My Reality: I Was the 6th Grade “Slut”

by Emily Lindin

Intro:

I am a woman in my late twenties with a full, satisfying life. I live with my wonderful partner, I love my work, I have supportive friends and colleagues, and I maintain a great relationship with my parents. But about a year ago, during a visit to my childhood home, I discovered my old journals from fifteen years ago and was transported back to a time of intense shame and isolation.

When I was eleven years old, I was branded a “slut” by my classmates. For the next few years of my life, I was harassed incessantly at school, after school, and online. I decided to create The UnSlut Project in the hopes that by publishing my own diary entries, I could provide some perspective to girls who are going through something similar right now.

Since starting The UnSlut Project, I have been contacted by many women who want to share their stories, too. This is a chance for us to prove, through sharing the details of our own experiences, that slut shaming is a strong negative force that has affected the lives of many women. It’s also an opportunity to help girls who are currently suffering from this type of shame, providing them with hope that it will get better.If you have had an experience you’d like to share, or if you can offer some words of advice and encouragement to young women who need them, please contribute by clicking the “Share Your Experience” button.

Here is one of Emily’s diary entries as published on The UnSlut Project.

“Why did you all of a sudden hate me after we went to third base?”

March 12, 1998

Today in gym, Zach was sitting next to Maggie on the bleachers and I was sitting on the other side of her. Maggie was making a paper fortune teller. Zach and I started talking, and it started off as us throwing insults at each other but soon we got to something meaningful. Zach said, “You’re such a bitch!” [Like I said… something meaningful.]I said, “You act as if I did something wrong to you!” He said, “You did! You act all PMS-y towards me, telling me to fuck off.” I screamed, “Well, you used me!” “No, I didn’t!” “Then why did you all of a sudden hate me after we went to third base?”Matt walked by and snickered, “Hump ’em and dump ’em, right, Zach?” [Again, Matt with the perfect comedic timing.]Zach looked at me pleadingly and said, “I never said that.” I glared at him. He said, “Fine, you don’t believe me?” I could tell he was getting mad, so I said softly, “No, I believe you.” He smiled. “Good.” [I’d like to point out that this entire exchange took place over Maggie, who was just trying to make a fortune teller.]After school, he called me. He informed me that we were still going out: “I never officially dumped you.” I sighed, “Well, when you called me a whore you pretty much dumped me, and if you didn’t, then I’d only be in my right mind to dump you.”

He said, “Fine, then dump me.” “No…” “Why not?” “I don’t know how to dump someone.” “Just say, ‘I don’t want to go out with you anymore.’” “But I can’t…” “Okay.” He gave up.Then I confessed to him that I am bulimic (even though I am not) and so he decided to try to make himself throw up. I don’t know if he succeeded. So we’re on good terms now.

[I’m not sure what part of this last bit is the strangest: that I lied about being bulimic, that it could possibly be unclear whether the person on the other end of the phone had thrown up or not; or that this exchange somehow signified to me that we were “on good terms now.”]

Posted on April 29, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, My Reality 1 Comment

RIP Rehtaeh Parsons: Victim of Victim-Blaming

Source: Facebook

by Jarrah Hodge

Trigger Warning for rape, cyberbullying, suicide.

On Sunday Rehtaeh Parsons’ parents made the decision to take their daughter off life support. Three days earlier, the 17-year-old had tried to hang herself in the bathroom after being raped and then relentlessly cyberbullied.

According to the Halifax Chronicle-Herald:

Rehtaeh Parsons had a goofy sense of humour and loved playing with her little sisters. She wore glasses, had long, dark hair and was a straight-A student whose favourite subject was science.

But that didn’t seem to matter to the four boys who her mother, Leah Parsons, says raped Rehtaeh at a party when she was drunk to the point of being clearly unable to consent. According to the Facebook page Leah Parsons has set up in Rehtaeh’s memory:

The Person Rehtaeh once was all changed one dreaded night in November 2011. She went with a friend to another’s home. In that home she was raped by four young boys…one of those boys took a photo of her being raped and decided it would be fun to distribute the photo to everyone in Rehtaeh’s school and community where it quickly went viral. Because the boys already had a “slut” story, the victim of the rape Rehtaeh was considered a SLUT. This day changed the lives of our family forever. I stopped working that very day and we have all been on this journey of emotional turmoil ever since.

Police told the CBC they investigated the assault but didn’t have enough investigation to lay charges, but Leah Parsons says the police waited too long to interview the boys and refused to act on the distributed pictures because they “couldn’t prove who had pressed the photo button on the phone”.

Reading this story I was simultaneously heartbroken and overcome with rage. It makes me so sad that we have yet another case of misogynist cyberbullying that has led to yet another senseless, tragic death, another family in mourning. Another young woman, a complex human being who had so much to offer the world, is gone because of the rape culture we live in and the cyberbullying that perpetuates it faster and more furiously than ever.

Toula Foscolos writes in the Huffington Post: “We, as a society, recoil in horror at such tragedies, but fail to see the triggers that normalize violence against women. We shrug them off as unrelated. But they’re not.” Read more

Posted on April 9, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism 2 Comments

Franchesca Ramsey on How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming

Franchesca Ramsey shares her experience with date rape to talk about how slut shaming turns into victim blaming. It’s pretty powerful and comes with a trigger warning and a NSFW language warning. If you’d like a transcript you can find it at Racialicious.

