Women. Our issues are many sha! Why do women seem to be the ones giving other women a hard time? Whatever happened to female commiradry, supporting your sister and all of that? I remember in university days (and even secondary school), it was so easy to call another girl and “ashewo”, which is loosely translated to mean slut or prostitute. Typically, we associate these names to women who are sexually promiscuous. However a new research, published on Huffington Post suggests the real reason may be one of social class.
The study published in the June issue of Social Psychology Quarterly revealed that when a particular group of women call each other “sluts,” it has little to do with perceived or actual promiscuity, and everything to do with social class. Sociology researchers Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura Hamilton spent five years interviewing a group of 53 white female undergraduates as they went through their college careers at a Midwestern university. They found that the women who came from upper-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds — a group they referred to as the “affluent” students — used the term “slut” differently than the “less affluent” women from working-class, lower-middle or middle-class families. Armstrong told The Huffington Post that for both groups, the term “slut” had relatively little to do with a woman’s sexual experience or activities.
“The more affluent women tended to make a distinction between being ‘classy’ and ‘trashy,’ and that was very much about appearance” — for example, “having the money to have fancy clothes, the right hairstyle, the right tan, handbags [and] jewellery,” Armstrong told HuffPost. “If you looked ‘classy,’ you wouldn’t be seen as a slut. You couldn’t be ‘trashy’ if you looked right.”
Among the less affluent women, she said, it was generally more important to be down-to-earth and easy to get along with, while the more affluent women put a higher value on social climbing and participation in Greek life.
The less affluent women associated “sluttiness” with being stuck-up, snobby and exclusive, Armstrong said. They considered the affluent women who went to a lot of parties and “hooked up” (an activity that, in this study, did not necessarily involve penetrative sex) to be “slutty.”
Armstrong found that only the less affluent women at this college were publicly slut-shamed by their female peers. The more affluent women, she said, held to a complex code of conduct that wasn’t easy for outsiders to imitate.
“You looked hot, but not slutty. You looked classy, not trashy,” said Armstrong. “You hooked up just the right amount, but not too much. You engaged in the ‘appropriate’ amount of sexual activity. You selected men who were hot, not men who were jerks, from the right fraternities, not the wrong fraternities.”
“You had to indicate that you were deserving of status,” she continued. “So the women who failed at that were of course the less affluent ones for whom the behaviour was not easy, obvious or natural.”
Armstrong also told HuffPost. “We figured out that one of the ways in which women avoid slut stigma is to lie about their sexual behavior.”
“If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term ‘slut’ is a surefire way to do it,” Armstrong told The Atlantic. “It’s ‘she isn’t one of us, we don’t like her and she’s different.'”
So the next time you want to call a woman a slut, think about the real reason behind your actions, or better still don’t do it at all!
Portions of this article have been culled from Huffington Post. The full article can be found here
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