ColumnFor as long as the Earth has turned, people have had lots of opinions about women and girls, and their bodies. This past week just drove the previous point home… hard.

Toward the end of January, a group of six teens visited the office of Washington state Representative Mary Dye (R). The visit was part of Planned Parenthood’s Teen Lobby Day. The meeting was supposed to go like this: the teens were going to pick Dye’s brain for a period of time and ask her some questions about health insurance and contraceptives; the teen lobbyists also “made a push for bills that would expand access to birth control,” Mic reports. Well, Lobby Day took a turn for the worse when Dye asked the group of teens if they were virgins.

Why did this politician think it was a good idea to ask a group of teens about their sexually active status? No one knows for sure, but all the teens who were present at the meeting agreed on one thing: Dye’s inquiry about their virginity was inappropriate and creepy.

Rachel Todd, the group’s supervisor and an education specialist for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho, says Dye’s comments were unsolicited. “After she made the statement about virginity, all of my teens looked at me,” Todd says. “And I said, ‘You don’t have to answer that. You don’t have to answer that.'”

After Dye asked the question, she offered the teens advice on “the empowerment of women and making good choices,” these were, apparently, opinions shaped by her mother and from her experience as a mother of three daughters, Mic reports.

Dye isn’t the first person to say something completely idiotic about young people’s virginity. Cultures around the world have been placing value on virginity for years and slut-shaming people — mostly girls — who don’t adhere to their purity standards.

While it is a bit shocking that a politician thought she could get away with shaming a group of teens, it’s not surprising that people — specifically men — think it’s okay to slut-shame their exes. Yeah, we’re going to talk about this whole Amber Rose, Kanye West beef. Sigh…

Amber Rose recently wrote a piece in Time about all the slut-shaming she’s received over the years. In Rose’s piece, she detailed how she’s been treated poorly for dating men, while her exes are lauded for bedding many women. “After my ex-husband Wiz Khalifa and I got a divorce, I’d go out for a date at a restaurant like any normal single human and people would say, ‘Man, she’s such a ho. She’s out at restaurants with guys.’ Then they would see my ex-husband with a bunch of women. They would say, ‘He’s the man! That’s so cool.’ So when I went on a date, I’m a whore, and when he’s piling girls in a car, he’s the man? There’s something wrong here,” Rose writes.

She also reflected on how she’s been shamed for working as a stripper:

“People would actually say things like, ‘Who would ever love you? You were a stripper. Why are you in relationships?’ And I used to feel like I had to explain that maybe it was because I’m a good person… I can’t talk to everyone and tell them who I really am. They’re still going to have their own opinions. If you know me, you love me. If you don’t know me, you might love me, but you might not – and that’s cool. And you know what? Now I sleep like a baby at night.”

Yeah, Rose isn’t like you and me, but being slut-shamed is awful no matter who you are, and it’s nice to see yet another woman have the guts to speak out and put trash talkers in their place.

Next up, Barbie’s new bodies.

You may be thinking, “what do slut-shaming and sexism have to do with new, body-diverse barbie?” Quite a lot, actually.

Just this past week, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate parents, unveiled a line of dolls called “Fashionistas.” The line includes three different Barbie body types, seven different skin tones, and Barbies with different hair and eye colors, too.

Yeah,  a doll isn’t going to stop people from pressuring women to look or dress a certain way, but it’s a pretty big deal that a large corporation that creates dolls for kids has finally, finally, decided to sell different sizes and shades of dolls that are, by and large, marketed to young girls.

“Despite her ridiculous proportions, the original Barbie, with her golden hair, svelte frame and tanned skin, is seen to be emblematic of the predominant beauty ideals in Western society,” Dazed Digital reports. “The introduction of variety means that young girls can now select their own perception of perfection; one which is far more relatable than the 56-year old icon of old.”

Agreed.

So, as far as we’re concerned, this is a step in a body positive, non-body shaming direction. Maybe we’re on course to a kinder future after all.

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Image of Barbie via Facebook

The post On Slut-Shaming, Sexual Politics, and Barbie: #NowWhat appeared first on EcoSalon.

Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” crew are on point about sexual assault on college campuses. Jessica Williams just nails it here…It’s funny in that OMG-she-is-spot-on kinda way. Now, go enjoy your weekend. Remember to bring some mace.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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The post Are Colleges Trying to Incentivize Sexual Assault? ‘The Daily Show’ Has This Answer [Video] appeared first on EcoSalon.

