Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum

From Barnes & Noble

Tramp. Slut. Loose woman. The words reverberate down American high school corridors: Indeed, forty percent of women have heard such gossip about themselves. Buy why are women who are sexually active dismissed as promiscuous, while their male equivalents are viewed as potent studs?: Freelance journalist Tanenbaum answers the question by revealing her own brief, embarrassing career as a supposed high school harlot and then interlacing her experiences with those of others similarly stigmatized. Her conclusions are troubling: She suggests that even in today's "sexually liberated" environment, young women are victimized by their own double standards. (P.S. While on tour after the hardcover edition of Slut!, happily-married Tanenbaum found herself hounded by a radio interviewer's persistent questions about when exactly she had lost her virginity.)

From the Publisher

Girls may be called "sluts" for any number of reasons, including being outsiders, early developers, victims of rape, targets of others' revenge. Often the labels has nothing to do with sex — the girls simply do not fit in.  An important account of the lives of these young women, Slut! weaves together powerful oral histories of girls and women who finally overcame their sexual labels with a cogent analysis of the underlying problem of sexual stereotyping.

Author Leora Tanenbaum herself was labeled a slut in high school.  The confessional article she wrote for Seventeen about the experience caused a sensation and led her to write this book.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

The word "slut" is uniquely suited to describing girls and women of all ages who are trampy, cheap, trashy, sleazy, sexually promiscuous, and sexually aggressive -- and outcast by their peers for seeming so. In this fascinating work of feminist critique, Leora Tanenbaum uncovers the phenomenon she calls "slut-bashing." By interviewing girls and women who have been labeled "sluts," she puts to the page their experiences to reveal that it is not always -- and, in fact, rarely is -- a woman's "deviant" sexual appetite that causes sexual labeling. Rather, it is the sexual mores, attitudes, and insecurities of the labelers (often friends and peers) that are the root cause of this damaging and utterly unjust form of sexism.

Discussion Questions

1. Describe a "slut." Has she had many sexual partners? How many is too many? Does she dress in provocatively? What criteria do a woman or teen need to meet to be labeled a "slut?" Is it ever acceptable or accurate to label a woman in this way? What are our general responses to women we meet who might be considered "sluts?"
   
   
2. What are the limits of "normal" adolescent sexual expression? Is this tied in to a teen's sense of autonomy and individuality? How are autonomy and individuality affected by name-calling, labeling, and "slut-bashing" -- on both the receiving and giving ends?
   
   
3. Who is responsible for the culture of "slut-bashing" that runs rampant in American schools? What are the roles of students, administrators, teachers, and parents and are they complicit? To what extent do the media have an effect on each of these groups? Have the messages perpetuated by the media takenprecedence over those expressed by loved ones, peers, and friends?
   
   
4. Which is the classic and damaging double-standard: that men are permitted sexual freedom while women are held to strict behavioral codes that make them the voices of abstinence in the heat of the moment, or is it that women and "good girls" do not experience or act upon sexual feelings for someone they do not love or to whom they are not committed to in a long-term relationship?
   
   
5. Educational institutions have been subject to lawsuits in recent years, accused of being irresponsible and unresponsive to reports of verbal sexual harassment, including "slut-bashing" and name-calling. How seriously should schools take simple name-calling? Should students who call others derogatory names suffer disciplinary action? Who should mete that out -- parents and guardians or school administrators? Or, is categorizing and labeling a normal part of growing up?
   
   
6. Should schools and various other community groups incorporate awareness of sexual harassment, sexual aggression, and assault into their curricula? Does opening discussion of these topics ultimately equip teens to recognize and possibly avoid damaging behavior or does it open a Pandora's box for perpetuating negative behavior?
   
   
7. Is our culture too open about sex? To what degree do various forms of mainstream media -- movies, television, magazines, music -- contribute to long-standing sexual stereotypes? Can you name specific or current trends and examples of this? Is there any truth in these stereotypes? Why do they persist?
   
   
8. Do women and girls seem to be more harshly critical of other females than do men and boys? Is most "slut-bashing" rooted in female aggression or generated by the opposite sex? If so, why? What to women have to gain by publicly demeaning other women? Can a woman successfully improve her own image and set of beliefs (as in the chaste "good girl") by labeling others as slutty or loose or promiscuous?
   
   
9. Is it true that girls and women are praised more for their appearance than for their accomplishments? How does body image play a role in burgeoning awareness of sexuality for both young men and women? How is the act of labeling related to teens who are simultaneously trying to assert their individuality as well as conform to their peer group?
   
   
10. What can "sluts" do to overcome this labeling? What can their peers do to help downplay the stigma? Can it ever be completely erased within a community or forgotten altogether?

About the Author

Leora Tanenbaum is a New York-based freelance writer who focuses on the unique problems facing girls and women. Her articles have appeared in Seventeen, Ms., The Nation, Salon, and many others.

