Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation was getting a follow up. I first read Slut! at 16 and it was one of my awakening books, the "Oh, this actually happens to other people/I'm not alone" type of books. I eagerly anticipated the same feeling with Tanenbaum's newest, but I was sadly and woefully disappointed.
The book is broken down in nine chapters, starting with the differences of slut bashing and shaming today versus twenty years ago, the differences between a "good" slut and a "bad" slut, how online harassment has developed, sexual assault and how to cope and eventually eliminate the term. Tanenbaum states upfront that there is a lot of ground to cover because "the label 'slut' is far more common, and utterly more confusing than ever before. But one thing has not changed: regardless of context, the consequences of being labelled a slut are nearly always damaging." Damaging indeed. Countless young women, including Rehtaeh Parsons, Felicia Garcia, Audrie Pott, took their lives after brutal and disgusting bullying, mostly about their sexual lives. The author states that one thing that has changed is that there are now two separate types of harassment: slut-bashing and slut-shaming, the latter being a causal way of judging peers, but still nonetheless harmful because it polices others' behavior. The term 'slut' has always been about controlling women.
The book does include some very thoughtful and important points, like specifically calling out the fact that "the components of a slut's sluttiness include: displaying agency, being active rather than passive, choosing her actions....Agency is a critical element of the sexual double standard, in which only girls, never boys, are called to tasks for their real or presumed sexual aggression."Women who don't toe the party line or play the game have been called aggressive or slutty since the beginning of time. Calling a woman a slut "convinces girls and women who have been victimized that they are the ones who have done something wrong," when in fact it is a tool to subjugate women. Young women "[recognize] that sexual equality does not in fact yet exist in practice. When a girl and boy are identically sexually active, only the girl is treated punitively."
However, there were several disappointing parts in the book. While Tanenbaum includes the ethnicity of the young women she interviewed (skewed toward white women), she also included physical descriptions, such as hair style and clothing choices, which seemed unnecessary. And while many aspects of the digital age are numerous and sometimes understood only colloquially, the author plays up to the fact that she is out of date. Social media isn't difficult, nor are teenagers a separate species.
One of the biggest issues was the discrepancies in advice or judgement. On one page, this is stated: "It's true that something is horribly wrong. But hand wringing, clucking or lecturing girls to behave 'appropriately' or 'modestly' is an ineffective as a 'Do Not Track' app." And yet on the very next page, "We wonder: Don't young females today recognize that if they sexualize themselves, particularly in nonsexual contexts such as school, others will regard them as sexual objects?...Are they really so clueless?" And yet still on the next page, "In general, these girls claim that they make clothing choices for themselves, not male attention. This, my friends, is a smoke screen." Gobsmackingly, this same book spoke about agency and how "sluts" take agency and control and are thus penalized for it. I'm at a loss as to what effect the previous statements could possibly hope to make.
I appreciate the situation as it is currently: we want to encourage women to dress and act as they wish, because they are independent human beings, but also must acknowledge the fact that rape culture and outdated and dangerous attitudes prevail, which lead to whispered advice and contradictory attitudes about drinking while out in public. But the advice given seems deliberately contradictory.
When the book ended with appendices, I admit I was incensed. They included "Don't insult your daughter over her clothing choices" for parents but in The Slut-Shaming Self-Defense Toolkit, "Don't binge drink" and "Don't dress in a sexually provocative manner unless you want to be looked at sexually and can handle being reduced to a sexual object" were listed. For the latter appendix, the author does preface with "It's never your fault for being slut-shamed or assaulted. The ultimate goals described in this book are to eliminate slut-shaming and to redirect blame for sexual assault onto those responsible for it: the assaulters."
Since Ms. Tanenbaum is unclear on the topic, please allow me to state it unequivocally: "A woman could be stone cold drunk, unconscious and a gigantic arrow pointing to her orifices and guess what? STILL ISN'T HER FAULT THAT SHE WAS RAPED." It is utterly galling to read a book geared toward young women seeking advice about how to combat sexist attitudes and harassment that includes those very same judgments within the same book. As previously mentioned, I understand how difficult it can be to help women avoid assault. I realize attitudes and actions take measurably longer to change, but this book feels yet again that we are putting the onus on women to avoid rape rather than teaching men healthy boundaries, consent and to not rape women.
(Photo Credit: http://www.leoratanenbaum.com/)
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