-Jarrah

Posted on December 26, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism Leave a comment

Watch TEDx Talk from SlutWalk Toronto Organizers

by Jarrah Hodge

Back in October I spoke with SlutWalk founder Heather Jarvis about what it was like to get ready to speak at TEDx. Now that that process is over, you can catch her talk with co-founder Sonya JF Barnett. As you’ll see in their talk, Jarvis and Barnett liken language to a virus and apply this metaphor to slut-shaming, calling “slut” one of many “infected words” that have become contagious and are used to dehumanize.

I have to say my favourite part starts around the 4 minute mark where Barnett talks about how much it sucks to be called a “slut” at age 15. That really resonated with me – I share that knowing that all those times I was slut-shamed still stick with me over a decade later.

“Separating my sexual identity from my self-worth has become very difficult over time,” says Barnett and I think a lot of women will know what that feels like and likewise hear their own experiences when Jarvis talks about coping with assault.

I’d encourage you to watch the video even if you have issues with SlutWalk or some of the ways it’s played out in different communities. I think it really grounds the discussion in the very real, lived experiences of women and girls who are slut-shamed and blamed for “asking for it” when sexually harassed or assaulted.

I’m interested to know what other GF readers think – feel free to comment below!

Posted on November 21, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism 4 Comments

Vamps, Prom Queens and Sluts: Covering the Women of the Petraeus Scandal

by Jarrah Hodge

Earlier today I joined Mother Jones writer Kate Sheppard on CTV News Channel to talk about the way that some news media and blogs have been portraying the women involved in the recent scandal around David Petraeus. I can’t embed the video clip but you can watch it online here if you’re interested.

I wanted to pull out some lowlights of the media portrayals, in case there are any readers who haven’t seen how widespread the sexist stereotyping was. Here are some of the most common ways the main players have been portrayed, along with responses from writers like Sheppard.

Hollister (Holly) Petraeus, a.k.a. The Woman Who Let Herself Go and Had it Coming

Perhaps the most oversimplified woman in this situation is Holly Petraeus, the David Petraeus’ wife of 37 years. As pointed out at the Daily Beast: “Holly took the traditional notion of an Army wife to a new level, building a legacy and reputation of her own even as her husband oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and rose to lead the CIA.” In addition to being Petraeus’ wife, she has an important job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau helping protect military members and their family from financial fraud. She has an interesting history as a tough, smart, caring “Army wife” who has always been there for the troops. But god forbid that should get in the way of a salacious story. It’s much easier to reduce her individual achievements and identity to one easy story: that she “let herself go” in the looks department and was thus partially to blame for her husband’s cheating. Read more

Posted on November 14, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Politics, Pop Culture 2 Comments

Cuddling Doesn’t Mean What You Think it Does… Apparently

by Jasmine Peterson

Dating – it’s exhausting.

At first I thought it was fun (being new to the dating scene, and never having really done the dating thing in my younger years), but as time has gone on, I’ve discovered that it can be really, really exhausting.

I’m a pretty open and honest person. I’ve put a lot of myself out into the ether of the internet (from discovering myself to be polyamorous to the health repercussions of my breakup and consequent brief personal meltdown). So when I’m dating, I’ve got no qualms about being honest about my intentions, my feelings, and my desires. And because I’m such an honest person, an open book really, I often expect that others will be the same. I’ve discovered that this is just me projecting my own qualities onto others; they are not always coming from the same place of transparency as I am.

How much easier would dating be if we could all just be honest about our intentions? I’ve met a few men who were pretty upfront about exactly what they were looking for – whether it was to settle down into a relationship or strictly a relationship of a sexual nature – and it made knowing how to proceed so much easier. What I want keeps changing, it seems, but I articulate it as I go to ensure that any man I am seeing knows that. I’m a work in progress, and I can understand that what someone else wants might also change, so I like to keep the conversation open and evolving to accommodate that.

But what I’ve found to most often be the case is that men are reticent to admit to wanting to have sexual relations, as though admitting that is somehow going to result in some catastrophic implosion of the dating universe. At first, I found this baffling.

“Do you want to cuddle?” a guy would say.

And if I didn’t, I would say no. But some nights, I really did want to cuddle and would accept the offer. Little did I know, “cuddle” is apparently a code word for sex. Because every single time a guy would come over to “cuddle”, he would start making sexual advances. Read more

Posted on October 28, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 8 Comments

SlutWalk Meets TEDx

Heather Jarvis (photo credit: N. Maxwell Lander)

TEDx Toronto is coming up this Friday and one of SlutWalk Toronto’s founders, Heather Jarvis, will be one of the speakers around the theme of Alchemy: “the seemingly magical process of taking ordinary, common elements, usually of little value, and combining them to make something extraordinary of great value.” Heather Jarvis is a queer, sex- and body-positive feminist with a strong background in gender studies, social work and community activism.

I wanted to talk with Heather about the whole TEDx process and what she thinks being part of TEDx means for SlutWalk, a movement that has grown and evolved since it was started just over a year ago. We started out talking about what it’s like to get the TEDx call.

“I was really shocked and blown away,” said Jarvis, “I’ve known about TED Talks and TEDx events for some time now and I love them…it was really a far-fetched dream that I would be involved someday.”

For at least the last month Jarvis has been busy workshopping her ideas with the TEDx team, turning her talk concept into “a more personalized story” that she’s hoping will be engaging for audience members who don’t have a background discussing issues around slut-shaming and that will challenge all attendees to reflect on the issues after the talk.

Here’s her TEDx intro video:

The whole process has caused her to reflect on how SlutWalk has moved forward over the past year and how it’s been impacted by the media, particularly though spreading the misconception that SlutWalk is a women’s only event where attendees are encouraged to dress promiscuously (it’s open to all genders and people are invited to wear whatever they want). Read more

Posted on October 23, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism 1 Comment

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