cites a French Marxist philosopher who talks
(14:31):
about how femininity is an ideology and quote, slut shaming
is a hailing mechanism that transforms females into both disciplinary
agents as well as feminine subjects. So she goes on
to write quote observation becomes a mechanism of discipline and coercion,
(14:51):
and she even gets into putting this in the framework
of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, where essentially, now, especially with so
media and smartphones and selfies, etcetera, etcetera, we're constantly being monitored,
but we don't know we're being monitored. And yes, this
is all through the framework of slut shaming, So we're
in a slut shaming pan opticon, Caroline. That's actually that
(15:14):
is literally this point is where I had to stop
reading the excerpt of her book on Salon dot com
because it just was getting so intense slash depressing. Not
that I was like, this is too hard for me
to read. It was more like, this is too upsetting
for me to read because it's so true the fact
that we just in general have internalized the fact that
(15:38):
we're being watched, that everything we do is on Instagram
or Facebook or like creepshots dot com or whatever, which
thankfully is no more. Yeah, well, websites like that things
places where people are posting terrible pictures or places where
you're expected to post a good picture. Of yourself and
we've just internalized that this is natural and normal. But
(15:58):
it also leads us to least others who aren't acting
according to whatever sort of ephemeral law we think they
should be acting according to. Yeah, because when it comes
to that abiding by the rules of normative femininity in
today's rules, part of that is presenting attractive images of yourself,
(16:18):
these like online personas that we have. But the line
of the good slept versus the bad slut comes up
a lot, for instance with the revenge porn podcast that
we did a while back, wherein sexting is a common
part of today's dating process, and it's totally fine. If
(16:40):
you are in a relationship with someone and you send
him or her a naked photo of yourself, that's being
a good slut. If it ever gets weaked, though, or
if you're not in a relationship with that person, then
you're a bad slut. Then you are asking for everyone
to see you right exactly. And then I mean speaking
(17:01):
about you know, today's kids, kids these days, these days, well, yeah,
let's be honest. That leads us to this study that
was done by UK think tank Demos, which examine the
use of the words rape, whore, and slut in tweets,
and found that accounts with male names used one of
(17:22):
those words more than a hundred and sixteen thousand times,
while accounts with female names did so more than ninety
four thousand times. Yeah, this was reported on in Time
magazine basically saying, hey, okay, here is social media proof that, Yeah,
women are calling each other whores and sluts and making
(17:42):
rape jokes or outright rape e comments to other women. Well,
it's the norm. It's become not not just like a
rape joke or saying like oh that test raped me
or whatever, but commenting and judge, commenting on a judging
women's body bodies is the norm. Judging women's sexuality, whether
(18:03):
it's it exists or not, is the norm. And so
if you look at it in terms of like a
who has the power and who's within that power? If
if the people with the power are making this the norm,
the people without the power are going to go along
with it. And that's what these researchers found, which is
that women are going along with this train in terms
(18:25):
of calling other women sluts and horse And I would
say too that again, like slut is such a powerful
word because it is shorthand for completely and immediately devaluing
someone because of the classism and racism embedded in it,
and because of just how the worthlessness implied with it.
(18:49):
At least when it comes to calling someone a whore
or a prostitute, that person is is earning a wage
and money at least is wielding more economic power than
a slut. Right, But let's take a little deeper, Caroline,
because we're talking about a lot of cultural forces at work,
a lot of nurture, a lot of environment. But there
are some people to who think that, hey, maybe slut
(19:11):
shaming it's just science. And we will talk about that
when we come right back from a quick break and
now back to the show. Well, so before our break,
we gave you a lot to chew on in terms
of not only where the term slut came from and
(19:33):
what it has meant over the ages, but really how
people nowadays are using it to police others. And so
let's get into some academic work that's been done on
the theory surrounding sex, sexual power, and yes, slut shaming. Yeah,
some think, well, maybe this is just evolution at work.
