Consent on Campus by Donna Freitas

Author:Donna Freitas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Name-Calling and the Objectification of Bodies

In “ ‘Good Girls’: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus,” Elizabeth A. Armstrong and colleagues speak of a pervasive fear among college women, even the most privileged among them, of being labeled a “slut.” It is a label that is tied not only to gender but also to class and privilege. “High-status women employ slut discourse to assert class advantage, defining themselves as classy rather than trashy, while low-status women express class resentment—deriding rich, bitchy sluts for their exclusivity,” Armstrong and her colleagues write. “Slut discourse enables, rather than constrains, sexual experimentation for the high-status women whose definitions prevail in the dominant social scene. This is a form of sexual privilege. In contrast, low-status women risk public shaming when they attempt to enter dominant social worlds.”4 All women, including high-status women, are afraid of attracting the label of “slut,” but high-status women strive to get the upper hand in this discourse, doing their best to control who gets the label.5 Just as there is a hierarchy of bodies ordered according to gender, race, sexual orientation, and economic background, there is also a hierarchy within each gender, a kind of “sexual privilege” that is enjoyed.6

When I did my initial research about sex on campus, this kind of name-calling was rampant—mainly among the young women I interviewed, though it was certainly present among the men as well. It was from men that I learned the term “dirty girl,” which refers to someone who should be avoided because she is known to have hooked up with lots of people and is thought likely to have sexually transmitted diseases.7 When I asked the first young man who told me about “dirty girls” whether men ever get labeled as “dirty,” he laughed and told me no. Apparently, men who hook up with lots of partners are immune to negative labels and also immune to sexually transmitted infections. In fact, men who hook up with lots of women are celebrated as “players,” who are understood as men who should be respected for their many conquests. Yet any woman who engages in similar behavior is under threat—and she knows it, all women know it—of being called a slut.

References to hos and sluts came up often in my interviews with women and men in their discussion of theme parties on campus, the most popular among them being “Pimps and Hos,” “CEO’s and Office Hos,” “Politicians and Prostitutes,” “Football Stars and Cheerleader Sluts,” and “Millionaires and Maids.”8 These themes, taken straight from porn, follow traditional patriarchal binaries and scripts about men in positions of power and dominance, including sexual power and dominance, with women always relegated to the subservient, submissive, and sexually available positions.9 In a college culture where women themselves are supposedly aspiring CEOs, athletic stars, and politicians, that the role of women at a party is still to be sexually available to men who occupy positions of power—at least men who are performing these positions of power at a party—shows exactly

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