Slut-shaming has little to do with sex, study finds
Sociologists say affluent university women use slut-shaming to show poorer women they are ‘trashy’ and don’t belong
May 29, 2014 9:35PM ET
A new study of college women and their attitudes about so-called sluttiness found that slut-shaming — calling out a woman for her supposedly promiscuous sexual behavior — actually had more to do with a woman’s social class than it did with sexual activity.
Sociologists from the University of Michigan and the University of California at Merced occupied a dorm room in a large Midwestern university, regularly interacting with and interviewing 53 women about their attitudes on school, friends, partying and sexuality from the time they moved in as freshman and following up for the next five years.
The researchers discovered that definitions of "slutty" behavior and the act of slut-shaming was largely determined along class lines rather than based on actual sexual behavior. What's more, they found the more affluent women were able to engage in more sexual experimentation without being slut-shamed, while the less-affluent women were ridiculed as sluts for being “trashy” or “not classy,” even though they engaged in less sexual behavior.
"Viewing women only as victims of men's sexual dominance fails to hold women accountable for the roles they play in reproducing social inequalities," Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology and organizational studies professor at the University of Michigan, said in a release. "By engaging in 'slut-shaming' — the practice of maligning women for presumed sexual activity — women at the top create more space for their own sexual experimentation, at the cost of women at the bottom of social hierarchies."
Armstrong and then-graduate student Laura Hamilton, who is now a sociology professor at the UC-Merced, used the findings from their five-year longitudinal study in their book "Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality."
The authors say they hope their study, which was published in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, will shed light on the fact that slut-shaming is in fact a form of bullying. "In a few recent cases, 'slut-shaming' has played a role in the suicides of girls and young women," Armstrong said. "We hope that our findings are constructively used in campaigns against bullying.”
Armstrong and her team had originally viewed slut-shaming as based on “sexual double standards established and upheld by men, to women’s disadvantage,” they wrote in the study, which was published Wednesday. They thought that, due to societal expectations that men should seek out lots of sexual activity but that women could only do so while in a committed relationship, the women are “vulnerable to slut stigma when they violate this sexual standard and consequently experience status loss and discrimination,” they wrote.
At this particular university, which they declined to name, participation in the Greek system was “the most widely accepted signal of peer status on campus.” And as it turned out, the 23 women who were in sororities were from upper- and upper-middle-class backgrounds, likely because they had the time and money to participate in Greek life. The remaining women did not, as they came from working-, lower-middle- and middle-class backgrounds, the authors said.
The sociologists discovered through interviews and passing conversations with the women through the years that the affluent sorority girls viewed themselves as displaying femininity in a “classy” way, but that they felt the way the less-affluent women did so was “trashy.” For example, one of the affluent women said “good girls” would never wear a short skirt or a revealing top, but if she did, she wouldn’t dance seductively in that outfit at a party. But the less affluent women did, and therefore were considered "skanky."
On the other hand, the less-affluent women equated sluttiness with what they viewed as the materialism and the unfriendly, cliquey nature of women in the Greek system. One of them told the researchers that “sorority girls are kinda whorish and unfriendly and very cliquey. If you weren’t Greek, then you didn’t really matter,” they wrote.
"Surprisingly, women who engaged in less sexual activity were more likely to be publicly labeled a slut than women who engaged in more sexual activity," Armstrong said. "This finding made little sense until we realized that college women also used the term as a way to police class boundaries."
The authors discovered that the affluent women participating in sororities in fact worried less about being judged as a slut than did the less affluent women, even though they would engage in more sexual activity. That was because they kept that activity quiet and conveniently seemed to define the accepted standards surrounding sexual behavior.
But when the less affluent women tried to befriend them, the affluent women would publicly slut-shame them as a way to convey that they didn’t fit in.
"This often took the form of calling other women out for their dress or deportment, as a way of making it clear that they did not fit in with the high-status group,” Armstrong said.