(19:55):
Maybe females naturally, I mean females like in the the
natural world sense of the word, we slut shame each
other for a purpose. And we talked actually about some
of this research in our podcast not so long ago
on shine theory, when we referenced primatologists Sarah Hardy's research
(20:16):
on female competition, because, as we noted, the longstanding scientific
paradigm was that females were coy passive objects of male competition.
Men are the competitors. Women are the recipients. We're just
hanging out on chaise lounges, fainting couches. Yes, wait, it
(20:37):
is waiting for a for a male male to hop
our way, that's right. But it turns out that basically
the study in the nineteen forties that a lot of
that was based on was inaccurate. Yeah, poor methodology. And
it turns out that primate research has found that, surprise, surprise,
females are actually quite competitive. And Hardy actually describes the
(21:00):
female species at one point as quote flexible and opportunistic
individuals who confront recurring reproductive dilemmas and tradeoffs within a
world of shifting options. So ladies be crafty? Is that
what that means? I think? So? I think I think
that that's what that means. So split shaming is a
part of that. Well, we are flexible and opportunistic, and
(21:25):
we are dealing with reproductive dilemmas and tradeoffs, and perhaps
splut shaming is just a tradeoff to deal with the
reproductive dilemma. Interesting, okay, So yeah, speaking of that competitiveness
and that sexual power driven competition between women, we also
talked about this issue in our Shine Theory episode. And
(21:47):
this is coming from a study from McMaster University that
was conducted by Tracy Villancourt and Anschal Sharma where they
sent a plant into basically a a lab or a
classroom where like a human plant like they sent a
palm tree with sunglasses. Yes, okay, point taken. They sent
(22:09):
a woman as a plant. She was she was part
of she was in in the in the scam, she
was helping run the scam. They sent this woman into
this room where two female friends were sitting and the
female friends had been told you're here as part of
a study on friendship. What they did not tell the
women was that they would be sending in this plant,
(22:30):
this palm tree, this ficus, wearing a bikini, dressed either
like in a T shirt, and jeans, or in a
low cut tight blouse and a short skirt. And then
they sent this woman in and they just sat back
and watched because what happened, and you can pretty much,
I mean, it's predictable. When the woman went in wearing
(22:51):
a T shirt and jeans and was like, hey, have
you seen professor so and so, the women were like, yeah,
it's down the hall didn't think twice about it. When
the woman went in, same woman where the tight clothes.
Oh boy, did the slug shaming hit the fans. Yeah,
the participants turned on her so quickly, Yeah, saying saying
(23:11):
terrible things about her, rolling their eyes, making assumptions out
loud that she was just going to go, you know,
screw the professor or whatever. Interesting to see how that
sexual competition, which is I mean unspoken, it's it's not
like directly happening, but that issue of sexual competition enters
(23:32):
this situation so fast and furious. Yeah, the the participant
responses honestly read like the intro too, sir, mix a
lot's baby got back. It was a lot of oh
my god, Becky, did you see her? But I mean, again,
using this language and these reactions to essentially discount her
as a person. Yeah. And so what these researchers think
(23:54):
is going on is that sludge shaming is guarding against
mate poaching and ensuring access to sexual resources by limiting
men's access. So sludge shaming reciprocal sledge shaming, the girl
on girl. Sludge shaming serves possibly this horrible um by
(24:16):
reproductive purpose, solving that reproductive dilemma of hey, you know what,
we need to keep him away from her because she's
going to distract him away from us. Yeah, and women
do not like other women who they perceived to be
sexually permissive. Yeah. This um came out of a study
published recently in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships
(24:38):
titled Birds of a Feather Not when it comes to
sexual permissiveness. And this was really interesting because it not
only highlighted sludge shaming, but also the sexual double standard
that is intertwined with slut shaming. Right, So, these researchers
basically presented uh potential fictional friends to study participant ends
(25:00):
and had them evaluate a bunch of different characteristics, and
they found that for women and for non sexually permissive men,
having sexually permissive friends was not desirable. And then they
took it a step further and had these fictional friends
evaluated on levels like competence, emotional stability, warmth, and dominance,
(25:23):
and across the board, the fictional sexually permissive men were
seen as more competent and emotionally stable than the sexually
permissive women. Essentially, there are lots of studies like this
that have been done examining different kinds of sexual double
standards at work, where they simply interchange the names, you know,
(25:43):
John or Joan for the same kinds of qualities, and
we find that we're often far less comfortable with Joan.
