Wanna Be A Victim: A Discussion on Sluts

So, 16 Yale students and alumni have filed a Title IX lawsuit against the university for their lack of disciplinary action against the people responsible for the following: DKE pledges publicly chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!”, ZTE pledges surrounding the Women’s Center with “We Love Yale Sluts” signs, more frat members stealing shirts decorated with personal stories of sexual assault from a Clothesline Project anti-violence demonstration (better to crush someone’s spirit than drink a bunch of soy sauce and die), and the general bureaucratic hushing-up and shaming involved during the small percentage of sexual assaults that women on campus actually reported.

A reminder: 1 in 4 college women is sexually assaulted during her time in school and 80% of those assaults are committed by acquaintances. But of course, 2 in 5 college women dress like sluts when they go out (3 in 5 on Halloween or any sort of theme party, 5 in 5 at the good frats) so what are we even talking about here?

On the word “slut,” I have mixed feelings. One cop in Toronto gave some safety tips to women on how to avoid sexual assault; although the only valid nugget of advice on this issue is “don’t be a woman,” he suggested to the public that they don’t dress like sluts. And while that’s clearly ridiculous, there’s a massive undercurrent of thought about sexual assault that it’s connected in some way to how the girl looked and how she was dressed. Think about the Times gang rape piece, blaming the 11-year-old for wearing makeup, or the thousands of times you’ve heard someone say “She was asking for it.” Or the way people react to a man raping 200 elderly women primarily with surprise that he could get it up!

I don’t agree with the way that “slut” gets thrown around, and I don’t like the nasty hint of approval in both that word and the “she was asking for it” line, although it does get straight to Jezebel‘s point: that women are somehow supposed to be sexy from the moment they put on an Abercrombie padded bikini top at the age of 8 until the day that Botox and Pilates are finally not enough–but they’re not supposed to be sluts. Or, as Coop says in Wet Hot American Summer, they’ve gotta be the right kind of slut.

But I love that movie, and, more to the point, I think that there’s something to be gained by not dismissing the word “slut” as meaningless just because it’s mostly deployed by idiots. As it stands, “slut” is used for females of all kinds: girls who like sex, girls who don’t want to have sex but have the audacity to show off their bodies anyway, ugly or fat women who presumably do slutty things to make up for their less desirable qualities, pretty women who go just over the line in performing all the self-beautification acts that the beauty-industrial complex asks them to do, pretty much anyone who’s giving too much access or not enough access to their God-given T&A, which is pretty much everyone.

But I’m going to take a stand on this word. A slut is someone who bases the entirety of her (or his) self-worth on being as sexually attractive as possible and then acts accordingly: in other words, someone who’s been fooled by the machine!

Now of course, sluts are made, not born, and they’re not to be faulted. The gamut of consumer choices available to little girls runs from the apparently innocuous (princess gear, the consumption of which is a preview to the absurd $161 billion American wedding industry) to the obviously disgusting (nipple tassel baby T-shirts, or ones that say Future MILF and Future Trophy Wife). Snooki made a video for AOL giving an 11-year-old a Jersey-style makeover, with the tag line “You’re never too young to look bangin’.” Girls are socialized from birth to base their self-worth on men and looks and sex and slutty attributes.  The winning-est women in America are those who appear on (as the 30 Rock joke goes) the Maxim “I’d Rape That” 100: women who are idolized for the very qualities that make them, according to police officers and male college students, worthy targets.

Take Katy Perry. She’s awesome, she shows her tits all the time, her tits are awesome, her music is catchy, she rocks! Sluts rock! That song she made with Kanye about aliens came on the radio today and I stayed on the station for long enough to hear the line “Take–me–t-t-take me, wanna be a victim”–and then I just got so sad. Not because of the line itself, but rather, because it isn’t shocking in the least. Even when taken out of its very insightful alien-metaphor context, “wanna be a victim” is so unremarkable, so run-of-the-mill as far as today’s aggressive, porny brand of objectification goes. Sometimes it seems to me that loosened standards for female sexual freedom are resulting in a blunt, dangerous creep factor on all other sides: that women said “I’m going to own this” and men replied, “Oh bitch I’ll show you who owns this.”

Back to Snooki for a second. Rutgers paid her $32,000 for a speaking engagement. They paid Toni Morrison $30,000. So, economically speaking, being a Snooki when you grow up is just as good if not better than being a genius and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

How to navigate this system? College girls will be called sluts anyway, so they’ll continue go out every Wednesday through Sunday aiming to look just as hot and rape-able as the girls at the very top of the either unspoken or brutally public list of frat’s most wanted–and then they’ll be blamed for it when assaulted, which (never forget) 1 in 4 of them will be. If I was a Yale student drawn to wealthy misogynists the same way that I’m drawn to jean shorts and cinnamon-sugar doughnuts, I’d have played the game too–maybe I’d have believed that my assets were all external and in existence primarily for male consumption, which is the primary tenet of sluthood.

I’m not arguing for the use of the word “slut” or for the right to put people in categories. You can’t judge a slut by her cover, either; a girl certainly has the right to throw her tits out there, get hammered and go home with a stranger just for the fun of it. And, you know, there are a lot of ways to be a terrible human being! It’s just that this one is just so obviously remediable. It can’t be that hard to refuse to buy into the mindset that the best a woman can be is a trophy at the top of the list.

