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Overcoming Slut Shaming (1-2)
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In this empowering episode, hosts Jon and Natalie delve deep into the taboo topic of slut shaming and its impact on individuals' ability to embrace and enjoy a fulfilling sex life. With a blend of personal anecdotes, research-backed insights, and candid discussions, they explore the harmful consequences of slut shaming on women and all people, highlighting the pervasive double standards and societal pressures that fuel this phenomenon.
From dissecting the historical roots of slut shaming to examining its modern manifestations in media, culture, and everyday interactions, Jon and Natalie fearlessly confront the stigma and judgment that often surrounds sexuality. They passionately advocate for dismantling these damaging beliefs and fostering a culture of sexual acceptance, empowerment, and consent.
Drawing from their own experiences and the experiences of listeners, Jon and Natalie offer practical strategies and resources for combating slut shaming and reclaiming sexual autonomy. Through open and honest dialogue, they emphasize the importance of self-love, body positivity, and sexual exploration in overcoming shame and embracing a fun and fulfilling sex life.
Join Jon and Natalie as they challenge societal norms, debunk myths, and celebrate the beauty of sexual diversity in this thought-provoking and liberating episode. Whether you're navigating your own journey of sexual liberation or seeking to support others in theirs, this conversation is sure to inspire and empower.
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Transcript
Introduction to Slut Shaming Discussion
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Fun with Sex podcast. I'm Natalie. And I'm her partner, John. And today we're going to be talking about slut shaming.
What is Slut Shaming?
00:00:12
Speaker
So the reason why we decided to do slut shaming as the topic for our second podcast is because before we dive in deeper into how to have better sex and how to explore your sexual fantasies, it's important to get rid of one of the biggest roadblocks that stops people from exploring the things that they're into.
00:00:30
Speaker
And one of the big things for all people, but women is specific, is slut shaming. Yeah, we really wanted like Jon said to cover those first because I think for a lot of women, they're afraid to get deeper into their sexuality and what they really want because of slut shaming. It comes from all ends in society, from men, from women.
00:00:53
Speaker
So I think it's a big hindrance to a lot of women that I do talk to where they haven't really taken the time to explore their sexuality. Um, a lot of that fear comes from the response you got from other people. So what do you think is slut shaming or how would you define
Slut Shaming and Societal Norms
00:01:10
Speaker
slut shaming? I would define slut shaming kind of the umbrella term of it all is that it's the act of somebody shaming you for engaging in sex.
00:01:23
Speaker
often it has to do with engaging in casual sex. And I think one of the other aspects kind of under that umbrella is being shamed for enjoying sex. That's a big thing too. Um, cause you know, as a woman, I think you could get shamed for casual sex, for enjoying sex or wanting kinkier sex or sex that other women don't see as quote unquote normal.
00:01:52
Speaker
I view slut-shaming as one of two ways predominantly. I think the first way is the way that you see from everybody, from men, women, from parents, and as a way of policing women's sexuality and sexual desire with the concept of shame.
00:02:09
Speaker
It's a way to weaponize shame to keep women into quote-unquote normalize behavior of what sex is supposed to look like and I want to Expand that a little bit because I think that like slut shaming also goes hand-in-hand with like homophobia for queer people and like shaming them from Not exploring the sex that they want to have with the people that they want to have with but getting back to women. I think that That's the way that we predominantly see slut shaming in society. I
00:02:38
Speaker
I also think that slut shaming happens specifically from men to women in a more violent and derogatory way of upholding the patriarchy by saying, at the end of the day, no matter who you are, no matter what you do with your life, no matter how many degrees
00:02:56
Speaker
and how many jobs you get, how successful you are. I'm going to weaponize the word slut or any of those other derogatory terms to say that I'm still going to judge you by your sexuality and by your gender and bring you down using that term. So I think those are the two ways to slut
Control Dynamics in Slut Shaming
00:03:12
Speaker
shaming presents itself. Yeah. And that's the thing is I think slut shaming, it
00:03:18
Speaker
I think kind of the thought people have is it typically happens to people who are more promiscuous or are engaging in casual sex, but it also presents itself in a lot of other ways in our society too. Like if a woman is wearing something more revealing, you know, it kind of goes
00:03:38
Speaker
again, hand in hand with rape culture of like, oh, she's asking for something or she wants a certain kind of attention. Um, so we see it like that shaming people for their clothing choices, you know, shaming a bisexual woman for being bi because she must of course be hypersexual if she's bi and we should shame her for that too. But it really is all about control. And I think what it comes from, you know,
00:04:07
Speaker
not to think of things in a very gendered way, but I think when it comes from a man to a woman, it's about that control of, oh no, if woman enjoys sex too, they have the power. You know what I mean? If they're asking for sex, if they're willing to have sex, if they want to sleep with me on the first date, if they want to go home with me from a bar, they have some type of sense of power because typically,
00:04:35
Speaker
it's men pursuing women. So if we're also enjoying sex, if we're also willingly doing sex, if we're willingly engaging in kink, men are relinquishing some of their power because she wants it too. She's asking for these things too. Um, but I think the power aspect comes in a different way with woman on woman with slut shaming, where I think it's a lot of like,
00:05:01
Speaker
Um, it's still about control, but it's a lot more of, I honestly think these women, I think it's a lot of things. I think, you know, you'll see it if a woman's dressing revealing the other woman will slut shame her because they're jealous. She's getting male attention for dressing that way. And, you know, you see it, it presents too in the aspect of like, wow.