Joan is always being sent to the corner or Joan well,
and it's because that sexual permissiveness, which is just a
fancy way of saying like, hey, yeah, I've hooked up
with people, people who are honest, Yeah, but no, I
(26:04):
shouldn't just say that, people who are more open to
maybe non monogamous relationships and hookups and things like that.
That was interpreted as a form of dominance, and so
that the researchers think is what made the traits so
undesirable for these fictional women, even when being evaluated bisexually
(26:25):
permissive women. I think that issue of dominance is so interesting,
and I think that plays so well into that Evo
bio explanation of well, not only the evo bio explanation,
but also just our historical understanding of the words slut
and what that means to different people, because because if
you're going to judge someone for sexual permissiveness or what
(26:48):
you perceive to be sexual permissiveness, that means that he
or in this case, she is not acting according to
how you think she should be acting, and maybe whether
you want to be free to make these choices. Also,
you're there could be some issue of being threatened by
someone's behavior being outside the norm. Perhaps, I think there's
(27:11):
maybe the threatening factor at work, and also to the
fear of being associated with someone. It's like, well, if
I'm hanging out with quote unquote slotty Jane, then maybe
they'll think that I am like they They'll think I'm
a Joane too, a gang of slutty Jones. No one
wants to be slotty Jane. But let's split the script
(27:33):
and talk about slutty John for a second, because one
of the more recent questions with this whole slutge shaming
thing is, well, can men be slut shamed, because it's
rather debatable because the entire existence of sludge shaming, in
this concept of sledgehamming is based on the patriarchy, and
(27:54):
within that embedded in it to it is normative femininity
and heteronormativity and all of as many women's studies buzzwords
as you can fit into one sentence, all adding up
to a sexual double standard that is permissive for John's
and restrictive for Jones. Right, I mean, can men be
(28:14):
shamed about certain behaviors or made to feel embarrassed, Yeah, sure,
But in terms of the very specific realm that we're
discussing right now, in terms of calling them a slut, no,
men can't really be slut shamed in the same way
that women are because, you, guys, the root of this
word is it's a female gendered insult, and man slut
(28:39):
just arguably doesn't carry the same weight that calling a
woman a slut does. Because I mean, you mentioned the
sexual double standard, slut shaming sort of hinges on that
the idea that female sexuality is inherently bad and male
sexuality is inherently awesome. Well, and this was something that
you and I, Caroline were just talking about casually before
(29:02):
the podcast in terms of the man slut not carrying
as much weight because the threat of being labeled as
a man slut or a man whore is that he's
just probably not going to make a very good boyfriend.
But if you are a woman and you are called
a slut, then that means that your body is dirty
(29:23):
and you're a bad person. You're a bad person, and
that's someone who you probably shouldn't you shouldn't even really
be interested in having sex with that person because it's
just you know, used goods. So there's so there's usually
so much more to it. And it's interesting too to
look at the gendered language of sexually promiscuous people. And
(29:45):
I'm pretty sure that we've talked about this before on
the podcast. Um, but there's this often cited nineteen three
study looking at the words the gendered words for promiscuous people.
They identified to hundred in the English language relating to
sexually promiscuous women and only twenty for men, just twenty.
