Reading with Liz: "Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation"

'Get Thee to a Nunnery:' musings on Slut! Growing up Female with A Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum

Let's face it: how many of us have been labeled 'slut' in the past? How many of us have called another girl 'slut?' How many of us have experienced both? Remember the scene in Mean Girls where Ms. Norbury proclaims, "You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores"? Every girl can laugh at this because it's true; we've all been called or called someone a slut or whore at some point. Ms. Norbury's words convey a complicated idea under the surface. She is describing a mechanism in which young girls uphold a sexual double standard. It’s called 'slut-bashing.' Leora Tanenbaum's book Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation explores slut-bashing and what really causes it.
I was assigned to read Slut! for a class called Sluts, Whores and Other Feminists: Sexual Justice through the Ages. Sexual justice, or the lack of, was the primary concern of the class. If you don't know what sexual justice means, the stories in Slut! are not examples of it. Instead they are the opposite. By sharing her personal experience and the experiences of fifty other women, Tanenbaum illustrates slut-bashing and, by consequence, the sexual double standard that causes it. It has at least one story that every girl can relate to, and each one will draw compassion from your heart. Personal narratives that periodically fill the pages are moving and sometimes disturbing. Slut! proves that the slut reputation is never deserved. Then what causes it? Why do we call each other sluts and whores?
There certainly seemed to be a lot of 'sluts' running around my high school, but Tanenbaum suggests that most high school sluts weren't even sexually active. Then why is the label so popular, when it shouldn't even be applicable? Tanenbaum says that calling a woman or girl a slut is "a common way to damage [their] credibility." Credibility according to whom exactly? What do high school girls care about most? Guys. They're all in competition with each other at that age. But aren't we still?