slut-shaming

 

Good morning! Here's the feminist news on our radar.

• Today, Arkansas might be the 36th state to ratify the ERA. Help show your support and spread the word. [ERA Action]

• April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center has lots of way that you can take action. [National Sexual Violence Resource Center]

• NPR interviewed Ari Seth Cohen, talking about his blog Advanced Style, which features the beautiful and stylish older women of NYC. [NPR, Advanced Style]

• We all know Rosa Parks, but she wasn't the first to refuse to give up her seat on the bus. Democracy Now interviews Claudette Colvin, who was just 15 when she was arrested for doing the same. [Democracy Now, NewBlackMan (in Exile)]

• The National Magazine Award nominees have been announced, and this year half of them are women! [Mother Jones]

• A six-year-old girl in Afghanistan was going to be sold into marriage to repay her father's debt, until an anonymous donor paid the debt. [New York Times]

• New York State Sen. Eric Adams has testified that the "stop and frisk" program was intended to intimidate minorities. [Raw Story]

• We're getting ready for this weekend's season premiere of Mad Men and are excited to see what social and feminist storylines might be on the horizon. [Women's Voices For Change]

• Speaking of Mad Men, John Hamm is getting really tired of people talking about his penis, and he's not the only one. [Tiger Beatdown]

• The Yeah Yeah Yeahs released a video for "Sacrilege" from their upcoming album, depicting slut shaming to the extreme. [Feminspire]

Is there anything I missed? Share what you're reading in the comments!

 

Making matters worse—way worse—for young people online and for the world in general is a new page on Facebook called "12 year old slut meme's" [sic], dedicated to slut-shaming and general douchebaggery. Since the page launched last month, Facebook users have asked that it be taken down as a violation of the site's hate speech policy, but as of the publishing of this post it's going strong with 214,489 fans.

The administration Delhi Charter School of Delhi, Louisiana, ought to be red-faced right now. Why's that? Well, in 2006 the administration instituted a new policy: No pregnant students allowed in the classroom. The school reserved the (illegal) right to even force pregnancy tests on students. However, when the good ol' ACLU stepped up on the case, the Delhi Charter School claimed ignorance on the unconstitutionality of banning pregnant women from their halls and reversed their policy. Even without the government stepping in, the administration of the Delhi Charter School is guilty of body-shaming and slut-shaming their student body for ever instituting this policy, and certainly earned the honor of this week's Douchebag Decree.

There have been countless observations made here at Bitch and elsewhere about how the term “slut” has been used, abused, and reclaimed with varying degrees of success. In this post, I want to explore a topic that I’ve been having a lot of conversations about lately with a friend who works full time at my university. Her position happens to be managed by the undergraduates in the student government. She's said that while few undergrad students would raise their hands if asked “are you a feminist?,” many more seem to feel like the work of feminism is done and what they've taken away from it is a message of sexual empowerment and freedom. What I wonder about is how much this message is a product of second wave feminisms and how much it is a reflection of the rampant oversexualization of women in the media. My friend hears this version of empowerment in watercooler talk about whose "number" is higher and who "got" whom after the bar last night.

So, Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle, songwriter and poet laureate of the existentially anguished, identifies as a feminist and has even said that his feminist ideals conflict with his Catholic faith. When I first heard this, I was quite surprised. Why? Well, listen to one reason, a song called "Bad Priestess" (lyrics).

Full disclosure: I have had misgivings about Slutwalk from day one. "Slut" has never been a term used against me. Though the idea of reclaiming the word seems to resonate with many young, white heterosexual women, it is not clear to me that it's something that can unify all women. It felt alienating and exclusionary to me from the start.

Lori Aurelia Williams has been one of my favorite authors since high school, when I was lucky enough to stumble across When Kambia Elaine Flew In From Neptune. Williams' debut novel was a poetic, mesmerizing story of a working-class family in Houston. It also was the rare story to deal with sexual abuse in a believable yet unexploitative manner, as the narrator slowly discovered that her friend, the title character, was being prostituted by her guardian. Williams went on to write sequel Shayla's Double Brown Baby Blues and additional novel Broken China, and while the latter drew controversy for its depiction of teenage motherhood and stripping, I admire both of those works as well.

So it was that I approached Maxine Banks is Getting Married with astronomical expectations. Williams' first published book in five years, Maxine Banks features a seventeen-year-old protagonist, her oldest yet and arguably her strongest. Seeing her friend Tia's (a character from Williams' first two books) happiness at marrying her longtime boyfriend, Maxine suspects that marriage is the answer to her own life's inadequacies. After all, she loves her sweetheart, Brian... and hates living with her hypercritical mother and her mother's many abusive lovers.

If you haven't heard, there's only one possible result when you're a "slut"—particularly if you have the audacity to do it without shame and—clutch your pearl, ladies—talk about it in a public forum.

NO RING FOR YOU!

Who would want the cow when he can have the milk for free, we're told (because, like cows, we women apparently have no intrinsic value—we're just about what we can provide for others).

The ACLU is suing this week's Douchebag Decree recipient for being a gigantic douche. OK, so Austin Couch, principal of Churubusco High School in Indiana, is actually being sued for free speech violation, but that's just lawyer speak for douchiness, right? At any rate, Principal Couch suspended two CHS sophomores from all extracurricular activities last month because they posted photos of themselves on their MySpace pages looking too darned sexy. He calls it principal-ing, but we (and the ACLU) call it slut-shaming.

You girls are officially suspended for having bodies!

Meghan McCain posted the cleavage shot that launched a thousand tweets last night with this twitpic of her reading an Andy Warhol biography:



The photo, which she captioned with the line, my "spontaneous" night in is my Andy Warhol biography and takeout....I'm getting old caused a major freakout among her devoted Twitter followers and their pervy friends, with cries of "boobs!" and "slut!" and "boobs!" echoing throughout the Twitterverse. (Yes, I said Twitterverse. It's a thing now.) Slut shame much, tweeple?