(30:07):
And I would really love if there are any linguists listening,
if you know of a more recent study, or if
you could just conduct an updated study. I want to
know there is one slightly more updated but still dated
study from in Finland that identified four hundred Finnish words
for promiscuous women and only a hundred and twenty for
(30:30):
promiscuous men, which often tended to be more tolerant. And
I laughed out loud when I got to the part
where they were listing various terms for men and women,
and men had names like bore and stallion, but women
were called village hors, and I, from the from the
(30:50):
sheer surprise of it, just laughed out loud because they
they don't play around. They cut right to the chase
on that one. Yeah, yeah, I mean you have men
could be make be called pimps, which again it's reflective
of his ownership of other women players, similar thing Casanova's
and Don Juans. That sounds that Depp, Yes, and you're
(31:11):
just a Johnny Depp. I mean, at worst, you can
call a man a dog, but a lot of times
to those those male pointed insults usually have some kind
of female ricochet effect back to say a mother or
a son of a or a you know whatever kind
of word I can't say on the podcast, right, but
(31:31):
I mean, even the word dog, however derogatory. You mean
it or you intended to be. It's still more of
a way that he's treating other people rather than a
commentary on how many people he's having sex with. Yeah,
I mean there is no what's the word for a
male mistress? There is none? You know, yeah, kept man,
Even that sounds like if I just envisioned pools and cabanas,
(31:55):
So it doesn't even seem that bad. So so, even
in our flut shaming language, it's still so female focus. Um.
Although we did find a two thousand thirteen dissertation written
by Michael Flood called Male and Female Sluts Shifts and
Stabilities in the regulation of sexual relations among young heterosexual men. Yes,
(32:19):
there's a lot. There's a lot in that title. Um.
And he was focusing though on college men in Australia,
and his research did find concerns among those Aussie blokes
of being labeled a male slut. Yeah. And so he
proposes that this concern itself signals a slight weakening of
(32:39):
the sexual double standard and an increased policing of male
sexual behavior, which to that I say, great, But I'll
believe it when I see it. I mean, well, it's
I mean, the keywords there's a slight weakening. Um and
I do think hearing especially from men directly on YouTube,
because that's where I hear the most directly throughout the comments,
(33:00):
there is a lot of there, There is a lot
of concern out there. I think that men men feel
police in certain ways as well. But it's almost the reverse.
It's more, uh, you're not having enough sex? Yes, yes,
a feeling like they need to meet up to these
standards of masculinity rather than you know, and being like
(33:22):
what if I what if I don't want to well
hook up all the time. But I mean there's also like,
if you look at all the cultural and social ideas
behind calling a woman a slut policing her sexuality, if
you look at like Rush Limbaugh talking about Sandra Fluke
and her campaign for birth control, affordable birth control. I mean,
(33:43):
one writer, I can't remember if it was Valenti, but
one writer brought up the fact of like, okay, well,
if men and young boys are being encouraged to go
out and have all the sex, and women are being
told that they're bad people if they go out and
have any sex or even think about it, Like, what's
happening in that in that interim, like who are these
(34:04):
women that men are supposed to go out and be
so virile with? And like what are women? Like, who's
nobody's talking, Let's let's talk about this. What's in the
middle ground? Yeah, I mean, and this is where we
get to the impact of sledgehaming, because I think that
middle ground is a lack of sexual communication issues with
consent of people not knowing what we're so often, especially
(34:27):
in US culture, I'll be very interested to hear from
international listeners about this. We are so openly sexual and
yet so simultaneously repressed that it I mean, I think
it reaks so much havoc in the bedroom or the
backseat or wherever sex sexual contact is happening. It leads
(34:48):
to so many kind of nasty expectations on both sides exactly. Yeah,
I mean it is. It is absolutely a lose lose
situation for women and men alike because it is constantly
rein forcing the sexual double standard, and it also handicaps
healthy sexual exploration and growth in young women who are
(35:08):
terrified of being labeled sluts to the point that they're
not even going to masturbate because they feel like that's
going to make them This thing, it's sturdy thing. Yeah,
and that also means that you're getting a lot of
ill informed kids out there who are afraid of STDs,
but who might end up contracting them because they don't
have they're not equipped with the right info. And it
(35:30):
also is going to inhibit sexual communication and disclosure between
partners or just between friends or healthcare providers, and engaging
in other kinds of sex that isn't penis in vagina
intercourse that would therefore constitute sluttish behavior in the modern
sense of the term, and thinking that that's not sex
(35:52):
as well. So it's yeah, it just we really just
have this this brimming sluts hole of garbage thanks to
this thing. And of course we have to talk about
in the context of rape, because slutge shaming quickly spirals
into victim blaming, right, Yeah, the thought that, oh, she's
(36:16):
she's dressed a certain way, she's acting a certain way,
she looks a certain way, so you know, she deserves
whatever bad thing happened to her. You know, if the
girl in Steubenville who was drunk and say she's somehow
deserved to be sexually attacked, exactly, women always have to
not only apparently police other women's bodies, but police their
own body as well. We are constantly in charge of
(36:37):
we We are both the prisoners and the guards of
our own pin opticons, Caroline, that's exhausting to think about it. Well,
it is, it's exhausting to live it. But also one
thing that has gotten a little exhausting too for some
people is the constant use of slutt shaming as sort
of the jumping off point to comment on things. And
(37:02):
that is a really ineloquent way of this question of Okay,
are we not overusing this term? Is everything now flut shaming?
