Let all your Slut shaming turn into “Shut” Shaming

Have been broken a lot
But not as much as
When been called a slut
Slut-shaming…

You might think, “Ah! one more feminist article”. But is slut-shaming a feminist topic to write on?

This question always tickles my mind…”Is slut-shaming a problem for only females?” “Why is it so that only the females have to be the prey of slut-shaming or body shaming or any shaming?” Well, I could never find an answer to these questions that come to my mind.

To define slut-shaming, according to the Google dictionary, it means ” stigmatizing women who are sexually promiscuous.”

But it doesn’t limit to that.

If a guy asks a girl out and she refuses…the guy goes on telling other guys that the girl, he asked out is a slut because she said no to him. So here, hilariously the girl didn’t even have to be “sexually promiscuous.”

With this situation prevalent all over, google definitions do not do justice to the term slut-shaming.

Art by Chetana HP
Degrading women based on their clothing sense or their expression of sexuality freely or being a lot flirty and even being straight forward… all these words clubbed together define slut-shaming.

History is the witness of women’s desires, expressions, wants, sexuality, and even women’s orgasm being regulated by men and still in some parts of the world it prevails. Even women burden other girls who try to make use of their constitutional freedom by branding them with character-defining words like ‘loose,’ ‘desperate,’ ‘slut’ etc. And oh of course oddly enough the religious card comes into play too.

Well, that’s a whole other topic to write about …. later maybe.

But to continue, even after the protest held on April 11, 2011, in Toronto, where a student protested against college authorities and local policemen who implied “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”…the world still blames the women if they are catcalled or worst raped. The protest in Toronto was given the name Slutwalk by the police because all the girls walking down the road wore “slutty clothes”. The policemen, though, became the laughing stock when the men joined the march wearing only shorts and tank tops.

Well, events aside and on a serious note, the usage of the word slut has gone up since the year 2014 according to the data forum of Western Michigan University. Besides, it’s also been noticed that since the past two years, slut is the most used word even on social media among the North American teens.

The only reason I’m stating all the facts is that it is on us that the word slut is so hyped among the teens these days. There is no context, no situation, and somebody pops up and labels a girl slut. And all this is because we do not stand up to the people who call the girls sluts. We leave them on the hook of “Boys will be Boys” or “Old people from old times.”