the problem with slut-bashing (+ why we are all bad girls)

1

Many moons ago, I was having a drink with a male friend in New York when I told him this idea I still like to kick around. It's for a nonfiction book. It would be a personal investigation of the 'golddigger' myth: where the stereotype comes from, how it evolved, how it gets institutionalized and plays out in the culture.

My friend then introduced me to the term 'dinner whore'.

Urbandictionary defines it thusly: "A girl who is exclusively after a free meal or an expensive gift. She actively seeks out dates with well-off men who will wine and dine her at upscale restaurants. She is usually physically attractive enough to make the man fall for her feminine wiles. She will rarely have sex with these men, until they spend a certain number of dollars on her. Nobody knows exactly what that number is, so the man keeps spending and spending, while the dinner whore keeps living it up."

Let me get this straight. A man, who might or might not be exclusively after sex, takes an attractive woman to dinner hoping but not knowing if he'll get to have sex with her, which might or might not actually happen.

I think we used to call that a date.

(Although if she invited him, she should probably pick up the check.)

2

I myself have never known a woman to say, "Gosh, I'd like to eat at Spago tonight. Time to put on those five-inch glitter platforms and cruise Rodeo Drive."

If a man can say, "It was just a one night stand,"

it seems a woman can say, "It was only penne a la vodka and a nice chardonnay. It didn't mean anything."

Note that a dinner whore is called a whore because she doesn't sleep with the man immediately (or at all). She has the audacity to think that she is not required to exchange her body for food, even if Thomas Keller serves it up personally; she considers the pleasure of her company, the value of her time and attention, to be reward enough.

How uppity.

But it shows how the word 'whore' gets used to diminish a woman when she doesn't go along according to plan. Or when she has her own plan.

And if she speaks out against the plan, who knows what hell might break loose. Some well-known personality might call her a slut and order her to make sex tapes and upload them to the Internet for public viewing.

Not like that happens or anything.

3

I understand that men get frustrated when they feel judged solely on the basis of wealth and status, or lack thereof; I understand that women get frustrated when they feel overlooked for some sweet busty soul who considers anything predating MTV to be of the prehistoric era. My point is not that one gender is morally superior to the other.

I believe that men and women are equally capable of love, greatness, and compassion, and the world works best when we can bring that out in each other.

But the double standard sucks. It implies that one gender has worth, and the other does not. Men can exploit women, and discard them, and that's acceptable (especially if there's a prenup) and even expected.

It's acceptable because we still believe, even if we're not fully aware that we believe it, that women are out to exploit men, to lure them over to the dark side with their "feminine wiles" so they can drain them of life energy/material wealth.

And then go shopping.

The only safe woman is a naïve and sexually inexperienced woman, a pure woman, a virgin. As Jessica Valenti points out in her excellent book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman's moral character isn't judged by what she does, but what she doesn't do (have sex).

In short, a woman's worth is located between her legs.

This is a brand of misogyny embedded in our cultural DNA, tracing all the way back to an origin story about a girl and a boy and a rosy red apple.

Stories shape the soul of a culture. They transmit the values and beliefs of a culture. As Michael Margolis put it: if you want to change a culture, change the stories.

But that story isn't changing anytime soon.

When you call a woman a slut, it's not because you necessarily believe that she's slept her way through the entire NBA. You do it because there's nothing more base than female sexuality. You want to cut her down to size, to put her in her place, for whatever transgression she's committed that took her outside the box of 'proper' feminine behavior and made her such a pain in the ass.

The worst thing you can call someone in this culture, man or woman, is a cunt. Call someone a 'dick', and you're implying that he's an idiot; call him a cunt, and you're implying that he's trash, he's contaminated, she's vile. Throw her away.

As women, we understand this all the way down through our bones.

It's not that we're being oversensitive. It's not that we care overmuch what other people think. It's the visceral meaning the word carries, how it attacks and degrades the very essence of who we are, and where it locates us in the culture.

If we let it.

4

And we let it.

We use the word against each other.

We do it in a kind of self-defense: by calling you a slut, I am implying that I myself am not. We do it out of jealousy, competitiveness and scorn. We do it to exclude: we define ourselves as insiders by declaring others as outsiders. Letty Cottin Pogrebin refers to slut-shaming as "the survival tactic of a second-class human being. Lacking confidence, bereft of self-esteem, we play the only game in town that seems to offer a payoff."

"Slut bashing," adds Leora Tanenbaum

is a sad attempt to wield power by those who feel they don't have any. Women and girls lash out at other women and girls when they recognize that no matter how hard they work, and no matter what sacrifices they make, they will always have more to prove than men and boys do."

And because they generally haven't been exposed to feminism, Leora adds, it doesn't occur to them to turn against anything except each other.

5

In her book THE ART OF WAR FOR WOMEN, Chin-ning Chu writes:

Women seem to have fallen prey to something I call the crabs-in-the-pot syndrome. When you cook crabs, you don't have to place the lid on the boiling pot because the crabs keep one another from getting out. As one crab gets near the top and attempts to climb over the edge, another crab will naturally put it down in its own attempt to escape. As a result, all the crabs go to their collective doom.

This is the problem whenever a woman defends herself by saying I am not a slut.

By declaring that you are not a slut, you are saying that some women are sluts; you are drawing a line between yourself and them. Except it's a line that can't exist, because all it does is reinforce the stereotype that you're trying to deny. As soon as you buy into a reality that brands any woman a 'slut', you buy into a belief system that attacks femalehood itself. This includes you. You sacrifice someone else in your effort to escape the boiling water, but you can't get out of the pot.

Says Chu:

But it doesn't have to be that way. There are countless examples through history of women who have risen to the top because they've helped other women excel.

We can transcend. We can act like the pot doesn't exist. We can refuse to use the word against another woman, or to acknowledge the word if and when it's applied to us. We don't need to explain or defend; we know that as soon as we do — as soon as we buy into that particular framework of beliefs – we end up perpetuating the slut game, and we lose.

Better to create – to force into being – a new reality, one in which we are all sluts and whores and dinner whores –

– or none of us are.

We can commit to each other.

We can lift each other up.