we censure it, thereby creating sexual tension around it we feel sexual tension in relation to the thing, leading us to consider it sexual we see it as sexual, so we censure it. Wash, rinse, repeat.“How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?” The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you.”
— Luke 1:26–38
The archetype of the woman-child holds a powerful sex appeal: youth denotes purity, and purity is irresistible when the goal is transgression. As with other societies where patriarchal religions have infused sex with guilt for centuries, our Judeo-Christian culture directly associates sex with transgression. You could even say that to us, sex is transgression.
But what exactly is being transgressed? In a word: woman.
The cumshot principle holds that being a target is not enough: a woman must also be pure, so that it is exciting to sully her. Our notions of sex revolve around the idea that a woman is inherently unspoiled, naive, and virtuous — and that a man has the power to corrupt her with sex.
We are obsessed with the idea of dirtying that which is pure. The cliché of the woman begging to be defiled serves as an arousing sexual fantasy for many. This explains in large part why our culture fixates on a woman’s youth. The younger the woman, the purer — and more corruptible — she is, and the more erotic we find her.
But purity isn’t enough. Our dominant fantasy is actually more elaborate: the young woman, who starts off innocent, must end up being consumed by lust. That is the ideal outcome.
This is the tipping point we seek: we like to contrast the image of the sweet, innocent woman with that of the woman corrupted by sex.
“Come on, you whore, say you like it! I know you like it!” Injunctions like these, common in the porn industry (and in the bedroom), illustrate how central women’s purity is to our sexuality. Ordering a woman to express her enjoyment of the sexual experience implies it isn’t a given. We assume that either she has not been enjoying herself or she has remained silent in keeping with her role (real, presumed, or imaginary) of pure woman, detached from sex. And now, we want her to verbalize that she is giving herself up to the sex that is defiling her. The tension within the idea of a woman who at first doesn’t accept her own enjoyment, then finally gives in and concedes, “I love it; I’m a slut,” is electrifying for the man ordering her to admit it. It may also be electrifying for the woman receiving the order, who is engaged in the same fantasy.
An incredible amount of porn revolves around a man corrupting a woman. Basically, we don’t want a woman to want sex, until she does.
This model of sex is obviously harmful in its commentary on women’s consent. It implies that consent is not given at the outset — even if, in reality, situations like these are part of a game, with consent given beforehand.
But even in the context of a game, the takeaway is that the woman must articulate she is enjoying what is being done to her — and by doing so she becomes a slut.
Take the term itself: slut. A slut is defined as “a woman who has many casual sexual partners.” Synonyms include tramp, whore, prostitute, and floozy. By default, then, it is an adjective only used to describe women.
In French, the male form of the word slut effectively translates into the term bastard, which connotes a completely different field of meaning: “an unpleasant or despicable man, one who is disloyal or dishonest.” Synonyms include scoundrel and villain. The word is pejorative, but it is free of sexual connotations. A bastard is someone who exhibits bad behaviour. A slut is a woman who exhibits bad behaviour in relation to sex.
We can, and do, use the adjective “slutty” to describe a man, but it often serves to reinforce his masculinity or his virility. A slutty man uses his arsenal of male weapons to sleep with as many women as possible. A slutty man is often congratulated, not disgraced.
Why the difference?
Our language doesn’t give many tools to shame a heterosexual male for his libido or for how he exposes his body in public. There is literally no word to describe disgraceful sexual behaviour for a straight man. The notion only applies to women; the expression was invented for them.
The reason? The purity imperative only applies to women.
Sexual clichés for women focus on inexperience, youth, propriety, modesty, reserve, and naïveté — all qualities that evoke purity. But — crucially — our expectations don’t end there. The same women also have to be “real sluts.” A woman’s purity must coexist with her sexual desire. Men don’t truly want women to be pure, and women aren’t actually pure. But our collective sex drive, conditioned by our Judeo-Christian and patriarchal heritage, feeds on the tension between the whore’s eager “yes” and the good girl’s modest “no” in the face of sex.
Purity is the determining characteristic of a slut. A woman can’t become a slut if, fundamentally, she cannot be corrupted. A person who retains their dignity while expressing a sexual desire is not a slut. That’s why men’s purity isn’t compromised during sex: no one expects them to be chaste to begin with. Expressing desire cannot debase their image.
Women are expected to be naughty. To throw seductive glances over their shoulders and blush. To wear sexy clothes without revealing too much. They must protect their virtue, but also crave the penis. They may be provocative at times, as long as they retain an air of purity, as long as their appearance or basic attitude continues to evoke innocence, youth, and submission.
