Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd – congratulations, and welcome to the fastest-growing club in America: women who are shamed and punished for their sexuality. You’re a big-name celebrity who was sexually harassed by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and then blamed for what you endured by so-called women’s rights champions like Donna Karan, who said you were “asking for it” because of your clothing.
The public policy decisions and Hollywood revelations of the past week, which on the face of it may appear isolated and unrelated, actually connect tightly like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Snapped together, they reveal the omnipresence of slut-shaming, which shapes laws and norms, affecting all American women.
Slut-shaming is judgment of a girl or woman for being a sexual agent, for being “too” sexual – whatever that means – wrapped around the belief that she deserves policing or punishment. I’ve been tracking slut-shaming for two decades, and I’ve interviewed hundreds of teenage girls and women who have been labeled “sluts” and “hoes.” Their experiences show that we live in a culture with a deeply entrenched sexual double standard: the mindset that boys will be boys, and girls will be sluts.
This culture of slut-shaming primes many people – including lawmakers – to be unsympathetic to women who exert sexual agency. With abortion, research confirms that people’s opinions are braided with their attitude about women’s agency. According to Gallup, Americans are far more likely to support safe, legal abortion when a woman experiences a circumstance beyond her control: her health is at risk; there are fetal anomalies; she’s been raped. However, most people want an abortion to shape their life for the better – to complete their education, because they have financial constraints or to meet the needs of their children. These are considered weak explanations and garner far less support in opinion polls.
When feminist attorney Gloria Allred had an illegal abortion in 1966 after being raped, and almost died, a nurse told her, “This will teach you a lesson.” Although abortion now has been constitutionally protected by Roe v. Wade for over 40 years, politicians are still trying to teach women a lesson.
If the Senate fails to pass the abortion ban that the House passed 237 to 189 last week, making criminal any abortion after 20 weeks, most likely the reason will be that enough senators are swayed by pleas such as that of Colorado state Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet, who has spoken out about her own later abortion – the result of a wanted pregnancy in which the heartbeat stopped at 20 weeks. All people, not only those with tragic, heartbreaking stories of fetal distress, deserve access to abortion. Anyone who seeks an abortion for any reason but can’t access one has a tragic, heartbreaking story. Perhaps she lives in a state with laws restricting access, or maybe she can’t afford one since federal Medicaid funding, Title X family planning funding, and even private insurance plans in 11 states won’t cover the cost. Abortion restrictions disproportionately harm low-income women and women of color with few resources.
Exposing the centrality of agency in abortion discourse is crucial in helping us understand why attitudes about same-sex marriage have changed dramatically in a short period while attitudes about abortion have not. To many Americans, same-sex attraction is not within an individual’s control, and therefore being gay or lesbian is not seen as an act of agency. That the majority of Americans now feel comfortable with gay and lesbian sexuality yet remain uncomfortable with heterosexual women’s non-procreative sexuality explains why companies and entertainers boycotted North Carolina for passing a discriminatory bathroom bill against transgender people – while no one has boycotted Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin or any of the other states that have laws restricting access to safe, legal abortion.
Attitudes about birth control and sexual agency are also entwined. Some people are surprised that many who oppose abortion also oppose access to birth control, since obviously birth control prevents abortion. But if you believe that women should not be able to control their sexual and reproductive lives, making birth control costly – as employers now may do, since the White House gave them wide latitude to exclude birth control coverage from their health plans – makes sense: Only sluts use contraception (never mind that it has medical applications wholly unrelated to sex, such as treating endometriosis).
Many young women tell me that fear of being labeled a “slut” or “ho” leads them to have sex without birth control. One college student shared with me that after her mother called her a “slut,” she concluded that girls should not use birth control and should just rely on boys to use a condom. To her, taking ownership over her sexuality was slutty. When she was 18, she became pregnant and had an abortion. Luckily for her, she was able to obtain it.
Anxiety over women’s sexual agency is so strong that even when a woman is robbed of her agency through sexual assault, she still is punished for her agency. If she dressed or acted in a slutty way, this illogical thinking goes, she wasn’t really assaulted – or if she was assaulted, she must have “done something” to ask for sexual attention. A juror on Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial said that he did not believe Cosby’s accuser Andrea Constand, who says she was drugged and assaulted, because she wore an outfit with “a bare midriff.”
This thinking explains why Donna Karan, as well as Harvey Weinstein’s former legal adviser Lisa Bloom – who suggested digging up photos of the women he sexually harassed “in very friendly poses with Harvey” – discredited Weinstein’s victims. One way or another, they either are not true victims or they are to blame for their victimization.
Punishment of women who exercise sexual agency is everywhere, and it’s getting worse because it’s endorsed at the highest level of power. Sixty-three million Americans chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, voting for a man who bragged about assaulting women and then threatened to sue the women who say he assaulted them.
As I was saying, we are all sluts now.
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