According to Slut Shaming in Adolescence, a global study by the National Institute of Health, just under 80% of people will be slutshamed at some point in their adolescence. It’s a disappointing yet all-too-believable statistic for any person who has attended high school, read an Instagram comment or knows a woman, and one that alarmed award-winning investigative journalist and author Beth Ashley. The statistic highlights experiences that Ashley has had recounted to her relentlessly during her extensive reporting on sex and relationships over the last eight years of her career.
“No matter what I’m reporting, slutshaming comes up somewhere,” Ashley explains. “I’ve reported on why people cheat and when people keep their sexual fantasies away from their long-term partners. I’ve gone to a swingers resort in Jamaica and reported on that. I’ve gone to Japan and reported on the sex culture there. No matter what you’re looking at, in all these different problems that I investigate in sex and relationships, somewhere along the way slutshaming comes up. That’s even true in the most positive of spaces which, ironically, are some of the places that I see slutshaming the most.”
Ashley’s debut book, Sluts: The Truth About Slutshaming & What We Can Do To Fight It, is her response to the tidal wave of tragedy and trauma she’s researched. “There’s a couple of reasons why [I wrote the book] – the reason why and the reason why now,” she says. “I wanted to produce a book on slutshaming, specifically investigating where it came from and all the different ways that it manifests, the ways it looks for marginalised communities.”
Sluts is a ground-breaking investigation of slutshaming, how it continues to affect us today and what we can do to fight against it. Packed with informed research and statistics, real-life interviews and practical tools, Sluts equips readers with the skills to tackle slutshaming, rethink the ideas that encourage us to shame those who are sexually expressive and empower readers to have open conversations about sex.
This issue also hits close to home for Ashley, who interviewed a teenage female family member for the book who is currently not attending school due to slutshaming rumours that have been spread about her. “In terms of ‘why now’, I think people make the mistake of thinking that slutshaming happened in this early noughties vacuum,” she continues. “They think about Mean Girls and they think about teenagers in school and dress codes and teenage girls calling each other slags. They think about it in this capsule, but slutshaming doesn’t start nor end with teenage girls.”
Below, Ashley explains exactly why slutshaming remains so pervasive across the globe, what that means for those most vulnerable in society, and how we can all be active participants in changing the culture of slutshaming for good.
What inspired you to embark on investigating this topic now?
I think if you look at the way that people talk about dating, there’s so much slutshaming in there. The way that polyamorous people are judged, or the way that we set down arbitrary rules for dating, like not fucking until a certain number of dates or certain red flags to look for, can be slutshaming.
A more updated version of that is a ‘not having sex on the first date’ rule, a lot of Gen-Z people online talk about being ‘boy-sober’ [which has 37.7 million views on TikTok] as a necessary part of finding ‘the one’. They talk about soul ties – it’s all very slutshaming. They just have so many weird dating rules that are repetitive or are the same behaviour rebranded.
I think part of the reason people make this mistake is because, in the early noughties, it was brazen. There was no subtlety to slutshaming. This is when there was a newspaper, I think it was The Sun, that used to give out a ‘Slut of the Year’ award that was obviously negative. Then they also had a ‘Shagger of the Year’ Award and that one was positive and given to men.
Back then it was super on the nose, but that doesn’t mean that it went away – it just became less acceptable to be like that in public. I think that’s starting to turn on its head. I think in the last two years, we’ve started going back to that early noughties culture of really brazen slutshaming. If you look at a teenager’s For You page on TikTok, you will find slutshaming that feels [reminiscent] of that era everywhere. He’s certainly not solely responsible – and I don’t want to give him the credit – but Andrew Tate has a big part to play in it, and everything that he represents. Not just him, but ‘alpha males’ and men’s rights activists in general, have created this comeback of slutshaming. He very famously said on a podcast that he thought 99% of the world’s problems would go away if women had to walk around with their body count on their heads. Since he said that, body count street interviews have been one of the most popular TikTok trends ever. It’s at least half a million. It’s crazy.
The topic of slut-shaming sheds light on the social issues that are associated with a gendered double standard because it has commonly been aimed toward women, people of marginalised genders and LGBTQ+ communities, and not straight cis men. I know that the book also covers the effects slutshaming has on marginalised communities so I’m curious if this still feels like a gendered issue, or do you think the behaviour of slut-shaming has diversified its victim pool at all?
I do think it’s diversified its victim pool. Historically, slutshaming has also targeted people of marginalised races and queer people, regardless of their gender. However, I would still say it’s a gendered issue because even if we’re looking at the race chapter [in the book], I talk about how Black men are massively slut shamed and have this promiscuity attached to them that stigmatises their experiences – but it’s still not as much as Black women, so it’s still incredibly gendered.