Few words irk me more than “slut.” It’s incredibly rude (and totally lazy) to use a crud word to police what a person does with her body. Sadly, though, slut shaming has already crept its way into America, and it’s being used to describe nearly everything a woman, or girl, does, says, or wears.

Unfortunately, grown ladies, such as myself, have probably experienced a few instances of slut shaming through our lives. Just recently, I was told that I looked “a little slutty” because I chose to wear platform sandals and a tank top on a late-spring night out. The horror!

Now, while I can take the comments and the sneering because I’m A) sadly, used to it, and B) an adult with a pretty decent self image, it troubles me that young women are having to deal with being called sluts more, and more often.

In the past few months, there have been more than a few instances where high schools have shamed young women into not wearing certain types of clothing because the young women’s attire could, potentially, distract young men. Come on.

Here are just a few examples of some of the weird lengths some schools have gone to, to censor female students’ attire:

• It was recently reported that administrators at Wasatch High School in Utah decided to Photoshop some female students’ bare shoulders in the yearbook. According to XOJane, the school claimed that the students were dressed inappropriately.
• According to ThinkProgress and Bust, a Minnesota high school’s principal sent an email to parents in which he asked moms and dads to discourage their daughters from wearing clothing, such as leggings, yoga pants and tight pants, that could be “highly distracting” to other students.

While schools are allowed to monitor what students’ wear, this obsessive form of body and clothing policing isn’t helpful to anyone, and it puts all the blame on the girl.

While the above examples may seem a bit trivial, they are not. This type of policing plays into a culture that teaches students that it’s a woman’s fault if she gets harassed. It’s that whole, she-was-asking-for-it, rape-culture problem that has reared its ugly head in American culture in recent years.

So, I beg of everyone – can we stop with the slut shaming already? Let’s just respect everyone’s bodies and get on with it.

Follow Abbie on Twitter or Instagram, or read more about her on ginchy.

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Resources

“25 Everyday Examples of Rape Culture,” EverydayFeminism

Image: David Shankbone

The post Stop the Slut Shaming Already! appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnYou can thank your old friend Dr. Freud for the oh-so-useful, yet staggeringly frustrating concept that is the “Madonna-Whore complex.”

Even though there’s much that Sigmund got wrong about women (hello, Penis Envy) the Madonna-Whore complex was one of his greatest hits, at least in terms of framing the male psyche, and through it, our culture at large. He coined the term close to 100 years ago, yet we’re still dealing with its daily ramifications. This is one cigar that is not just a cigar.

Defined by Freud as a complex stemming from Oedipal origins, he posited that heterosexual men can only truly love and admire women that they are not sexually attracted to, with a bitch of a corollary – these same men cannot love the women they want to boink. “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love,” he said. Grossly and sadly, this is still overwhelmingly the case, except with the most conscious and progressive of men. I’m not, however, saying that men are responsible for all relationship ills — don’t send me angry emails. (Also: it’s the patriarchy, folks.)

Back in the day this meant that men wouldn’t marry women who’d been sullied by sex — it was a lot more straightforward than it is now, however wrong it was. You could only “snag a man” if you perfectly performed the archetype of the virgin, which in some cultures came down to blood-stained sheets on your wedding night.

Women, of course, internalized this and began to believe that there was only an either/or available to them – in order to survive, they’d need to learn the script. Either act like a proper mother/saint and never have pleasure, or get your rocks off but never marry. This fit comfortably within the construct of women as property sold from fathers to husbands. Society didn’t much care about the “sluts” cast out of this process.

Before there was birth control, there would be evidence of your slutty unmarriageable deeds, one of the reasons so many women were compelled to be “good girls.” The Pill was supposed to have set us free of such binaries, but we continue to struggle with them everyday, from rape culture to the intimate corners of our established relationships. We’ve come a long way, but there’s still far to travel, baby.

So much of this plays out in pop culture, where our complexes are mined for corporate advertising profits. The Madonna-Whore complex is the TV trope that keeps on giving, even as our small screen is increasingly diverse in terms of race and gender. We’ve got the gays (and they’re married), we’ve got women in positions of power, but still, it seems the sexually-empowered woman rarely gets the guy in our contemporary dramas. The bitch, the slut, the hardened lady cop who is too cold for a relationship, the frigid wife, the harried mom who has a headache — some of our favorite characters.

