“Boys will be boys and girls will be sluts”: Leora Tanenbaum on defeating slut-shaming i

“Boys will be boys and girls will be sluts”: Leora Tanenbaum on defeating slut-shaming in the age of the Internet Salon.com: In the book you talk a lot about where race and class intersect when it comes to the slut label, as far as who could even be a slut historically. I’m curious how the racial implications specifically have changed over time, because one of your primary findings is that in the age of social media, everyone’s a slut. It used to be one or two girls in the school and now it’s everyone. So does that apply racially as well?LT: The 55 girls and women I spoke with are not a random representative selection of young American women who have been labeled “sluts” and “hos.” These are people who wanted to speak with me and wanted to participate and who came to me. Having said that, I actually did not find any noteworthy racial or ethnic difference in the overall narrative arc that I describe about being labeled a “slut” or any of its synonyms. It really cut across racial and ethnic lines. I find that really striking that white women, black women, Latina women, biracial women, Asian women, all told me roughly the same narrative. It does make me think about how although we all live intersectional lives, the way I, with my racial privilege, experienced slut-bashing when I was in high school was obviously different from the way other people who may not have racial privilege experienced their slut-bashing; the fact that the basic narrative is the same really just goes to show you that this is a product of the sexual double standard.Salon.com: So, this is a book about social media and social culture online in addition to all of these other social issues, and I’m curious: With the pace at which the world moves these days, do you worry about having just written a book about the Internet? How much do you think things are going to change? Do you think this relationship with social media and slut-bashing and slut-shaming is here to stay and that a lot of this research that you did is going to hold for a while?LT: Definitely girls and women now have these tools to fight back against slut-bashing and slut-shaming. So many of them are doing a really fantastic job. My concern is that some people, many people, might think, “Oh, well because all of these teenagers are calling out acts of slut-bashing and slut-shaming, they seem to have it under control, so we can leave them alone and they’re going to take care of it.” When you are a young person, you often don’t have the savvy and the tools; you may know how to create an amazing video and you may know how to orchestrate an amazing Twitter campaign, but you’re just a kid, and the burden should not be on you to fight back as an individual. You also have to have certain privileges to feel that [fighting back] is something that you’re capable of doing. So many young people either don’t have those privileges or just are not developmentally at the point where they feel they can handle that. Which is why I feel that this is a fight for adults to be fighting and we need to be taking the lead. We need to help them. It’s great for those [young people] who are fighting. But that’s not their burden; that’s our burden and we need to help them along.“Read the full interview here -- source link

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