Stop the slut-shaming and be fair

I think I can safely say women have made some major gains in recent history. In school, I was allowed to play sports, take shop class and have every opportunity boys did.

In college, I’m part of the majority; according to the American Council on Education, women have represented 57 percent (or more) of university attendees in the United States since 2000. I’m pretty confident I’ll be given the same opportunities in my future career as my male
counterparts.

It’s a good time to be female. Except for one little snag. If the world is beginning to treat women better, why are women treating one another worse?

When you walk around our campus and listen to the conversations of girls, you’ll hear the words “slut” and “whore” used casually. Sometimes they jokingly refer to their close friends this way (as in Regina George of “Mean Girls”’s famous quote: “Boo, you whore.”). More often, they’re used to disparage the morality of other women. She was flirting with the boy you like? I guess that makes her a “whore.”

If a man flirts with multiple women in a night, accepts advances from others or takes other girls out, it’s usually never his fault. At least, that’s what I hear. It’s all the fault of “sluts who probably just want attention.” Since when did forward women become hoes?

In the midst of our hyper-sexualized culture, we’ve managed to keep women in a
powerless place. Women who are “too forward” are often characterized as desperate and over-sexed. Although men sometimes find their advances distasteful, forward women are more often condemned by their own sex.

If the meanness comes from a sense of competition for guys (which, from what I’ve seen, it often does), rest assured IU has an exact 50/50 gender distribution, according to the US News College Rankings.

My fear is that the enmity comes from something deeper.

Today’s media is full of women who hate other women, a phenomenon you never see echoed in men’s feelings about other men. The idea that women are catty and hard to get along with is a stereotype, just like the idea that men aren’t good at traditionally domestic tasks. Both ideas are easy to invalidate, yet we buy into them.

We need to find a little sympathy for one another.

An outfit you think is slutty might be what another girl feels confident in, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling good about yourself (although lately it seems unacceptable for women to admit they think they’re attractive). The only problem with this way of thinking arises when people (and, as I’ve seen, especially young women) use the opinions of others to define how they think about themselves.

The remaining glass ceiling for women in this country is one we’ve created. We need to stop the slut-shaming and the unkindness.

We’re not “whores.” We’re women with a lot in common. More than that, we’re all people trying to live our lives in the way that works best for us.

When we can’t seem to realize that we’re all motivated by the same desire for happiness and that we’re all just doing what we can to make that happen, we’re doing nothing but holding ourselves back.

­— kelfritz@indiana.edu