Growing Up in the 2000s, Slut-Shaming Was Normal; Now, We're Rewriting That Reality

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.

I was 12 the first time I called another girl a slut.

It had nothing to do with sex. (No one I knew had done more than kiss a boy in a chaste game of spin the bottle.) But our classmate Lizzy had been seen holding hands near the lockers with a boy that my friend liked, and it seemed like an opportunity to try out a word I had just learned.

"Why does he like her?" my friend whined to us at the lunch table.

"Well, maybe because she's kind of a slut?" I offered. "Wasn't she going out with someone else two days ago?"

From then on, through high school, I remember that my friends and I used the word from time to time in conversation: she was a slut, don't be a slut, am I dressed like a slut?

It felt casual. It felt like asking, "Am I dressed cute? Is it too sexy?" It didn't feel like a slap across the face, the way I feel typing it now. It didn't jerk a conversation to a standstill. Not back then — probably because we weren't the only ones saying it.

The word popped up frequently in the early aughts: in nascent online forums, in movies, even in occasional articles in women's magazines. At the time, publications ostensibly dedicated to women's issues, or even women's pleasure, often took a tone that empowered and rebuked on the topic of sex simultaneously. "Ten tips to titillate" could coexist with advice on how to dress in a way that "left something to the imagination." We should learn ways to blow his mind with blowjobs, but we shouldn't sleep with him on the first date, or we'd run the risk of being branded — there it was again – a slut.

If I can try to remember what it was like to be myself at that time, I think I assumed that this was just the way of the world: I believed women deserved all the same rights and opportunities as men, and yet I also believed that it was an immutable, animal fact that men governed the world of sex and dating. Playing the game – concealing enough to be respectable, giving enough to be desirable — was simply the way the dance had to work.

It's worth noting that I certainly considered myself to be a feminist, and so did all my female friends.

I was 20 the first time I was sexually assaulted.

(Have you ever noticed that it's possible to start a conversation with a group of women with exactly that prompt — "When is the first time you were sexually assaulted?" — and virtually everyone will have an answer, as if you'd asked, "When was the first time you ever went to the beach?")

It happened after a night out at a bar. He asked if he could walk me home. I knew him well, too well perhaps, and I said yes.

Could he come upstairs and help me clean up my apartment? Since I'd hosted a pre-party there before we went out to the bar?

"Sure, yes, that's so nice," I replied.

Once we were inside, he kissed me while I said, "We shouldn't," pushed me down on the couch while I said, "Wait, stop," and forced his hand down my pants. I braced my forearms against his chest and realized I was going to lose. He was too drunk to understand, or I deserved this, or both. I prepared myself to just go with it; prepared myself to understand how I had invited this: with the way I had dressed, or with the way I had flirted with him earlier in the night, with the fact that maybe I'd seemed like I wanted it.

Suddenly, my roommate's key turned in the lock.

He leapt off me the instant he heard it, hand off a hot stove, and that, there, was the worst part. It was the worst because it was the moment I realized that he knew exactly what he was doing to me, and that it was wrong, and that he was going do it anyway, until he thought he might get caught.

Only a month or two before that night, I had been given a writing assignment I felt very proud of. I would write an article entitled "Are You Girlfriend Material? What He Really Thinks About You."

I wanted to be Andie Anderson, writing "how to lose a guy in 10 days" before pursuing a career in political journalism. I wanted to be Candace Bushnell, conducting "sexual anthropology" in the city. I wanted to be a real writer.

The concept of the piece had been designed around interviewing men on our college campus about what made them consider women to be "girlfriend material" versus a "fling" or a "one-night stand." I wanted it to be exciting and enlightening, controversial if necessary.

But I never questioned the premise itself: the idea that it was the role of men to tell women what made them worthy of being a girlfriend, and that it was the role of women to make sure that we ended up with that title by any means necessary.

I wrote the piece. I used the world "slut" in it — as part of a painfully misogynistic quote — and I didn't think twice about it. I don't think my editors did, either. No one circled it or flagged it or asked me to cut it.

Years later, when I revisited the piece again, I felt nothing but deep embarrassment, hot shame. How could I have printed those men's words, when they were only going to minimize or demean or hurt the women I swore I wanted my writing to help in the first place? How could I — as someone who counted herself as a feminist, attended Take Back the Night, and read about the importance of intersectionality — have had such a blind spot at the center of my life?

Now, though, when I look back, I feel only compassion.

I couldn't see it then, but I can clearly see now the dotted line from the young woman warning other women not to be "sluts" to the woman on the couch, pinned down, saying no, but fearing she had invited it anyway. Convinced that if she had just dressed differently, or acted differently, or been someone else, that she would have been worthy of the respect she didn't yet feel she deserved.

The gap between me writing that college article and me writing this essay is only about 12 years. I marvel not that I have changed so much, but that I can see that there are parts of our world that have begun to change, too. There has been a genuine evolution in the way we, as a society, talk about and understand sexual assault in the post-Me Too era. We have examined the double standard of the word "slut," critiqued the way women's sexuality has been packaged and policed in a way never applied to men's.

This is to say nothing about the present and critical attack on women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy playing out across the nation, a topic I have also written about passionately in recent years. It is clear that there is still much farther to go.

But writing in 2023, in a time where I no longer see the same types of language applied to women and sex on magazine covers and article headlines, I feel a shift that other women have long fought for. And it is from this rising swell of cultural awareness — and the growing recognition of the insidious nature of internalized misogyny — that I gained the perspective with which I wrote the storyline of my character Rachel in my new novel "Who We Are Now."

I see a lot of myself in Rachel. I see a bold, intelligent woman, and an aspiring writer, who considers herself the equal to any man in her life — but who is also subtly competitive with other women for the attention of men, who equates men's romantic interest with validation, and who, like many women I know, has downplayed and ultimately ignores an act of sexual violence against her. When, more than 10 years later, she is finally able to give voice to the fact of her rape — and to truly absolve herself from any role in it — it's a transformative, liberating moment for her, as I hope it will be for the reader, too.

Some of the final words in Rachel's interior monologue come as she reflects on the misogyny she has overlooked, and the behavior, the violence that she — and we as a society – has excused: "Years later than she should have, perhaps, Rachel finally knew the truth. It was not, and had never been, okay."

It wasn't. If I could reach back through the years and tell my younger self that truth, I would. But I can't, and so, instead, I am saying it to you.

Lauryn Chamberlain was born and raised in Michigan. She studied journalism and French at Northwestern University and then moved to New York City, where she worked for several years as a journalist, freelance writer, and content strategist (sometimes simultaneously). She currently lives in Toronto. She is the author of the novels "Friends From Home" and "Who We Are Now."