There’s an interview that I do with Vagina Museum founder Florence Schechter in the queer chapter that sums this up really nicely. When you’re queer, regardless of what kind of queer you are or what gender you are, you’re already subverting gender roles, therefore, you become a victim of sexism – which sounds bizarre to some people to say that a man could be a victim of misogyny, but when you are a gay man, you are subverting everything that’s expected of you as a man. You’ve broken gender, in a way. It sounds cliche, but you’ve broken the ‘cistem’. Now they’re subjected to this hate that I’d say it’s still gendered. Some people have a closed-off view of who can be a victim of gendered bullying. There was a viral podcast clip recently, and it was this gay man saying, “Men don’t hate gay men, they hate women, and they just see gay men as women.” That’s pretty much what’s happening with slutshaming as well.
I interviewed Zachary Zane for the book – he’s a really cool, bisexual writer – and we were saying it’s hard to remember which one came first because women will get slut shamed for having anal sex. Is that because it’s a gay thing? Or are gay people slut shamed because they’re considered to be doing ‘womanly’ things? I guess as the years go on, it’s become really muddled. I’d definitely say it’s still a gendered issue, but that gender doesn’t mean women-only.
I’m particularly interested in the idea that once slut-shamed, you’re brandished for life – or what feels like it – whether that’s someone in high school or as we’ve seen high-profile cases with Monica Lewinsky and Rebecca Loos. Why do you think slut-shaming in particular has such a long-lasting impact?
I think it’s because slutshaming isn’t really about sex. We unpack slutshaming and articulate things based on who it’s come from and who it’s directed to: what form it takes, whether it’s being literally called a slut or being humiliated in some kind of public list, being picked on at school, or rejected on a date because your body count is too high – all of which I’ve heard stories about. Whatever kind of slutshaming it is, it’s not really about sex at all. It’s about power structures, and people trying to put you back in your place, which is really gross.
Particularly if the person slutshaming you is from a more privileged background than you, whether that’s a man saying it or a middle-class person saying it to a working-class person. I think that’s why this kind of slut label is so sickening, because power structures are. If someone wants to do that to you, that’s a very difficult thing for one person to overcome. And, again, people tend to think about their, teens or early 20s experiences when they talk about the most obvious forms of slutshaming that they’ve faced, and how are people supposed to know any of this or have the tools to combat it? I think that’s the really difficult thing about slutshaming, especially when you’re young. It literally feels like the end of the world. It doesn’t feel like you can undo it, and you don’t have any of the tools to undo it.
It’s known that one of the biggest fears that young women have is isolation, so when they’ve been humiliated in this way and then left on their own – because no one wants to hang out with the slut – that’s the worst thing you can do to a young woman, especially when she’s coming of age.
It’s known that one of the biggest fears that young women have is isolation, so when they’ve been humiliated in this way and then left on their own – because no one wants to hang out with the slut – that’s the worst thing you can do to a young woman, especially when she’s coming of age.
I find the statistic from your press release that ‘just under 80% of people will be slut-shamed at some point in their adolescence’ to be truly horrifying. Was there anything you uncovered in your research – perhaps a statistic or an anecdote – that has stuck with you since writing?
If you experience slut-shaming at a young age, it can cause sexual dysfunction when you’re older. Our brains are merely just filing cabinets for data that they have collected – that’s why things like PTSD exist, as they don’t always file things correctly. So even if you don’t believe in the slutshaming things that you’ve been told, when you go to have sex, your brain will send an error message because it remembers being told that ‘sex is bad’. And, because your brain communicates to your genitals via the spine, it can cause a physical reaction, causing issues such as excessive dryness and erectile dysfunction, which can affect trans women. Women can have these sexual dysfunction problems despite them genuinely wanting to have sex due to the brain incorrectly internalising some of the stuff they were told about sex being bad.
It also affects pleasure – even if you don’t have a dysfunction, there’s a more distinct pleasure barrier. If you’re being slut shamed, you’re going to be less expressive of sexual pleasure out of fear of being judged. You might also be less likely to masturbate because you’ve been told that that’s shameful, and then you’re not discovering your body and what works for you. It’s insane to think about how undermined such shaming can be when it’s got such a far-reaching negative impact on its victims’ lives. There was a study, I think in 2018, that showed that doctors had less empathy towards patients they perceived to be a slut.
This fact ended up shaping an entire chapter because one expert told me and I was shocked, and then ten more experts told me the same thing. I realised that this had to be a big part of the book, which meant restructuring a lot to make sure I could cover the topic thoroughly.
