Slut Shaming

Seeing as "bullshit that society tells us" was locked, I decided to make another post on the topic of slut shaming because there are a lot of misconceptions about this topic and I think a lot of them are really dangerous and need to be adressed.

In the United States we portray "sluts" as women who are not conservative of the way they dress or present themselves, and have a lot of sexual parters and/or sexual activity of any kind. We go on to characterize these women as being illogical, irrational, having low self esteem and low self respect and negatively compete with other women. When you call a girl a "slut" you describe "regular girls" as being something different from these "sluts". The problem is, when you label these "sluts" as in other, that is something different from regular or normal people, you're perpetuating the stereotype that women who have a lot of sex are not as worthy of respect as women who don't.

Good things happen to "regular girls" and "sluts" get hurt. By saying this you're keeping the stereotype alive that women who have a lot of sex are weak, and stupid, and unwanted temptresses. When women say that about other women, it supports that kind of thinking in men. And when men don't see "sluts" as real people, as regular girls, then for some men that makes it okay for them, it helps them justify hurting or disrespecting these women. And that is how rape happens.

Someone said "if you see a girl that's blackout drunk who's about to go home with some guy she doesn't know you should go up and talk to her to discourage her from making dumb decisions" I believe they had honest and good intentions by saying this but there are also a lot of problems with it. When a women is blackout drunk, and doesn't know where she is or what she's doing you're not saving her from making a dumb decision you're saving her from being raped . "Stupid decisions" implies that there was a two way street here, that's not how rape works. When a man has sex with a women who is incapacitated, too drunk to know what she's doing, unconscious, asleep or otherwise incapable of making a sober decision that's rape every single time. The sex that occurs in that situation is never a dumb decision made by a dumb slut, it's rape.

There in lies another issue with separating "regular girls" from "sluts". When we make the situation we start to justify that if a "regular girl" is attacked in an alley that's rape but if a slut goes home with someone making a dumb decision, that's her being stupid. The problem is that the majority of rape doesn't come from a mass attacker, but these "sluts" hear things like this and they internalize it, blame themselves for their assault, and feel like if they had made better decisions they wouldn't have been raped. That leads to people not reporting their assault, leads to people not talking about their assault, and leads to people not understanding what assault is, therefore putting other people in the position to have it happen to them as well.

This is also a much bigger problem then most people realize. According to the rape abuse and incest national network, one out of every six american women has been a victim of attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. That means that with out a doubt, several if not many of the women you have met or encountered in your life have already been raped, or sexually assaulted. Also 44% of rape victims are under 18 and 80% are under thirty. When you shame "sluts" for making "stupid decisions" you're shaming a large portion of women for things that have already happened to them that were not their fault, dehumanizing and comparing them to animals or people who aren't as highly evolved, or less capable of making rash decisions as monogamous people. By doing so you are enforcing the thinking that the most horrible thing that's ever happened to them was a result of them being stupid or animalistic.

Disclaimer: There are a lot of points in this post that I did not touch on, keep in mind I used "women" and "girls" in particular for this post about slut shaming just because 9 out of 10 sexual assaults happen to females, I did not mean to devalue or erase the issues of men, or otherwise identifying other kinds of people who have had these things happen to them.

Here is the news article that provoked a lot of outcry in the media and sort of sparked this discussion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/sport ... wanted=all
And here's a video by Laci Green that sums up slut shaming and most likely explains it better than I did:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCw2MzKjpoo&t=1m46s

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/QeYR-NKZq74/viewtopic.php

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