And then we watch Peggy, Betty, Meghan and Joan battle with these identities on “Mad Men” each week, imagining ourselves liberated by the waves of feminism that have saved us from their lives. But some archetypes hold so fast, so tight, that we must also break through them individually, even while the collective boundary-bashing is happening before our eyes. The myths we’re fed since babyhood are powerful things.

The intricacies of the Madonna-Whore complex are legion, and they seamlessly thread from the personal to the political and back again. There is the MW complex within your husband or boyfriend’s psyche, and then there is the one that permeates every pore of our simultaneously sexist and hyper-sexualized culture. And there’s the one that’s inside of you, and growing inside of the seven-year-old girls who already understand that in order to be liked, they need to be sexy – not smart.

The MW complex suggests that women are not fully human – that we are defined by our roles as either sexual or non-sexual beings. There is no grey here, only the black of the slut or the white of the virgin. Sex is vital, important, life-giving (quite literally). But when we are defined by it and nothing else, it’s harder and harder for us to take pleasure in it, to have it without shame. Before you’ve processed this, you enter any room as either the slut or the virgin, full stop.

When we are cast as virgins, we’re infantilized. We are still property, meant to be taken care of because we can’t really think for ourselves. When we’re cast as the whore, it’s because we dare to have desires, thoughts, and ambitions – like Eve, any woman wanting to eat of her own knowledge is a she-devil bent on destruction.

Here are some of infamous slogans of the Madonna-Whore complex:

Good girls don’t.

Don’t give the milk away for free.

She’s marriage material.

Be a lady in the streets, and a whore in the sheets.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Let’s explore that last one a bit more closely. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” We’re damned if we are openly sexual, because we’re told men won’t consider us marriage or even “girlfriend material” – they’ll never text again the morning after. And of course, we’re damned if we don’t, because then we’re not getting our own sexual needs met any time soon, and/or our husbands will cheat on us, especially after the kids are born.

Perhaps we’re condemning ourselves to damnation here, because we’re measuring ourselves by someone else’s standards.

Conservatives believe there is but one antidote to the oversexed state of the union: drive sex underground. They call for abstinence-only education, Purity Pledges, and Purity Balls, which are really, really creepy. And then there are the racial implications of Bill O’Reilly’s insane obsession with Beyoncé. Note that even when girls buy into the purity industry and talk about the fact that they’re not having sex, they’re still positioning themselves as sex objects.

Saint/sinner. Mother/whore. Are you one or the other, a little bit of both, or something entirely in between? You know that you contain multitudes, gradations on the scale from slut to Madonna and back again depending on your mood, your ovulation/menstruation, your relative horniness of the moment, your work deadlines, your relationship status, etc. You might even cycle through all these sensations in one afternoon. So why do you still feel like you need to fit into a neat little man-pleasing package when you interact with the outside world? That’s what bedroom role-playing is for — but these roles should never govern your place in the world.

Intellectually, you probably already tucked away everything I’ve written before this paragraph ages ago.

The question is, why don’t you feel that way deep in the cells of your body? You have a new opportunity to wake up and expunge shame every single day. With every casual interaction, with every potential sexual encounter, you can take back what you had before you had shame. What if we reintegrated our inner whores on our own, without waiting for our prospective/current or imaginary partners to catch up?

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com, and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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The post The Madonna-Whore Complex in Depth – Virgins, Sluts and You: Sexual Healing appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnWhy is slut-shaming the default stance when it comes to women and sexual assault?

[Editor’s note: Libby Lowe, our usual ‘That Happened’ columnist is out this week, so this post comes to us from writer Heather Kenny.]

Last week the internet was in an uproar about a story by a popular advice columnist at Slate, written in response to several incidents involving women and girls who were sexually assaulted at gatherings where they had been drinking. The author offered the seemingly sensible recommendation that women avoid getting blotto drunk to minimize their chances of being victims of sexual assault, advice that is in fact a type of slut-shaming.

The article’s point of view mimics that of society: the burden of safety is put on girls and women while barely mentioning the fact that men who sexually assault women are criminals–whether their victims are drunk or not. Instead of holding men responsible for their ghastly behavior, women are told to regulate theirs.

