When I was in high school, I casually slept with this guy over the course of a summer. Drunk and horny, I went home with him after a party one night. We hooked up, I fell asleep, and I left in the morning like usual. Later that summer, a male friend pulled me aside at a party and said he had to show me something. On his phone was a picture of me lying passed out, my naked body, splayed across my hookup’s bed. Another male friend had taken the picture without my knowledge the night I was drunk and fell asleep after having sex, and had been sharing it around.
I still can’t think about that picture without reliving the shame and disgust and guilt I felt when I first saw it. In the days following, a few people spoke out against the picture and the people who shared it, which I’m grateful for.
But some of my female friends didn’t express the same compassion. I heard talk about how I had deserved the picture to be taken because I was drunk, because I slept around, because I had shown my body to guys in the past. Sometimes, I agreed with them.
I’ve been able to move on and learn from this experience. I’ve forgiven those involved, chalking up the hurt to immaturity and poor decision making. Women endure far worse every day. But the experience opened my eyes to how damaging any form of sexual violence can be, and more so, how insensitive we can be to one another as women.
On Sept. 13 I covered the Ottawa SlutWalk for the Charlatan. I watched a group of women—and some men—walk in solidarity on a miserable, rainy day to protest the injustice of the suggestion that women invite sexual assault, and therefore must accept some responsibility for it by dressing or acting in a particular way.
After speaking with many of the girls in the crowd, I was left awed by the compassion and empathy with which they spoke about their fellow women. Many told me that in order to change the sexual violence embedded in our society, we as females must use our voices to speak up for one another. Sadly, I see this group of women as the exception to the rule.
It struck me after leaving the event how foreign the concept of female solidarity in the area of sexuality felt to me. As a young woman, I believe girls are one another’s harshest critics. I see slut-shaming as something that is perpetrated more often by women against women than by men against women. The last person to call me a slut was a girl. I assume many other women would say the same.
In the past, I’ve labeled women “trashy.” My friends and I have discussed other ladies’ “kill counts” like we’re analyzing hockey scores. I think very few of us are innocent of such judgment. Whether it’s out of insecurity, or jealousy, or misunderstanding, I witness girls tear each other down every day, and it terrifies me.
How are we ever going to stop men from telling us we asked to be raped because we were dressed provocatively, or because we were flirting with every guy at the bar while we were drunk if we as women continue to normalize this kind of judgment ourselves?
Slut-shaming within our gender has to stop. We need to stop looking at one another as competition—which I believe all female-on-female slut-shaming stems from—and start seeing one other as allies.
The sexual violation of another woman is damaging to all of us. Every time a woman is harmed by a man—and moreover, every time we as women turn away a victim in our disdain for the way she was dressed or acting—the more we entrench this kind of violence as acceptable and the more vulnerable we make ourselves to experiencing this kind of violence in the future.
