The Truth About Sluts

“Boys will be boys, and girls will be sluts.”

That’s how author Leora Tanenbaum sums up the sexual double standard.

Tanenbaum has spent the past two decades researching the word “slut” and how the label is used to shame and police young women, and female sexuality as a whole. Her first book on the subject, Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation was published in August 2000. Nearly 15 years later, she re-examines what has changed — and what hasn’t — in I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet, published this week.

I Am Not a Slut focuses on how digital culture has shaped the ubiquitous nature of the “slut” label. “Today we’re constantly on display,” said Tanenbaum in an interview with HuffPost Women, “and certainly men feel that pressure too, but the pressure on girls and women is really inescapable, because so much of our feminine identity is connected with looking sexy and looking sexy all the time.”

If being labelled “slut” is so undesirable, why is it that being perceived as not sexual is also so undesirable?
That is so true. You don’t wanna be a prude and you don’t wanna be a slut. It’s really impossible. We are evaluated and judged through a sexual prism no matter what we do. Either we’re not sexual enough or we’re too sexual. It’s just tiring, man.

It’s god damn exhausting!
There’s really no way to win. And I’m so glad that you raised that issue, because so many adults are judgmental about the way young women present themselves in public. They just don’t understand how these young women have to walk on this razor-thin tightrope to not be a prude, not be a slut, be sexy but just the right amount, not show that they’re exerting any effort — you just woke up looking sexy in this very understated way.

It’s impossible for anybody of any age. That’s why we’re in this muddle. Because just existing while female puts us at risk of being evaluated on a sexual scale.

The Huffington Post