Whatever your opinion on this type of slut-shaming, there is little doubt that it reinforces the status quo, in which women are forced into a defensive stance when it comes to their sexuality. The messages are heavy on warnings: “Don’t get yourself into situations where you could be taken advantage of. Don’t walk by yourself at night. Look sexy, but not so sexy that you attract the wrong type of attention. Don’t trust boys to know when to stop.” In short, don’t ever make a mistake, or the consequences may be dire, and we’ll blame you for them.

We live in a society where the default setting for discussions about girls’ growing sexuality is fear and worry. Even scarier is that we’ve come to think of this slut-shaming as normal, even righteous.

What we forget is the potential negative effect of these slut-shaming messages on female sexual development.  People don’t exit adolescence and magically transform into fully developed sexual creatures with the understanding and confidence to successfully pursue their desires in respectful and mutually pleasurable ways. It takes learning and practice, especially for women, whose mechanisms of sexual pleasure remain somewhat mysterious even after decades of study. And learning and practice inevitably involve mistakes, which may include getting involved with or trusting the wrong person.

When the stakes are so high, as they are for women, it’s only natural for them to avoid anything they perceive as a risk—even those that may ultimately prove to be important and valuable learning experiences. Sex can be an ambiguous realm, after all.

This kind of negative, defensive conditioning can have physical repercussions as well. It’s hard for the body to shake off years of conscious and subconscious training from the brain. (Not to mention the effect of unrealistic images of female beauty and sexual response disseminated in advertising and pornography.) It’s tough to get turned on and fully enjoy yourself when you’ve been taught to always be on your guard.

Perhaps the reason so many women in their 30s and 40s experience a flowering of their sexuality is because they finally have the confidence to mentally throw off the slut-shaming messages and expectations forced on them. That’s wonderful, of course, but should it potentially take decades of sexual experience for that to happen?

It would be nice if we could take a more proactive and supportive stance toward women and sexual violence and encourage both men and women to help stop it. Maybe that’s a lot to ask for. But it wasn’t so long ago that people couldn’t imagine a black president or gay people legally being able to marry in their lifetimes.

Society can change its attitude about sexual violence to women, which goes hand-in-hand with our views of female sexuality and empowerment. But it’s going to take more than just repeating the same tired messages to women. It’s time to change the narrative in men’s minds, not ours.

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The post Slut-Shaming Is The Status Quo: That Happened appeared first on EcoSalon.

When it comes to how we talk about young women and sexuality, Miley’s twerk is the least of our problems.

Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance took over the news cycle this week. There was outrage about slut-shaming—why was everyone disgusted by her but not by Robin Thicke? There was a gut feeling among many that Miley Cyrus’ performance was racist, but no one summed up why better than blogger Cate with her post, “Solidarity Is For Miley Cyrus: The Racial Implications of Her VMA Performance.” If you read one more post about the twerk heard around the world, make it Cate’s.

There was reaction [yawn] from the Thicke and Cyrus families and endless cable news coverage of the VMAs mocked aptly by The Onion. So, yeah, everyone (myself included) is spending the week obsessing over a young 20-year-old white woman appropriating black culture, abusing her tongue muscles and rubbing her junk all over a guy old enough (36) to be her creepy uncle.

But something else happened this week that, by comparison, barely made headlines. A teacher who raped his 14-year-old student was sentenced to 30 whole days in jail. In 2008, the girl was raped by her 49-year-old teacher, Stacey Dean Rambold. The victim-blaming in this case started at the top, with this statement from Judge G. Todd Baugh: “It’s not probably the kind of rape most people think about. It was not a violent, forcible, beat-the-victim rape, like you see in the movies. But it was nonetheless a rape. It was a troubled young girl, and he was a teacher. And this should not have occurred.” He has since apologized, but the sentiment is clear.

Maybe if the rape had been more like a movie rape, the victim would still be alive. But just a few weeks before her 17th birthday, she took her own life. After confessing, the rapist was sentenced to 30 days in jail. He confessed to raping a child and got 30 days. One month. Because, you know, like a girl who died at 16, his life is sorta ruined, too.

After the sentencing, the victim’s mother shouted at the court, “You people suck.” She went on to point out in a statement, “Judge Baugh, who never met our daughter, justified the paltry sentence saying she was older than her chronological age. I guess somehow it makes a rape more acceptable if you blame the victim, even if she was only 14.”