Superabound posted:i honestly cant remember the last time i was part of an irl conversation involving 2 or more women where the topic did not eventually devolve into how "skanky" all of their female co-workers are accompanied by an exhaustive run down of these so-called skanks' alleged workplace trysts
perhaps you should get some actual women friends
if you're hanging around people like that you should probably tell them to fuck off because its about as bad as telling racist jokes
RBC posted:perhaps you should get some actual women friends
probably 2/3 of my total number of friends are female, and most of them are either lesbians, feminists, or both
c_man posted:i've never heard any conversations like that either. maybe im just not cool enough to get in on all of the sweet gossip
the South runs on an entirely gossip-based economy
RBC posted:seriusly get some new friends cause those people are fukd and i can only extrapolate that you are terrible by association
yeah they said the same thing about you guys
Superabound posted:the South runs on an entirely gossip-based economy
This is entirely true
you know maybe if youd stop sexistly trying to weasel your way into their pants with every word that comes out of your mouth and try actually LISTENING and putting in the effort to pretend to care about whatever it is theyre yammering about theyd be more willing to open up and express to you all the deep and honest feelings they have about skanks in the workplace
everyone thinkin 'bout peoples butts
Superabound posted:the funny thing here is that you thinking that women talking shit about other women behind their backs is some sort of non-ubiquitous, avoidable social outlier just proves that its actually you who doesnt have any close female friends.
you know maybe if youd stop sexistly trying to weasel your way into their pants with every word that comes out of your mouth and try actually LISTENING and putting in the effort to pretend to care about whatever it is theyre yammering about theyd be more willing to open up and express to you all the deep and honest feelings they have about skanks in the workplace
lol what the fuck are you even talking about
youre the one stereotyping women as being backstabbing gossips
RBC posted:youre the one stereotyping women as being backstabbing gossips
turns out women are human beings who frequently engage in common human behavior. shocking, i know
Superabound posted:RBC posted:
youre the one stereotyping women as being backstabbing gossips
turns out women are human beings who frequently engage in common human behavior. shocking, i know
you should save this shit for the mens rights subreddit
Superabound posted:RBC posted:perhaps you should get some actual women friends
probably 2/3 of my total number of friends are female, and most of them are either lesbians, feminists, or both
c_man posted:i've never heard any conversations like that either. maybe im just not cool enough to get in on all of the sweet gossip
the South runs on an entirely gossip-based economy
I dont kick it with fellas i kick it with broads/ fellas act like females so why not kick it with a woman from the start
RBC posted:Superabound posted:RBC posted:
youre the one stereotyping women as being backstabbing gossips
turns out women are human beings who frequently engage in common human behavior. shocking, i knowyou should save this shit for the mens rights subreddit
q81ptFSA4mk
RBC posted:you should save this shit for the mens rights subreddit
first you tell me to abandon all of my decades-old close and deeply rewarding female friendships, THEN you tell me i should start associating myself with MRA redditors....what exactly are you trying to turn me into? does this forum really need another Goatstein?
1) 12 Years a Slave
2) Django Unchained
3) Black Dynamite
4) Boss Nigger
5) American History X
Edited by aerdil ()
daddyholes posted:i feel that with all of this rigorous post analysis detective work we will soon "ferret" out who does and does not know a female irl and the natural genetic behavior pattern of the true irl female. we're all counting on you.
we should get together and talk about like some gossipy school girls then call each other "sluts" and have a pillowfight
aerdil posted:Hey there fellow gentlemen, I'm pursuing a night out with a POC (Person of Color) soon (she's African-American, as best as I can tell). I plan to bring it all back home amidst some romantic candles and red wine. Whilst this goes on, I hope for us to watch a fine offering from the silver screen. Perhaps you fellows can help me narrow down the options:
1) 12 Years a Slave
2) Django Unchained
3) Black Dynamite
4) Boss Nigger
5) American History X
you should be extremely white and watch something super white that shes never seen before like christmas story or something
deadken posted:i know a lot of women who call people sluts but it's usually themselves or their close friends because i only associate with women so secure in their class position that they can "reclaim" the word with an air of knowing irony. im rich and i own a extremely cool rc helicopter
imagining dead kenneth in really wicked, gratuitously askew wraparound sunglasses flying a badas rc helo & muttering to himself about how Vice magazine is actually Good Dude, because of the,,, uh.. monks n the 13 th century wahaha
aerdil posted:nvm decided it was easier to just date a white guy instead
lol