How to Respond to the Question 'Do I Look Like a Slut?'
“Do I look like a slut?”
If you are a young woman, you’ve most likely asked this question. Perhaps you said it to yourself while looking in the mirror, or maybe you queried your girlfriends while you guys were getting ready to go out. Or, worse of all, you might have had wondered if you looked like a slut after someone called you one.
But what is a slut anyway? Some young women today are asking this question as a way of trying to get rid of the idea of any woman is a slut—or that sluts even exist. Hannah Whitton, a British video blogger who focuses on sex and relationships, recently made avideo about the word. “Why do we need to reassure ourselves that we don’t look like sluts?” she asked.
“It’s not just about the word,” says Emily Lindin, founder of the UnSlut Project, a collaborative space for sharing stories and raising awareness about sexual bullying and slut shaming. “The word is kind of representative of this idea of gendered disdain and disgust, and even hatred to women who are perceived to be sexual in a certain way. The word ‘slut’ shouldn’t make sense. Someone shouldn’t recoil from the idea that we’re sexual.”
Their point: Sluts, like Pegasus unicorns and guys who don’t watch porn, don’t actually exist. The answer to “Do I look like a slut?” should be “What’s a slut?”
Whitton began her video by asking her followers on social media to describe a slut; she too wanted to figure out if she happened to be one. “Because Lord knows I get called one enough,” she said.
One follower wrote to Whitton that a slut is: “A patriarchal social construct used to hold women to stricter set of standards than the ones men are held to.”
Another, however, wrote “A slut is someone that has way too much sex.”
Lindin started her project after hearing about a young women in Toronto, Rehtaeh Parsons, who committed suicide after being slut-shamed online (a picture of her taken after she was gang raped was posted on Facebook). She posted her own diaries from when she was called a slut in middle school online to help people understand the thought process that made it possible for a student to decide to end her life after hearing these slurs.
“It reminded me of myself,” she says. “I had been labeled a school slut starting when I was 11. I thought ‘I can relate to these girls.’”
Lindin, now 28, points out that women are also guilty of calling each other “sluts,” without a lot of thought about what we’re really saying when we do. “Until a few years, I was part of this normal behavior of slut-shaming people,” she says. “If one of my girlfriends had broken up with a guy, then the new woman that he was dating was a slut. No questions asked. It sounds really catty, but most of the women I speak to say ‘Of course, that’s what we would say.”
Whether it’s a woman or man doing the slur-slinging, the person being called a “slut” has no control over it. There is no way to figure out if you do or don’t look like a slut. The only thing we are in charge of is not calling each other sluts—or bothering to care if we look like one.
“The sad truth of it is that, as the victim of slut shaming, you can’t take steps to avoid being slut shamed,” Lindin says. “It’s not about you; it’s impossible to avoid. It’s on us to discourage the slut shaming.”
Whitton has much the same message: “If you’re going to take anything away from this video, let’s stop calling each other sluts,” she says.