Can we ever critique female sexuality in a healthy way
and it not be slut shaming? Right? I mean? A
couple of writers have talked about this, including Callibuseman over
(37:24):
at Jezebel, who wrote that all too often slut shaming
is used to police women for policing other women, which
is just hypocritical abusement, and others call for a more
open dialogue and an acknowledgement that Okay, you're doing one
thing and you think it one way, and you're doing
another thing and think another way, and it's okay if
(37:45):
people disagree, it's better too. Like you said, open that
dialogue and actually have a healthy critique of you know,
whether it's pop culture or just sexuality or whatever. It's
better to have that conversation and say, okay, well I
disagree with you, but here's why and what do you think,
then to just immediately shut down the conversation with well,
that's sled shaming, so your opinion doesn't matter, right because
(38:07):
it always points the finger to the woman. And I
mean the the examples where this really came up big time,
where after Sned O'Connor wrote that open letter to Miley
Cyrus post MTV v M as with with the Twerking
as the kids say, and then when Rashida Jones went
on a bit of a tweet fest and also wrote
(38:29):
a Glamour essay all about how uh you know, female
celebrities of pop stars essentially need to cover up and
that is very much paraphrasing her, And so that was
then flipped around on both Shond O'Connor and Rashida Jones
as saying, hey, stop being so sledge shaming and sex negative, right,
(38:51):
And I mean you could argue that certain things could
have been phrased better and either one of those essays,
but I mean, the point remains that you have two women,
Shenad O'Connor and Rashida gents who have very certain types
of perspectives, and they're allowed to have those perspectives, um,
but certain other people definitely felt attacked when those opinions
(39:13):
were presented. Yeah. For instance, one of Rashida Jones, the
tweet really that started this whole Rashida Jones debacle involved
her calling referring to these women as dressing like horrors.
So doing the whole like horror thing not a not
a great move, but I think that it is valid
for her and say Shenat O'Connor and whomever else to
(39:36):
critique representations of women in pop culture like what is
what are we kind of collectively worshiping? Right? Because they
both do, however, eloquently or ineloquently, bring up the idea
that you can't forget the context in which these conversations
are occurring, and in which these music videos or fashion
(39:57):
shows or whatever you're looking at are occurring, which use
that same patriarchal structure. I'm just I'm picturing like a pergola, uh,
patriarchal pergola uh, in which we're all having some sort
of awful patriarchal cocktail party where we think that if
we dress a certain way or act a certain way,
we are freeing ourselves and being empowered. When people like
(40:20):
Sennt O'Connor saying, you're just playing to those puppet masters,
those patriarchal Pergola puppet masters, Yeah, because that's the thing too.
We we haven't even and won't have time to even
get into the clothes issue. But cover up is never
the answer to any of this. I think it's it's
a lot more instructive perhaps to dig into let's let's
(40:45):
remember where this words slot comes from and where the
problem really arises. And to me that comes up a
lot with the classism and racism inherently tied up with it.
