The She's-A-Slut Culture

Contents:  Sexual Violence, Suicide, Ostracism

Rehtaeh Parsons in Canada and Audrie Potts in the United States were teenage girls.  Both alleged that they were gang-raped by teenage boys while being  unconscious from alcohol.   Both also seem to have been the victims of social media and real world ostracism after the events took place.  And both took their own lives, Audrie last September and Rehtaeh this April.

In Parsons' case the initial police investigation about the alleged gang-rape  ended in no charges though the case has now been reopened, apparently because of new information.  The rumors are that a witness or one of the alleged rapists has come forward because of Rehtaeh's suicide.  In Potts' case the police has made recent arrests.

That is all a very neutral summary of the events which otherwise bring Steubenville to mind.  The shared aspects of these three cases (and many more)  are a) the alleged unconsciousness or near-unconsciousness of the girls, b) the gang aspect of the alleged rapes, and c) the destruction of the girls' reputations via social media and real world ostracism, including the spread of photos about the alleged rapes or the otherwise disgusting treatment of an alleged rape victim.  At least two of the cases also suggest a fairly lethargic involvement by the police and all three cases demonstrate that the schools failed in their duties.

Reading about all these cases is painful and difficult.  Writing those cut-and-dry statements is extremely insufficient.   But it is a necessary prelude for what I want to talk about:  The second Act in the play titled "How To Ruin A Young Girl's Life."

The First Act of the play is a sexual act, or an act which some parts of the society labels as mutually voluntary sex, even if it really is a gang-rape where one "participant" is unconscious and has given no consent.  More generally, almost any kind of sexual behavior by the young woman or girl may suffice the get the play going.

The Second Act is what articles about these cases call bullying.  But it's something more vicious than that term can convey.  It is ostracism combined with the destruction of someone's external reputation.  Mere ostracism at least leaves the target alone.  What the treatment of these teenagers suggests is more abhorrent:  The target is isolated, left almost friendless but still continuously harassed, ridiculed, gossiped about. 

Rehteah Parsons received text messages from strangers asking her for sex months after the alleged gang-rape.  The Steubenville rape victim was described as a whore and a slut in many tweets I read a month after the rape, and those who described her that way were her age and both male and female.  The Facebook messages I also scrutinized at that time described her as a slut and the boys as innocent victims of the naturally-must-hump-a-slut instinct.

Did the Steubenville victim not get supportive messages in the social media then?  Perhaps, but despite my attempts I couldn't unearth any.  This suggests (only suggests, as support could have been offered in personal channels only) that the view of sexually active women as sluts and whores is widespread among the young, that many teenagers think being unconscious or extremely drunk is not a valid excuse for becoming the object of sexual treatment by others and that men cannot help themselves in sexual matters, cannot abstain from having sex with inanimate human beings.  In short, the responsibility for gate-keeping sex is clearly seen as belonging to women.

What in olden days used to be called victim-blaming (why did she go to that party?  why did she drink so much?  how come was she dressed like that?) is not seen as victim-blaming but as The Way Things Are.  Boys are supposed to try to get sex, at almost any cost, good girls are supposed to cross their legs and somehow have that hold, whereas bad girls are stamped with the slut label and are then free game forevermore.

I was shocked to find all that so very much alive in the social media.  I naively thought that the past discussions about victim-blaming were now knitted into the wider society.  But that does not seem to be the case.  There are still good women (not for public sexual consumption) and bad women (for public sexual consumption).

What makes all this so horrible is that we are discussing minors in most of the better-known cases.  Children, really.  Teenagers whose lives revolve around their peer groups and for whom the sentence of that peer group can well mean death.  At the same time, those teenage boys got their understanding of the rules of the sex game from somewhere.  Who taught them that unconscious girls can be used that way?  Was it their parents?  The general culture?  Pornography?  I think the answer matters tremendously.

But it's not just the boys we need to reach.  The girls with those Twitter and Facebook accounts too often shared a similar understanding:  In some odd way boys and men are entitled to try for sex, by hook or crook, and if they succeed then the girl or a woman is a slut or a whore but he got lucky.

We need to do something about those values, and the need is urgent.

In the final and Third Act of the play the wider consequences of all this play out.   What they are depends on the individuals involved, on whether the woman or girl ever tells anyone about what happened, on her mental and emotional strength, on the severity of the hatred she must bear from her culture, on the support she receives and on the whole larger culture.  If the police is informed about the case as an alleged rape,  the values the police officers hold enter the story, and finally the values of those who decide whether a case can go to court or not.

At all those stages we must be aware of those underlying values, of the submerged belief that the destruction of some lives (such as the  student athletes in the Steubenville case) really counts for more than the destruction of other lives (such as that of the Steubenville victim) and of the deep, deep roots of the belief that women really are responsible for sex that happened, except if she lost an arm or her life while fighting against it.

The least helpful of all reactions I have read is the recommendation that girls not be allowed to go to parties, that alcohol should be kept away from teenagers, that parents are to blame for not supervising their children (usually their daughters) better.  This is not because it wouldn't be good to monitor teenagers but because all those assumptions are the same as saying that young men really all are rapists, that nothing can be done about that except to make sure that it's not your daughter who gets raped by them.  Besides, the advice usually boils down to limiting girls' freedoms as a solution to something that really isn't their fault.

All that is preposterous.  It is also highly insulting to all the young men who would never try to have sex with an unconscious woman or man, while doing nothing to the suggestion that perhaps that IS how young men are expected to act.