We want women to be pretty, young, and naive — or, sweet and maternal — because these qualities are intrinsically linked to purity. We claim that these qualities protect women from men’s debauchery. But in reality, the inverse is true: this feminine image fuels our erotic fantasies.
As a result, the pressure on women is twofold: they must evoke innocence while arousing sexual desire. In this way, the purity imperative imprisons women and their libido to a strange paradox.
PURITY PROPAGANDA
The purity imperative means fantasizing about the adolescent; the schoolgirl; the virgin. It’s Lolita. It’s Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s Marilyn Monroe. It’s Paola in La Dolce Vita. It’s Betty Boop. It’s the MILF, with her maternal aura. It is the pedophilic fantasy.
There is no doubt that the purity imperative is rooted in religion. But male chauvinism is a separate factor behind this deeply sexist principle that guides women’s socialization. As we have seen, the purity imperative establishes a code of conduct specific to women: “Stay young, stay naive; do not express your sexual desires, and do not sexualize men you are attracted to; most of all, be modest, do not be vulgar, and do not reveal your bodies excessively.” When women do not conform to this code, they are no longer pure, and the possibility of corrupting them vanishes. Women must adhere to the purity imperative at all costs, in order to keep the fantasy of transgression alive.
And that is why we invented slut-shaming. The practice is a call to order aimed at one or several women, meant to instill a sense of guilt for behaviour or physical appearance when we judge that they have exceeded the limits of decency.
Slut-shaming is a judgment that is defamatory, patronizing, and insulting toward women, and downright reprehensible. It is a form of stigmatization that usually comes from someone who subscribes avidly to the purity imperative.
It is also, clearly, a social construction. Humans are not born with body issues; babies and children don’t give a second thought to their physical appearance or their nudity. They don’t have complexes; they don’t feel shame. Kids running around naked are likely to laugh if you try to wrestle them into clothing. Loathing for the body doesn’t happen until later.
All it takes is one person, in one moment, to change our perception of our body. From the moment the disease of modesty is introduced, our body goes from neutral material to impure. And when the transformation is over, we end up wanting to convince others that their bodies are offensive, too — especially those of women.
When we talk about slut-shaming, we often think of women bullying each other — one woman judging another based on sexual conduct or appearance. But according to statistics from the British think tank Demos, which analyzed thousands of tweets containing the words slut or whore, men engage in shaming as much as women do.1
Men and women have different motivations for verbally abusing women, even if they are all ultimately related to social control and the purity imperative. I will group these motivations into three categories: elitism, jealousy, and sexual conservatism.
Elitism
Slut-shaming is often used to establish the superiority of the social elite over women of lower classes.
Sociologists from the University of Michigan2 studied female students who began university in 2004. They observed that women from wealthy families used “slut” to refer to peers from lower-income backgrounds in order to distance themselves from the latter, by criticizing their clothing or attitudes.
This study was concerned with young women stigmatizing each other, but men are also capable of elitism-motivated slut-shaming. A man might brag that he prefers women whose style is “classy” and not “trashy,” without realizing that these distinctions reflect the fashion values of the elite; conveniently, the elite determine what is considered erotic and noble or indecent and crude. The elite establishes what good taste looks like.
Jealousy
Both genders can participate in slut-shaming motivated by hostility toward a particular woman.
For example, a woman who does not want to dress provocatively or engage in certain sexual behaviours might feel jealous of another woman who does so and reaps the rewards (i.e., attention).
Male resentment can also produce this sexist phenomenon. Men who lack a sex life may stigmatize women who have relations with other men. The hypothesis was first introduced by the University of Pennsylvania’s Derek Kreager as part of a study that followed 921 students aged eleven to sixteen over five years.3
Sexual conservatism
Slut-shaming is ultimately a form of sexual conservatism — and this is the crux of the problem. It’s symptomatic of a fear of change; many people are afraid of a paradigm shift when it comes to sex. They fear their fantasies will cease to excite them, that they’ll be replaced by something else.4 If this were to happen, the fundamental values around which their lives are organized would become obsolete. This would upend their lives and cause them to lose their meaning.
For instance, a woman who has always believed in the importance of remaining a virgin until marriage may be upset to learn her daughter is sexually active. Similarly, a woman who has never worn leggings outside of a gym may be offended to see other women wearing them in public.