And when it comes to this question of like, well,
why don't we just reclaim this word, why don't we
It's fine, We're we're just women on the go, we're
(41:08):
on birth control, we have our I U D s.
We can be sluts do and it can be fine.
But yeah, yeah, I think my feelings can can definitely
be summed up about the multifaceted negative connotations of this
word by Fairitanus. She's the executive director of Black Women's Blueprint,
and she wrote, if people really put their minds to it,
(41:30):
they could probably reclaim the word slut. But for me,
I wouldn't want to because reclaiming means that it was
yours in the first place. And the word slut is
not something that I created for myself. It's something that
was created for a particular purpose, and the purpose wasn't
to serve me. And I think that touches on issues
of class and race, which are so inherent in the
(41:52):
word and its use and evolution. And when it comes
to that class factor too, it's very much alive and
well in its usage today. It's by actually when it
comes to reciprocal slut shaming, And this was demonstrated by
a pair of sociologists who essentially tracked girls on a
college campus and found highly class stratified patterns of slut shaming,
(42:16):
where you have wealthier girls who are usually in sororities,
who would tend to specifically slut shame less wealthy girls
who were in sororities, but then also the less wealthy
women doing the same thing to the wealthier women, saying
they're just rich sluts whatever. But when it came to
the power dynamics, those wealthier women's slut shaming was more damaging. Yeah,
(42:44):
and it's it's interesting to look at the hierarchies that
these sociologists reported on, because the wealthier or better off
college women considered sluts to be trashy, lower class women,
whereas if you look at the less wealthy non sorority
women on campus, they considered sluts to be the rich
(43:04):
bees in sororities. Because each of them had a different
definition of what was trashy and slutty that did not
include themselves, and so this freed them up to act. However,
they so chose to act while still being able to
police the behavior of women who were different from them. Well,
and then too when we I mean, you've already touched
on this, but when you move into the race factor.
(43:27):
This came up big time with the slut walk movement
that was really on fire a few years ago, and
we did a podcast about it, and black women really
wanted nothing to do with it because of how that
word has related to them historically as black women. And
we cited in that podcast on slut walks Susan Britton's
(43:50):
open letter from Black women to slut Walk organizers, which said, quote,
we do not have the privilege or space to call
ourselves slut with validating the already historically entrenched ideology and
recurring messages about what and who the black woman is.
We don't have the privilege to play on destructive representations
(44:10):
burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls
for generations. And that's a big reason why. In a
more recent article in The New York Times by Annah
Holmes asking this question of can we reclaim slut, and
she interviews Lee or a Tannon Bomb about her new book,
and the answer is still kind of shakes out to
be no, for these same kinds of reasons of Hey,
(44:32):
this is this is loaded with a lot of garbage.
It is letter with a lot of garbage. Just it's
it's it has never ceased to be an ugly word.
And I and I understand, I absolutely understand the impetus
behind wanting to reclaim it and grab it from the
hands of the people who use it to try to
oppress you or check your behavior or police the way
(44:53):
you look at, think, feel whatever. But I just don't
know that calling yourself and your friends or anyone a
slut is the answer to that, and it's certainly not
going to be our path to eradicating slut shaming. And
this is a poor analogy, but to me, it's like
telling women that, hey, you know what's gonna cure rape culture?
(45:15):
I was just telling rape jokes all the time. If
we just like make it funny, then it'll be fine.
Then it'll just stop because we'll be like, it'll take
the sting out of it. Like Nope, that hasn't happened
at all. So I I don't know the answer to
what's gonna stop slut shaming. I think that us stopping
calling each other sluts as Tina Fey told us to
do and mean girls a long time ago. It's a
(45:36):
good start. Yeah, I think that's a good start. But
I mean, we have so much sort of digging to
do in terms of really unpacking how we feel about
sexuality of both men and women and and trying to
trying to um not change how people think, although that
would be nice, but but just to just to become
(45:58):
aware that we even have these prejudices, these these feelings,
these negative feelings about how women even moved through this world,
and on an individual level, keeping ourselves accountable for the
policing behavior that we may consciously or even subconsciously an
(46:19):
act right because, like you said at the beginning of
the podcast, Kristen, slug shamming does not have to involve
me calling someone a slut. All it has to do
is involved me criticizing someone's skirt for being too short
or something along those lines, and then I have effectively
slut shamed someone and I have played into this patriarchal pergola.
