Quotes from Leora Tanenbaum

Indeed, girls can be so in need of social approval that they confuse harassment for acceptance--thinking that any attention is better than none. Since many girls as well as boys buy the idea that sexual aggression and exploitation is normal masculine behavior, it may not even occur to them to demand to be treated as equals.

I couldn't stand being identified by my sexuality, I retaliated by insisting that people regard me for my intellectual worth. My intellect became a form of damage control.

If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the strength to tell of the name-callers on my own. But at the time, all I knew was that if I avoided eye contact, it was a hell of a lot easier to get through my days.

Three out of ten women in the United States have an abortion by the time they are forty-five years old. And women who need abortions get abortions, whether or not the procedure is legal or safe, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Blaming women who need abortions through slut-shaming is not only morally reprehensible, it also is medically irresponsible.

Today, girls are pressured to dress and behave in an overtly sexual way, despite the conventional understanding that a "slut" is a woman who does just that. In this milieu, calling oneself a "slut" doesn't allow you to wrest the term away from those who would use it to judge and control women. Rather, it just confirms negative stereotypes of what it means to be female. You're merely adding ammunition to the arsenal.

When my reputation was at its height, classmates insulted me right to my face as I walked down the hall. When a teacher called on me, boys snickered and girls rolled their eyes. My body and face burned. I felt mortified. I contemplated suicide.

There is no good reason that a girl is shamed for sexting while a boy is not, that a woman's number must be lower than a man's, that a survivor of sexual assault has her credibility stolen from her along with her bodily integrity. For women to be truly safe, we must eradicate the use of the term "slut." Only then will female sexuality become transformed from a site of pitfalls to one of positivity and possibility.

Intercourse was now forbidden to everyone but married people; bundling disappeared. In its place young courting couples engaged in "petting"--which, interpreted broadly, meant that they were could do anything sexual short of intercourse. Women were now held responsible for controlling men's beastly sexuality--halting them from simply plunging ahead--at the same time that they were expected to be sexually innocent: an impossible position.

What drives abortion bans and restrictions? The belief that women who have sex for pleasure rather than procreation are sluts.

I tell girls and adult women that they never deserve to be called sluts or "hos"- and they never should call themselves sluts or "hos"-because in the absence of one sexual standard for everyone, the concept of "sluttiness" is grounded in sexist and specious ides about femininity, even when "slut" or "ho" is used in a seemingly lighthearted or even defiant manner.

The "bad slut" is the girl or woman who exposes the effort behind being hot.

White women who were raped were expected to die as a result of their abuse. Their degradation was expected to be totalizing, making postrape life unimaginable. But black female slaves survived their rapes and continued the work they were forced to do—a circumstance used as evidence that they were not properly feminine.11 According

Calling a female a slut even in a seemingly benign context ultimately results in a policing not only of the specific female involved but of all females everywhere.