When we organize our lives around a central principle and believe ourselves to be moral by adhering to it, we are shocked to learn that for others it may hold no value whatsoever. If others flaunt the rule, then why have we been holding back all these years? It’s mind-boggling.
Each generation is appalled by the behaviour of subsequent generations, particularly when it’s a question of sex. Each generation believes it has finally reached the “right” level of sexual liberation. We all think our parents were too uptight, and fret that our children go too far.
Sexual conservatism in men may also be prompted by the fear of impotence. I observe this phenomenon every time I talk about the need to desexualize breasts. In our culture, women’s breasts — whose biological function is to feed babies — are considered sexy and erotic. We force women to hide them, while men are entitled to display theirs. Male and female breasts are made up of the same tissue, only men’s are typically smaller. Censoring the chest of one and not the other is a sexist societal choice (there have been many societies throughout history that did not choose to do so). I write extensively about the discrimination against women’s bodies and, without fail, a number of male readers are astonished to discover that breasts can be desexualized. They are scared that the female chest will become mundane and lose its sex appeal for them.
They therefore insist that women should be prohibited from baring their chest in public. Men’s collective fear of no longer being excited by breasts leads to the injunction that women should not consider this part of their body as “normal.” Women’s breasts must retain their sexual mystique, which can only be accessed in the bedroom or by watching porn.
And many heterosexual women feel the same way. Their breasts represent a sexual asset; women fear that their powers of seduction would be diminished if baring their breasts in public were to become socially acceptable.
PROHIBITING WOMEN’S BODIES
Our relationship with women’s breasts is a good example of how we prohibit that which we eroticize. For those turned on by the fantasy of sexual purity, women’s bodies must remain hidden. It goes a little like this:
We consider something to be sexual, so we censure it we censure it, thereby creating sexual tension around it we feel sexual tension in relation to the thing, leading us to consider it sexual we see it as sexual, so we censure it. Wash, rinse, repeat.
There’s no escaping it: to censure = to eroticize. It’s a truly vicious cycle.
Let’s consider dress codes for female high-school students. Teenagers who make headlines by contesting these rules (by refusing to wear a bra or by challenging authority when a skirt is judged too short) exemplify this dynamic.
It’s a paradox: we impose a dress code on students who are supposedly overexposing themselves, and by doing so we sexualize them. A prohibitive dress code is essentially an eroticizing process that creates sexual tension.
For years we have been hearing male teachers complain that what their female students wear is “distracting.” Instead of encouraging these men to do some deeper reflecting, schools continue to hire teachers who can’t help sexualizing the young women they interact with; schools validate the teachers’ behaviour by requiring girls to cover their bodies so that they won’t “bother” the males (teachers and students alike) around them. Twice I have been on the receiving end of these judgments: reprimanded once by a primary-school teacher, and once by a high-school principal. I can still remember my shame and incomprehension. In my eyes, my clothes weren’t scandalous. They were pretty, trendy outfits, and I felt comfortable wearing them. But in the eyes of the administration, they were an outrage, and by wearing them I had become a “situation.”
School administrations contribute to female eroticization by laying out, in black and white, which parts of their bodies girls must hide. In their defence, one could argue that society already perceives these girls as erotic. And it’s true. But even though the prevailing sexist culture sexualized the adolescent before and more intensely than schools did, they both subscribe to the same logic.
Schools argue that their dress codes apply to boys and girls equally, but this isn’t entirely true — or rather, it isn’t really relevant. Fashion trends differ by gender; therefore, no dress code penalizes girls and boys in the same way.
Many of these dress codes stipulate that girls’ bra straps must not be visible. This creates a problem that only applies to girls. Nor do boys wear skirts at school (in fact, this would generally be prohibited). We might be tempted to argue that length of shorts could be a gender-neutral issue; but again, short-shorts are a uniquely female fashion trend. So, a boy can wear clothes that conform to the rules and still be fashionable. A girl who wears modest clothes that conform to the rules won’t be. The social cost is not the same: girls and boys don’t face the same dilemma.
Women’s fashion, which rests on the cumshot principle, is focused on pushing the limits of what is considered decent and indecent. If girls are forced to hide parts of their bodies, playing with the parameters of this injunction can become a game.
Furthermore, our culture encourages girls to project an image of sexual availability. Some men even criticize slut-shaming to encourage girls to show more skin. “Girls who expose themselves are just affirming their sexuality, so leave them alone,” goes the argument. While their discourse may appear noble, the underlying message is an essential part of the transgression equation. You must show yourself off so men find you attractive; you must reveal your body to be considered sexually interesting. By claiming that a girl who shows skin is just affirming her sexuality, we really mean that she is developing her sexuality by interiorizing the male gaze (and not by developing her own sexual perspective on others). It’s all deeply hypocritical.