Not the patriarchal pergola. Carol, Well, we definitely want to
(46:43):
hear from listeners about this. Mom Stuff at how Stuffwork
dot com is our email address. Do you have the
brilliant plan of how we can finally end slut shaming?
Do you think that it's a term that can be reclaimed?
And I'm curious too for parents with kids, is this
something that you think about as well, especially if you
have girls like to slut shaming play any role in
(47:07):
your at home sex education. I want to know all
of your thoughts and perspectives. Mom Stuff at how stuff
Works dot com again is our email address. You can
tweet us at mom stuff podcast or messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. Well, I've got a letter here about
(47:29):
our episode on lady lawyers and hal of they dress,
speaking of slut shaming that definitely happens in the courtroom.
And this was from Monique, who is currently a law
student in her third year of law school, and she said,
I was so happy to hear that you decided to
tackle the lady lawyer dress issue. I too have faced
the frustrations around what to wear in the courtroom and
(47:50):
even at work. But there were a couple of issues
I think you missed out on. First, the regional differences
in what is appropriate for court wear. For example, in Florida,
what would be appropriate in a Miami courthouse is much
different than what would be appropriate in a Jacksonville courthouse
or a courthouse in the Panhandle. This is also true
between states. I recently went to a conference with students
(48:12):
from different states and found that in some areas, wearing
brightly colored suits or shoes is not frowned upon. The
general rule of thumb is a more liberal a location,
the more liberal the rule address. I was told by
mentors to always, if at all possible, sit on a
court case for the judge you will be trying a
case before to get the general rules of that courtroom.
Every judge is a bit different, and it's best to
(48:33):
be prepared with the clothing that they will receive you
the best. In The other issue I think you missed
on is hair. As a woman of color, I'm especially
sensitive on issues of hair in the courtroom. The general
argument I've heard is that nothing in your appearance should
distracting the law you are presenting. This means that for
most women of color, you must have your hair permed.
While I've seen a few black female attorneys with natural hair,
(48:55):
it's few and far between. Perming my hair was a
decision I made on my own early my wife, so
continuing it isn't as much of a hardship as for
women who come to law school and then decide they
have to do it. The legal field is uniquely behind
the times, but as the influx of more females come
into the field, hopefully some of these issues will be fixed.
(49:16):
So thanks Monique and good luck with the rest of
law school. And I have a letter here from Rachel.
She says, I live in Morganton, West Virginia, and I'm
a regular listener and lover of your podcast. I have
so many favorites and recommend your podcast to almost everyone
I know. Thank you, Rachel. She goes on to say,
this Valentine's Day, a lot of women are going to
(49:37):
see Fifty Shades of Gray, which got me and my
gal pals chatting about the series. So I've only read
the first book. I found the story to be just
as Lisa Wilkinson put it, quote, domestic violence dressed up
as erotica. I personally thought it was poorly written and
have read accounts from b D s M community members
stating that it's a completely wrong portrayal of their community.
(50:00):
The pre ticket sales for this movie are record breaking,
which had us all talking about rape culture, and we
all agreed that this would be something awesome to hear
from you gals. Well, Rachel, you'll be happy to hear that.
Not only of Chris and I received a lot of
letters about this very same topic, but we have now
put it on our two podcast lists and that episode
(50:20):
will be coming to you very soon. That's right, Kink
Week is happening in March on Stuff Mom never told you,
so tune in or maybe just now be a little
weird about so if you have letters or requests for
us moms, Steven house Stuffworks dot com is our email
addressed and links to all of our social media as
well as all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including
(50:43):
this one with our sources so you can read up
as well. All about sledge shaming. Head on over to
stuff mom Never Told You dot com. Little more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it house stuff
works dot com
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.