SLUT!
   Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
   Leora Tanenbaum
  1999 Seven Stories Press, New York USA
   ISBN: 1888363940


A ground breaking account of the lives of young women who endured the destructive onslaught of the type of name-calling with which only females are targeted. With powerful oral histories, her own story & her compelling analysis of the problem of sexual stereo typing & wounding, this author airs a dreadful subject with uncommon grace & articulation. Be prepared for troubling & abusive language for that is what this is all about.

In the beginning, after the Contents, is a grim page listing the positive & negative expressions for both a sexually active Man & Woman. As you will see there are many more positives for men & many, many more negatives for women. While that doesn't surprise me because of our history, it does dishearten me.

This is a deeply saddening read with redemption only in the stories of those who survived to live good, happy & productive lives.

The rage, however, is claustrophobic. There is nothing any girl/woman can do about her gender & the sexuality others invest in her no matter what she wears, how she acts & with whom she plays.

Coming up in the 1950s, behind three brothers who felt no compunction about disparaging my gender whenever their brains failed to compete, I was fortunate enough to attend all girls schools where the worst any of us could say to each other was something unpleasant about our looks. With no boys in our daily lives, with mistresses who kept tight reins upon our language & behavior & no precedence upon which to embellish, we were saved from the slur of slutdom.

Get used to the word. It has a very different connotation from bitch. Many modern girls tease & taunt each other with the word bitch; many a proud American woman relishes the sobriquet, however that word pales in comparison to the tyranny of the word slut.

Here we are talking about young girls being targeted in our public schools where the word & their names are hissed & chanted for all to hear in hallways or scrawled across walls, particularly in boys' bathrooms. Inevitably few adults in schools are impressed by the girls' complaints & so without adult intervention, our youngsters become addicted to the power of their harassment & intimidation; they couldn't stop even if they wanted to. All through their high school years! The Scarlet Letter is alive & as vicious as ever.

When my son was harassed with name-calling aimed at his color, he was terribly wounded & fought back with flight. This incurred the wrath of both teachers & bus drivers who, naturally, never heard one word of the insults; by golly though, whisper a four-lettered retort & it would be heard clear along a noisy bus!

Each fall I'd make an appointment with the principal, vice principal, home room teacher & student counsellor to remind them about training the newly promoted 9th graders in the gentle art of civil rights. They would not do it voluntarily & always reluctantly after I'd wielded my experience in anti-apartheid/civil rights work where I had once marched with the best & debated with the worst.

I knew I was in deep when the out-going principal murmured that this student needed to grow a thicker skin & not take it so seriously. I remember questioning, in my strong immigrant accent, whether they thought Rosa Parks & Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, should have grown thicker skins & not taken it seriously?

Here, with SLUT! we have no such heroines or martyrs, we have only ourselves to teach our children. I know that a lot of my thick skin came from living amongst boys at home. When they went for my bra straps I went for their jock straps; when they went for my chest I went for their butts. I gave as good as I got & got a lot of bruises - only to watch my parents say just what the principals in this book say: “Boys will be boys.” My retort has ever been: “Right, so girls are targets? ”

So, a lot of stuff comes up reading this book! It's difficult, laborious, sometimes the worst kind of slog imaginable. Statistics & stories of the years of targeting.

It is also one helluva read! Not for the squeamish or easily offended because the subject of slutdom has nothing to do with kindness, mentorship or feel-good platitudes. It has everything to do with peer pressure of the worst sort, irresponsible hysteria by both genders & the “hear/see/speak nothing” attitudes of school staff.

What a roller-coaster! My heart goes out to every brave one of these maidens who told their story, healed their hearts & got on with their lives.

Bravissima!

publisher: http://www.sevenstories.com
(07/02/00)

Rebecca