Older than her age. Does that mean she wore lipstick? Low-cut shirts? Flirted with her teacher? Sought attention? Asked for it? Or, does it somehow connect to the idea that we’re so accustomed to seeing young women on display that kids are fair game for sexual predators?

I am not implying that Miley Cyrus was coerced into her performance, or that Thicke is a rapist—and I’m definitely not saying that the staged performance we saw on the VMAs is akin to what happened to this teenager in Montana. Cyrus is an adult woman who makes a living performing—but it’s hard to forget that only a few years ago, she was simply child star, Hannah Montana.

As a culture, we sexualize young women—just look back a few years to the countdown to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen’s 18th birthday. I am pretty sure no one was waiting to see who they would vote for. We make it unsafe for girls to experiment with their sexuality and figure out who they want to be as women. We tell them that sexy is cool and being provocative will make people like them. Then, when older men (or women) take advantage of them, we slut-shame them and blame them for being victims of crimes.

Not for nothing, PornHub released a study of keyword searches by state this week. “Teen” was the top search in seven states.

Image: PVBroadz

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ColumnSociety pushes girls to become sexual objects, then shames them about the length of a hem.

How many times have you heard someone say—usually after the “I don’t care as long as the baby is healthy” comment—that “it would be nice to have a boy, they are so much easier.” Are boys easier biologically, are we programmed to devalue  women and girls, or is our society so hard on women that even feminists think it would be “easier” not to deal with raising a girl in a world filled with thinspiration, mean girls, rape, anti-choice laws and sexed-up Disney princesses?

As someone without kids and no plans to have them, I don’t spend tons of time thinking about whether it would be easier or harder to raise a girl or a boy. But, I was recently talking with a friend about slut-shaming and she mentioned how many people make that comment to her—the mother of an amazing five-year-old girl. While I am sure most mean it as a compliment to her ability to parent a daughter in this messed up world; it’s not. It’s a comment on the value of girls and women. The mixed messages hit kids, and parents, constantly.

The movie Brave was largely celebrated for having a girl as its hero. The message, overall, was good: Stand up for yourself, make your own choices, corsets are stupid. But, since our 16-year-old heroine Merida was officially princessed by Disney, she no longer resembles the athletic, feisty girl we saw in the movie. She looks like she went to the same plastic surgeon who worked on Belle and Ariel.

The message is that girls can’t be girls. They can be comfortable in their skin for a brief period of time and then they become objects of distraction and desire. Society pushes girls to become sexual objects, then we punish them for it by shaming them about the length of a hem or the dip of a neckline.

Jezebel reported on “Generation Fabulous” blogger Vivienne Wagner’s attendance at her 8th grade son’s Academic Awards Ceremony. She wrote that she was shocked to see “exceptionally bright and disciplined” girls pursuing “hoochie-ism.” She posted (and has since removed) photos of these girls on her blog  and labeled them: “Examples of why I’m glad I don’t have daughters.”

Really? When it comes to sexist dress codes, most are in place because certain clothing is deemed “distracting” to the [implied] male students. So, rather than be glad you don’t have to deal with a slutty daughter, why not be pissed off that we live in a world where young people are sexualized to the point that it’s acceptable to call an 8th grade girl a “hoochie” and acceptable to assume that an 8th grade boy can’t control himself around a girl in a tight skirt?

Yes, dress codes serve a purpose in many places. For example, I don’t want to see an ass cheek (male or female) on Casual Friday. But let’s clean up the language we use to talk about guidelines for appropriate attire and understand that it’s not about modesty and protecting women from “boys being boys” (loosely translated to: she asked for it—whatever “it” turns out to be). It’s a tricky question–how to dress expressively but appropriately.

Maybe the answer is a world in which all men and women wear a very similar uniform, one that hides our parts. Once we’re all dressed as equals, we’ll be treated that way, right? I mean, just look at how well that has worked in the military. Only one in five women in the military report receiving unwanted sexual contact! And, it’s not like the recent news about a sergeant filming female soldiers showering is typical or anything…

Clothes aren’t the problem, and they aren’t the solution. Closing the gender gap starts with an attitude adjustment, and if that’s too much to ask, I’ll accept a linguistic adjustment. We can’t control what others think, but we can control how we talk about women.

