Atheling aka wickedday is a white, middle-sized, currently able-bodied, cis- and heterosexual British woman about to start studying for an MA in medieval literature. This piece was originally posted at her personal blog, This Wicked Day, where she also blogs about language, geeky things, random crap on the Internet and University Challenge in addition to feminism.
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One of the historic and ongoing aims of feminism and feminist movements has been the attempt to eradicate what’s known in the feminist blogosphere as slut-shaming. Even if you’ve never seen the term before, you’ve almost certainly observed it in action: somebody or somebodies abusing someone else on the basis of their (real or imagined) sex life, where ‘acceptable’ levels and types of sexuality are a) wildly inconsistent and b) liable to change without notice (assuming anyone states them in the first place).
Take Sam. Sam is not any of the Sams I know; Sam is a purely imaginary person, who has had sex 20 times in the last year. That’s a number: a neutral statement. But twenty sexual encounters in a year will be read very differently depending on whether they were all with a long-term partner or with twenty one-night stands. Both those situations are also likely to be perceived differently depending on Hypothetical Sam’s sex, sexuality and gender. And race. And dis/ability status. And age.* And what exactly they were doing. And how many people were involved. And their sex/race/age/etc. And fuck knows what else.
Slut-shaming is the shame directed at the many, many Sams who fall down, or who are alleged to have fallen down, on one of the myriad unstated Rules About Sex and are therefore designated as sluts. It happens less than it used to, but there’s still plenty of it, as is readily imaginable from the range of differing reactions to the cast of Sams posited above.
The practical argument against slut-shaming is simple: it doesn’t work.
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