I'm in the middle of reading Naomi Wolf's book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, and it's not bad. A little self-indulgent, but not bad. In it she explores the variety of ways she and her friends experienced their sexual coming of age growing up in San Francisco just off the Haight during the 70s. In the introduction she admits that this isn't going to reflect the experience of all girls everywhere. But after reading about half the book, what really got to me was the discussion of sluts. This is not the first book, by far, that discusses the phenomenon of the Slut in teen girl culture by taking on the subject from the outside. And by that, I mean that the teenaged Naomi Wolf was herself not considered a slut. Nor were Leora Tanenbaum of Slut: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation, or Emily White who wrote Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut. White admits to both fearing and envying the class slut. Wolf admits to knowing that she and her friends had far more sexual experience than the class slut at their high school, a friend of theirs that they "drifted away from" after her labeling.
While I appreciate the work being done, I kind of wish it were being done by someone who had worn the label of slut. You get an entirely different perspective when you're the ostracized one, than when you're observing the phenomena from the outside.
In seventh grade, word got around that I was easy. By the end of eighth grade, I had slept with the entirety of the football team and many of the male teachers. In ninth grade, my stubborn refusal to abandon my pregnant best friend cemented all the accusations in the minds of my classmates. By tenth grade, forget it...
I lost my virginity in a rape in tenth grade.
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