This topic can be very emotional, frustrating and delicate so I imagine this must have been one heck of a task to take on. How did you support/care for yourself while researching?
I didn’t take care of myself – my mum was a big support system, and so was my husband. I did a lot of co-working sessions which I think makes it easier to remove yourself emotionally from the material. You’re having a natter and a coffee or a cake with your mate while working on some of the most horrendous things you’ve ever written – it just makes it a bit easier, keeping myself community-based.
I should have had more breaks, but I did a lot of the writing in one go – but that’s just my ADHD, so that’s just how it’s got to be done. It’s really an all-or-nothing condition. Sometimes I would send chapters to my mates and ask for their thoughts, and it would really upset them. I’d forget how deep the topic is because I was so close to it.
It’s insane to think about how undermined such shaming can be when it’s got such a far-reaching negative impact on its victims’ lives.
I know the book includes some real-life interviews, can you tell me a bit about who you’ve spoken to and why their insight was so valuable for your book?
It was really important to me to have as many case studies in there as possible, particularly for the chapters where I don’t have a lived experience like the race chapter. I am white, so I wanted as many case studies as possible in this from lots of different backgrounds. I also just think, case study interviews are so good for humanising statistics – I’m not sure the book would have the same impact if it just went through different stats and research and experts. I think, interviewing a 14-year-old girl who wasn’t going to school at the moment because of racist slutshaming means any naysayers who are holding the book are going to realise this is a human problem. It forces people to think in ways I don’t think stats necessarily do.
For my experts, I knew who I wanted to interview pretty much immediately. Doing sex and relationship reporting for so long before doing the book, I’ve got a good little black book of people. There were a couple of people I knew I’d like to interview such as Florence Schechter, for example. We shared publishers, I’d read her book, and was a big fan of her work. Plus, I’d interviewed with her before for an article a while back. Before she was director of the Vagina Museum she was an anthropologist and a human biologist, she just has a really mad academic background. I thought she’d be cool to fit into the book somewhere, but we ended up having a three-hour Zoom call and she became a really instrumental part of the book. That was unexpected, in a good way, as she ended up taking things in such a different direction because she had so many interesting things to share.
There was one expert, Michael Yates from The Havelock Clinic, who works with Karen Gurney, the sex doctor. We had such a long call, hours long, and then ended up jumping on the next week for a second one. There were some people that I’d interviewed before that hadn’t had a platform to speak about this subject specifically, so once the doors opened, they were like, let me give you five hours of my thoughts. It was great.
I love that alongside this research, you’ve included tools for dealing with slut-shaming and tools to deal with the experience and rethink our opinions about other people’s sex lives. Can you share more about the tools you’ve highlighted?
It was important to have the tools in there because I think it would be a really bleak book if there wasn’t something to take home to try and create change in your community. Without those bits, it would just be like, everything’s bad. It was particularly important for me not to do that to the younger readers. There will be people my age who read it too, but when you’re writing a book for younger audiences, you think about the youngest people rather than the oldest, and I would hate for this to end up in the hands of a 14-year-old and for them to end it feeling powerless.
There are take-homes at the end of each chapter. That’s very much the vision I had in my head – this young girl going to do something about it and what she should do. Everything I said in these take-homes is completely inspired by the experts who are in the same chapters. I’ve just given it more of a design, for that girl I had in my head. Providing these bullet point lists – there’s one point where there’s an exercise you can do for yourself to rid yourself of internalised slutshaming.
I hope anyone who’s been slut shamed and reads it feels very differently about what’s happened to them – I hope they can realise that it was never about them, and especially not about their sex life.
Finally, what do you hope readers will take from your investigation?
That they’ll feel a bit more armed to fight back when slutshaming happens. I think in the conclusion, I address the slut shamer and the slut shamed. I hope anyone who’s been slut shamed and reads it feels very differently about what’s happened to them – I hope they can realise that it was never about them, and especially not about their sex life. Changing the way you have sex isn’t going to change anything, so there’s no reason for people to be suppressing their sexual sides because of this.
For the slut shamers, I hope that they realise the weight of what they’re doing. Not to feel shame, because that’s not helpful, but to realise the true extent of its impact. Calling someone who didn’t want to date you a slag isn’t worth it when you see how far slutshaming can really go.
I just hope that some people feel more hopeful about a future that doesn’t involve slutshaming after they read it and that they feel connected to the cause in a way. You can’t ask one person to feel the weight of ending something that’s a product of capitalism, but I hope they feel ready to do that in their communities because that’s where it will start. Then if everybody does that, that’s a lot of potential for real cultural change.
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