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It probably shouldn’t surprise to anyone that, in general, women in the blogosphere get a lot more harassment than men. After all, just walking down the street, women get a lot more harassment than men.
While I’ve been aware of this for a long time, it returned to the foreground of my thinking when John Scalzi wrote The Sort of Crap I Don’t Get, which is a nice overview of the issue from the perspective of a man who understands this. He’s been blogging for 13 years and has had a very strong online presence for 20, so he’s seen the development of the interwebs for a while. It doesn’t even matter what the topic is- knitting bloggers get vitriol, too. As he says,…
Continue reading When Sex Bloggers Get Slut Shamed
As you may have heard, SlutWalk started in response to a Toronto police officer saying that women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to avoid harassment or rape. And what was originally intended to be a local rally has inspired dozens of similar marches around the world.
The word “slut” has a rather difficult and complex history. Some folks embrace it and reclaim it, while others argue that there isn’t any way for women to reclaim a word that has been so loaded with sexist messages. There has also been some really great discussion about the different impact the word has on women of color and the different relationships they may have with both the term and the notion of reclaiming it…
Continue reading Slut-Shaming Enables Rape
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
The NY Times has an opinion piece up the other day by Ross Douthat, Why Monogamy Matters, which highlights what happens when people who don’t think all that clearly about sex write about sex.
Douthat starts with the recent research from the Centers for Disease Control that says that US teens and 20-somethings are waiting longer to have sex. Leaving aside an analysis of that research, I think there’s a pivotal sentence in the piece that shows how muddy Douthat’s thinking on sex is:
But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one
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Continue reading Critical Thinking in a NY Times Opinion Piece on Sex? Unfortunately, No.
When the topic of slut-shaming comes up, it’s often said that there is no equivalent for men. After all, the terms used for men who have a lot of sex or a lot of sex partners are things like ladies-man, stud, or Don Juan. They lack the negativity of slut and I’m certainly not going to claim that there aren’t different rules for men and women when it comes to sex. After all, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone called a stud to try to shame him into complying with gender roles or to punish him.
At the same time, it’s often overlooked that there is a comparable dynamic that affects men. Boys and men who act in ways that don’t …
Continue reading Fag Bashing & Slut Shaming: It’s About Policing Gender Roles
There’s been a flurry of articles recently about the shift on college campuses and within feminism about casual sex, hooking up, and abstinence. According to these stories on Salon.com, the Atlantic.com, the New York Post, and others around the internet, women are discovering that casual sex doesn’t work for them and are embracing celibacy and abstinence. And I think that most of these articles are missing the point.
First, though, I want to be very clear about what I think sex-positivity has to offer when talking about abstinence. From a sex-positive perspective, it doesn’t matter how often you have sex, or how many people you have sex with, or what kinds of sexual activities you do. What matters is that your decisions …
Continue reading What Does Sex-Positivity Say About Abstinence?
@SexDayUSA tweeted a link to a 2007 article on Glamour.com about purity balls, which got me thinking. If you’re not familiar with them, a purity ball is an event for fathers to pledge to protect their daughters’ purity and for daughters to “to commit to moral purity and help them understand the beautiful and righteous life God offers them.”
Of course, purity balls are problematic in a lot of ways. They give control of female sexuality to men and turn women into chattel that fathers hand over to husbands. They assume an adversarial relationship between boyfriends/prospective husbands and fathers. They ignore the experiences of lesbian, bisexual, and queer girls by reinforcing heteronormativity. They set people up for sexual disillusionment by requiring ignorance. In addition …
Continue reading The Shame of Purity Balls
A news report came out today that hits close to home for me. Literally, since it’s about something going on at my hometown high school.
It seems that an annual tradition has evolved in which the senior girls create a “slut list” of the incoming first-year girls. According to ABC news, the list names of the younger girls, along with something meant to be degrading. Some examples from the ABC article:
“I’m so desperate and hairy that I’ll give you [drugs] for free if you get with me,” one entry read.
“Keeping up with the family tradition, [blank] me … and knock me up,” read another.
The list is just part of what happens on the first day of school, students say. Seniors also
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Continue reading Slut Shaming Doesn't Sparkle
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