Read an Excerpt

Women living in the United States are fortunate indeed. Unlike women living in Muslim countries, who are beaten and murdered for the appearance of sexual impropriety, we enjoy enormous sexual freedom.¹ Yet even we are routinely evaluated and punished for our sexuality. In 1991, Karen Carter, a twenty-eight-year-old single mother, lost custody of her two-year-old daughter in a chain of events that began when she called a social service hot line to ask if it's normal to feel sexual arousal while breast feeding. Carter was charged with sexual abuse in the first degree, even though her daughter showed no signs of abuse; when she revealed in court that she had had a lifetime total of eight (adult male) lovers, her own lawyer referred to her "sexual promiscuity."² In 1993, when New Mexico reporter Tamar Stieber filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against the newspaper where she worked because she was earning substantially less than men in similar positions, defense attorneys deposed her former lover to ask him how often they'd had sex.³ In the 1997 sexual-harassment lawsuits against Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing, a company lawyer asked for the gynecological records of twenty-nine women employees charging harassment, and wanted the right to distribute them to company executives.⁴ And in 1997 a North Carolina woman sued her husband's secretary for breaking up their nineteen-year marriage and was awarded $1 million in damages by a jury. During the seven-day trial the secretary was described as a "matronly" woman who deliberately began wearing heavy makeup and short skirts in orderto entice the husband into an affair.⁵

It's amazing but true: Even today a common way to damage a woman's credibility is to call her a slut. Look at former CIA station chief Janine Brookner, who was falsely accused of being a drunken "slut" after she reprimanded several corrupt colleagues in the early 1990s.⁶ Consider Anita Hill, whose accusation that Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her was dismissed by the Senate because, in the memorable words of journalist David Brock, she was "a bit nutty and a bit slutty."⁷ Clearly, slut-bashing is not confined to the teenage years.

Nor is it a new phenomenon. If anything, it is the continuation of an old tradition. For girls who came of age in the 1950s, the fear of being called a slut ruled their lives. In that decade, "good" girls strained to give the appearance that they were dodging sex until marriage. "Bad" girls--who failed to be discreet, whose dates bragged, who couldn't get their dates to stop--were dismissed as trashy "sluts." Even after she had graduated from high school, a young woman knew that submitting to sexual passion meant facing the risk of unwed pregnancy, which would bar her entré to the social respectability of the college-educated middle class. And so, in addition to donning cashmere sweater sets and poodle skirts, the 1950s "good" girl also had to hone the tricky talent of doling out enough sexual preliminaries to keep her dates interested while simultaneously exerting enough sexual control to stop before the point of no return: intercourse. The twin fears of pregnancy and loss of middle-class respectability kept her desires in check. The protagonist of Alix Kates Shulman's novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen summed up the prevailing attitude: "Between me and Joey already one thing had led to another--kissing had led to French kissing, French kissing to necking, necking to petting, petting to bare-titting, bare-titting to dry humping--but somehow, thank God, I had always managed to stop at that penultimate step."⁸

No wonder that obtaining a reputation was even more frightening than becoming pregnant. An unwanted pregnancy could be taken care of--somehow, somewhere. A reputation, however, was an Indelible stamp. "Steve's finger in my cunt felt good," reminisced Erica Jong's alter ego, Isadora Wing, about her 1950s high school boyfriend in Fear of Flying. "At the same time, I knew that soft, mushy feeling to be the enemy. If I yielded to that feeling, it would be goodbye to all the other things I wanted. 'You have to choose,' I told myself sternly at fourteen. Get thee to a nunnery. So, like all good nuns, I masturbated . . . at fourteen all I could see were the disadvantages of being a woman . . . All I could see was the swindle of being a woman." The maneuvering was so delicate that pretty girls, the ones most sought after by the boys, sometimes secretly wished they were ugly just to avoid the dilemma altogether.

In the realm of sexual choices we are light-years beyond the 1950s. Today a teenage girl can explore her sexuality without getting married, and most do. By age eighteen over half of all girls and nearly three quarters of all boys have had intercourse at least once." Yet at the same time, a fifties-era attitude lingers: Teens today are fairly conservative about sex. A 1998 New York Times/ CBS News poll of a thousand teens found that 53 percent of girls believe that sex before marriage is "always wrong," while 41 percent of boys agree.¹¹ Teens may be having sex, but they also look down on others, especially girls, who are sexually active. Despite the sexual revolution, despite three decades of feminism, despite the Pill, and despite legalized abortion, teenage girls today continue to be defined by their sexuality. The sexual double standard--and the division between "good" girls and "bad" or "slutty" ones--is alive and well. Some of the rules have changed, but the playing field is startlingly similar to that of the 1950s.

Skeptical? Just take a look at teenage pop culture. On the TV show Dawson's Creek, which chronicles the lives of four hip, painfully self-aware teens, an episode is devoted to Dawson's discovery that his girlfriend Jeri is not only not a virgin, she's had sex with a number of guys.