Making an effort not to sexualize girls—and not to demonize boys and men—is the first step toward a world where a princess can be a girly girl, a tomboy or even a boy, and an 8th grade girl can go to a ceremony wearing something that makes her feel like the smart and powerful girl she is.

Image: Disney/Pixar

The post That Happened: The Princess and the Tramp appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnFrom Amanda Knox to a kindergarten girl’s short skirt, the message is clear: You should be ashamed.

Last night I watched Chris Cuomo interview, if you can call it that, Amanda Knox on CNN. Throughout the interview, he interrogated her, called her a sexually perverse deviant, berated her for pausing to think before she spoke and told her she needed psychological help. Sitting curled into herself, she was slow to respond, her voice was catching and she seemed to be in physical pain. Clearly, she felt like each word she said was being scrutinized, as were her reasons for writing a memoir and doing the interview (which Cuomo referred to as an “opportunity” numerous times, as if by merely allowing her to use her voice he was doing her a favor).

I don’t know if Knox is guilty of murder, (and she was found not guilty in Italian court) but I do know that Cuomo is guilty of some serious slut-shaming. Seems to be the season.

Despite an increase in public conversations about women—in the workplace, in the home, in the military and in schools–the message that women who own their sexuality are sluts, especially young women, is repeated over and over in a variety of overt and subtle ways.

Lawmakers are Trying to Deny Teens Access to Healthcare

In North Carolina, a measure advancing in the legislature would require teens to get notarized, written parental consent for testing and treatment for STIs, birth control prescriptions, pregnancy care, mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment. Supporters claim this measure would ensure parental rights.

This law doesn’t seem to take into consideration that some people are being abused by family members or living in households where, for whatever reason, it simply isn’t safe to ask for permission. Laws like this will lead to more and more kids taking desperate measures to get access to the care they need. And issues related to birth control and sexual health impact girls far more than boys, who can buy condoms at a local drugstore and, obviously, can’t get pregnant.

The addition of mental health counseling and addiction treatment to sexual health is interesting—and goes back to the themes in the Knox case: sex, drugs and promiscuity mean you are a crazy slut.

…And to Information About Sex

Did you know my mom hates me? Me either! Apparently it’s because I take the pill. In April, Pam Stenzel, an abstinence-only speaker, said this to a group of West Virginia high school students: “If you take birth control, your mother probably hates you,” and, “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.”

Despite overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work, abstinence-only sex education (rather, the opposite of education) is still alive and well in schools and churches. Speaking on a panel at Johns Hopkins University last week, Elizabeth Smart made a strong case against abstinence-only sex education, explaining that feelings of worthlessness after being raped influenced her ability to escape from her abductor.

She said: “I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence. And she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that?’ Well, that’s terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.’ Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.”

Your life no longer has value. Translation: Women are only good for making babies—and no one wants your impure babies.

The timing of Smart’s remarks, just a week before three women in Ohio were found after a decade of imprisonment as sex slaves, was a coincidence (Smart herself was imprisoned as a sex slave for nine months). But hers is an important voice—a reminder that abstinence isn’t always a choice and that adding shame to sex has consequences.

Boys Will be Boys—And Girls Should be Modest

In schools across the country, girls are reminded that their slutty clothes are distracting the boys—who obviously can’t be trusted not to get all rapey. This reinforcement of the idea that girls ask for it and boys can’t control themselves is dangerous. (See Steubenville.)

Think Progress has a great rundown of some school dress codes designed to shame girls into mom jeans and baggy turtlenecks. While there are lots of cases of strapless prom dresses, my favorite story on the list is the one about the kindergarten student in Georgia who was forced to change her “short” skirt because it was a “distraction to other students.”

I guess if we live in a world where nine-year-olds are called cunts, this shouldn’t be a shock. But to me, sexualizing a kid seems to work against the goal. And maybe the adults in that case are the ones with the problem.

Most of the people quick to label children and young adults as sexual deviants are the same people working to make sure they stay uneducated and without access to sexual education and healthcare, and don’t have the tools to control their own bodies and become responsible sexually active adults.

Starting to control and sexualize women at such a young age has an impact on society, which we can see as the details of what has happened in Ohio continue to unfold. If reports are accurate, we are now so accustomed to this kind of treatment of women that police ignore reports of naked women tied up like dogs in a backyard.

Image: spanginator

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