Teenage girls experience slut-shaming more than any other group. Our social institutions try to impose the purity imperative upon them above all, because the dominant fantasy centres on the image of the girl. This leaves teenage girls between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, they are expected to be modest, prudent, sweet, elegant, conscientious, and kind. We tell them to wait for love before losing their virginity. We want their sexual experiences to involve love, and we want them to take it very seriously. On the other hand, adults are constantly consuming their bodies through porn and in daily life. It’s easy to picture a man publicly criticizing the so-called transgressions of a young pop singer or actress, then later watching teen porn in the privacy of his own home.
We bombard teenage girls with contradictory messages that require them to show off their bodies even while they hide them. To be pure and impure at the same time. Together, these demands generate a sexual tension that damages young girls and takes their psyches hostage.
The moment we take a position that reflects anything other than indifference, we can no longer claim neutrality in this ideological battle. By telling girls to either hide their bodies or to flaunt them, we help perpetuate the paradigm of transgression. The two demands, though apparently conflicting, work in tandem to construct this fantasy.
HYPERAWARENESS OF THE BODY
Our duplicity doesn’t just apply to teenage girls; we begin to indoctrinate girls when they are quite young and easily influenced, to ensure they conform to the purity requirement and grow up to be potential sluts. These twisted expectations have lasting impacts on their sexuality.
First, they cause women to be hyperaware of their bodies. Women are constantly being asked to push limits but to never to exceed them. As a result, they become image experts who are obsessed with appearances. Knowing that the male gaze is constantly trained on them means that unlike men, women cannot take a casual attitude toward their appearance. Judgment and contempt are never far off — and neither are salacious looks.
At the same time, a young woman can never completely reject the idea of using her body. If she doesn’t play the seduction game, she won’t be considered feminine, and she will be judged accordingly. She might get called “ugly,” “butch,” “dirty,” “square,” or any number of other insults. We tell girls who reject female eroticization that they should “make more of an effort.”
Being acutely and constantly aware of their appearance predisposes women to develop body image issues. And this can create significant hurdles in the bedroom.
This hyperawareness of the body, of its ability to arouse excitement while walking the thin line of “respectable femininity,” prevents women from truly letting go, in a broad sense. Having a body that attracts an inordinate amount of attention does not create an easy route to sexual fulfillment.
The purity imperative is so deeply rooted that, for many women, giving themselves up to desire (the ultimate goal, according to the cumshot principle) becomes impossible.
I recently interviewed a woman who told me that when she has sex, it’s as though there is an imaginary camera above her bed, filming her. She watches herself via this camera and doesn’t like what she sees. It effectively kills the mood.
She’s not the only one. Various sexologists have told me that women can become disconnected quite easily during sex. They have a harder time than men remaining present in the moment.
It’s easy to tell women who struggle with these issues to simply “let go.” Yet nothing could be less simple. In reality, women who strive to break free of the purity imperative must undo years and years of conditioning. Being told to let go won’t help them erase everything the prevailing culture has been feeding them since birth. It’s like the battle of David and Goliath.
Women’s autonomy is undermined by the fantasy of purity that requires women to exercise restraint when it comes to sex. They’re supposed to resist sex — not to seek it out whenever or however they want it.
This frequently leaves women unable to articulate what they want, having internalized that men lead the charge when it comes to sex. And it doesn’t help that they grow up in a world that offers very little in the way of female-specific fantasies. Our culture does not provide women with fictional scenarios where men are the ones being transgressed. Women can’t fuel their libido with fantasies that simply don’t exist.
Thus, by default, women adopt fantasies created by men, for men. And they are thereby given a role: that of the pure maiden who transforms into a slut upon contact with a penis.
The purity imperative and the passive role imposed on women in the seduction dynamic function in complementary ways and have similar effects.
The purity imperative has women believe that deriving pleasure from sex should not be the end goal. Enjoyment is a fringe benefit that only happens when yielding to a man — whose own pleasure is the primary goal.
The woman’s job, then, is to place a man’s sexual pleasure at the centre of her own. This is the appropriate and dignified thing to do. By simply giving in to a man’s desire, the modest and passive woman who climaxes the moment a man touches her has merely lost control. She is not responsible for her own pleasure or desire, and therefore remains “pure” for her next sexual encounter. Her honour is safe.