Believing this, or acting like you do, is equivalent to becoming part of the Slut Creation Machine: an awful assembly line turning out young women who neglect to cultivate their personalities because of an accurate assessment that personalities don’t matter to the poon-seeking future leaders of America. We don’t need any more forces contributing to the sizable portion of girls who won’t report their sexual assaults because they believe that blacking out and getting anonymously plowed is the best they can do for a weeknight in college anyway.

So let’s all do our part by recognizing that this is a real problem. Next time you hear someone say “slut” or “slam piece”, suggest that they acquire a husky dog and train it to say “I love you” instead. Happy Friday everyone!

Note: I will refer to females as “targets”

So today, Jezebel posted this email written by some guy in Kappa Sig at USC–a treatise so desperately aggressive towards women that its publishing will hopefully render its loser author unable to snag any “cock-pocket” (as he puts it) for quite some time. But maybe not, because there’s always the “Loop n’ Doop: A target that is very easy to take down. All she takes is a good amount of liquor (loop) and she will be good to go for you to fuck her (doop).” The email is long and far from ground-breaking, but here are some highlights on this guy’s treatise on how to be a “Cocksman”: “Note: I will refer to females as ‘targets’. They aren’t actual people like us men. Consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless.“

Another: “Don’t fuck middle-eastern targets. Exhibit some patriotism and have some pride. You want your cock smelling like falafel? Filth.“

And my personal favorite: “1.) Non-consent and rape are two different things. There is a fine line, so make sure not to cross it.”

Now, I was in a sorority at the University of Virginia, and I’m dating someone who was in a frat there as well. Generally I stayed away from the Greek scene in college because I preferred my sexual marketplace to be a little less… structured; however, I don’t think that this this email is an occasion to bemoan frat culture, which is not universally terrifying and often really fun. More importantly, it’s something in which girls participate by choice. While it genuinely disturbs me that men like this often end up as millionaire CEOs, it’s a girl’s responsibility to have enough self-respect–and better things, or people, to do–than to have to resort to making slutty eyes across the beer pong table at a guy who’s wondering only about your ability to “gobble cock.”

But set this email up against the New York Times and Houston Chronicle coverage of an incident in Texas in which at least seventeen men gang-raped an 11-year-old. The articles are already being lambasted by bloggers for their total victim-blaming and focus on the “plight” of the guys in trouble. From the Times article: “Among [the community's questions] is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act? ‘It’s just destroyed our community,’ said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. ‘These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.‘”

From the Chronicle: “Local officials say the attack has devastated this close-knit community, leaving many to wonder who will be charged next. There’s talk that a star athlete at Cleveland High School was seen sexually assaulting the girl on the video.” Oh no, a star athlete? He had such a bright future ahead of him. He was probably going to go to college, join a frat, and be able to safely walk that “fine line” between non-consent and rape in a place where the alcohol is flowing and none of the girls are 11.

“Carter Williams, 64, seated at a small card table playing dominoes inside a local grocery, does not think laying blame is the right response to the sex assault. ‘This is a praying time for the young men and the young girl,’ Williams said. ‘Seems like everyone in this whole town needs some God in their life.’“

The 11-year-old girl is repeatedly described in a way that would suggest that she “asked for it.” She wore makeup and dressed like she was older. She “made flamboyant statements about drinking, smoking and sex.” While the implication of these details is appalling, I’ll go as far as I can and imagine that the girl did indeed want to sexually experiment at the age of 11 (despite the fact that she was driven to the site of the rape and told she would be beaten if she didn’t take off her clothes and do what the guys wanted her to–a small detail that these news stories seem to be completely ignoring in their tone). To use common parlance, let’s say she was a budding slut.

What, and who, do you think would be responsible for such a thing? The reporters (male and female) who choose to think like the Kappa Sig frat boy and treat obviously victimized girls as targets even after the fact. The culture that created both the frat email and these news stories, which are absolutely two branches of the same tree. The men and women who would read “R.D.A (Raw Dog Assassin): A man that refuses to wear condoms because no feeling on earth can compare to a warm piece of pie coming in contact with your cock” and laugh rather than hold back their vomit. And most of all, the idea that a girl isn’t anything but a target–the sum of her face (maybe), tits, and “spunk-pot”–a piece of objectification whose only path to interaction with the opposite sex is through marketing herself in a misguided and alarming campaign for attention. The child did not grow up in a vacuum. If she was ever indeed acting out sexually, even if she were to have stood in the park and screamed, “I’d love to have violent sex with seventeen adult men in the next hour,” she’s still eleven. The most “blamable” possible eleven-year-old would still be nothing more than a product of all our heinous cultural practices.

I don’t usually break the book review format to write about other things, but this is just too ridiculous. I don’t think that our new acquaintance at Kappa Sig makes it a pastime to gang-rape preteens. But I also don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that he’s had sex at least once with a girl who didn’t want to have sex with him but was too drunk to fight him off, which is, let’s say it: rape. And I doubt that he would find that too much of an issue.  The attitude that his email reflects is the same attitude that makes reporters at top publications portray this poor 11-year-old as someone who deserved it, and the men who raped her as solid all-American men whose upcoming legal ordeal will rip apart the town. Everyone needs to get some goddamn self-respect here. Girls shouldn’t reduce themselves to “Loop ‘n Doops.” Guys shouldn’t be borderline rapists posing as normal people. Reporters shouldn’t be idiots. It’s not difficult to start being a reasonable person who does not contribute to the acceptability of sexual assault. So here’s to these reporters getting a big slap at the next editorial meeting, and to this Kappa Sig cocksman having only “filth, fatties and uglies” on all forthcoming Gullet Reports.