Chapter Five: Slut-Shaming
I could have included slut-shaming in the sexualisation or the nudity/partial nudity chapters. However, I think that it deserves its own part in the book.
I understand that the sexual content on Wattpad can be fatiguing. Some people take the phrase “sex sells” too literally, while oversaturation seems to be beyond their understanding. Why is that? Well, a large proportion of writers on Wattpad are adolescents. Most of them are hormone-fuelled balls of frustration. With the advent of the internet however, things can get messy. Very messy.
Leora Tanenbaum, writer and journalist had tracked the slut shaming phenomenon for two decades. She described slut-shaming as the following:
“Slut-shaming is the experience of being labeled a sexually out-of-control girl or woman (a “slut” or “ho”) and then being punished socially for possessing this identity. Slut-shaming is sexist because only girls and women are called to task for their sexuality, whether real or imagined; boys and men are congratulated for the exact same behavior. This is the essence of the sexual double standard: Boys will be boys, and girls will be sluts.”
In my research for this book, I have heard several comments regarding ‘short skirts’ and ‘tops are too tight’. It makes me sad when I hear this, because it always only applies to women. Hugo Schywzer wrote an amazing article on this for Jezebel.com (January, 2013), where he described it more eloquently than I ever could:
“The peddlers of the modesty ideal insist on teaching girls that they are responsible for how adult men respond to their bodies. Usually basing their argument on junk science, misinterpretations of evolutionary psychology, and men’s own claims about their uncontrolled libidos, worried adults calculate that it’s easier to slut-shame an impressionable teen than to hold adult men to account. Adults often want to believe that short skirts are to blame for sexual assault, if only in the vain hope that more concealing clothing will be a perfect prophylaxis against rape. “
But why are these teenagers dressing in such a way? Or, since we are talking about Wattpad, why do teenagers ‘dress’ their protagonists that way in their media or in their content?
The bottom line is, it is a normal developmental level for teenagers to dress differently from their younger selves. It is normal for them to distance themselves from their parents’ ‘traditional’ values. Part of finding out who you are is finding out who you are not. It is normal for them to test their boundaries, and that includes their sexuality, both physically and emotionally. There are of course, some cultures that are different, but this development all level is typical for most Western and some Eastern cultures.
Just as a note, slut-shaming occurs to adult women too. We are just better equipped to deal with it. We want to curb unhealthy sexualisation, but on the whole, a girl’s perogative in her clothing choice, whether in person or on print, is just that. Her choice.
Clementine Ford, a writer-activist was quoted in Hugo’s article with the following:
“One of the biggest problems is that we imagine that for teen girls, sex is some kind of cataclysmic event that can never be recovered from. We make the mistake of assuming that giving girls the freedom to fuck up is really just giving them the freedom to be exploited. [That’s] not exactly a flattering view of girls’ emotional intelligence.”
Confused?
To Wattpad’s credit, I think their Code of Conduct (COC) is relatively robust in terms of bullying, at least ‘on paper’, as it were. However, the margin between Mature and Everyone in their CG is abrupt and does not match the graded sexual growth of our young readers and writers. Wattpad, as an organisation appears to have a rite of passage that no one else knows about. It is my feeling, as per the previous chapters, that Wattpad needs a more robust CG with a wider range of categories. I also think that it would be helpful if new younger members were provided with some official guide regarding sexual content and the cons of sexualisation.
The theme, as always, should be about empowerment to develop a healthy sexuality. Not repression, and certainly not a punition first approach.
