Chapter One

Insult of Insults

Women living in the United States are fortunate indeed. Unlike women living in Muslim 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 order to 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 Queensummed 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. 

Excerpted from Slut! © Copyright 2003 by Leora Tanenbaum. Reprinted with permission by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.