00:05:25
Speaker
my friend just sleeps with whoever she wants. Like I could never do that. I'm too shy. I'm too scared. I'm too, I'm still unpacking my religious trauma. Oh, I'm going to shame her and make her feel bad about that because there's some part of me deep down. That's like, I want to do this too. And it's a way of saying that like, I recognize your freedom and your control of your sexuality and your ability to say that, Hey,
00:05:52
Speaker
You stepped away from what society wants you to do and doing how and living how you want to live I certainly desire to do that too But because i'm not in a place mentally to do that i'm gonna shame you and try my hardest to stop you from getting to that place and I think that that's going zooming out in a bigger picture is why we see slut shaming everywhere and how everyone upholds the patriarchy because going back to the way you dress I mean one of the biggest
00:06:22
Speaker
People who participate in slut-shaming as parents to their kids, especially to their daughters, growing up in the church, in religious households, watching parents say, hey, if you're dressing like this and bad things happen to you, that's your fault because you're welcoming it from the way that you dress. And that's a way of perpetuating rape culture.
00:06:43
Speaker
by blaming women's attires for the way that men dress, even though when you look at countries where women dress more conservatively, that doesn't stop rape from happening. It doesn't stop bad things from happening, but it's a way to use the power of shame and the power of fear to police the way that people want to express themselves.
00:07:01
Speaker
Yeah.
Impact on Self-Perception and Internalized Blame
00:07:02
Speaker
And it's really, it's so deep, deeply ingrained in our society and amongst a bunch of different societies that people will even do it to themselves. You know, if you have an experience where you got sexually harassed or you got sexually assaulted, it's, you know, so easy for your first thought to be like, well, what did, what did I do? You know what I mean? What kind of vibe am I giving off if somebody
00:07:31
Speaker
felt like they should just like come up and grab me or just do this to me. I mean, that was a really big thing. I started unpacking in adulthood is when I like started getting hit on sexually by like adult men and older teenage men when I was maybe like 12, like just went through puberty. And at the time it was so like,
00:07:57
Speaker
Well, what am I doing for this to happen? Like, am I dressing too mature? Am I wearing too much makeup? Am I giving off too much of a vibe that I'm like sexually promiscuous? And this wasn't anybody had said that to me. Nobody in my life was like, well, these adults are hitting on you because of this. It was just kind of like that was my instinctual first thought.
00:08:23
Speaker
And that was a big thing to unpack because I was like, wow, it's really nothing you could have done. And I think this shows how ingrained slut shaming is into the patriarchy and into our society. And you can't separate that from purity culture and religious trauma. The idea that if something bad happens to you sexually, there must be something that you did that caused it to happen.
00:08:48
Speaker
Because if you were a pure person or if you weren't such a slut then that wouldn't happen to you and that's why it's important to overcome purity or overcome slut shaming and purity culture because it allows people to say no the reason why something bad happened to me is because there's bad people outside and it takes the blame off of women to police her own sexuality and for society to say hey people who do bad behavior disproportionately men
00:09:15
Speaker
This is your fault and you need to learn how to control yourself sexually around women and around other people because you're the perpetrators of this violence and no matter what somebody wears doesn't excuse it. Yeah. And at the end of the day overcoming that it's really about empowering yourself and giving yourself your power back so that
00:09:36
Speaker
You do feel empowered to explore your sexuality. You do feel empowered to wear what you want, do what you want, and do it with whoever you want. And I was going to say, and I think that's the big important thing too, is that overcoming purity culture allows people to explore their sexual freedoms.
00:09:54
Speaker
Dr. Justin Lay Miller has a beautiful book called tell me what you want where he surveys Americans I think like 3,000 on blind surveys on their sexual fantasies and up to I think was 97% of Americans had sexual fantasies But only about a third of them actually explored it and a big reason why is because shame
00:10:16
Speaker
And for a big reason why women explore their fantasies less than men is because slut shaming. The idea that, well, if I have this threesome or if I do kink, what does that say about me as a human being? And I think stepping away from slut shaming allows you to detach morality with sex and purity with sex versus the pleasure. The idea that, hey, I can enjoy these things and as long as I'm doing them concentrally with
00:10:43
Speaker
other consenting adults.
Historical Context: Racism and Classism in Slut Shaming
00:10:45
Speaker
This doesn't mean I'm a good person. This doesn't mean I'm a bad person. It's just like eating the dinner at my favorite restaurant. It's something that I enjoy doing and I'm going to do it for pleasure. Yeah. So moving on. Is slow shaming strictly a thing that can only happen to women? What are your thoughts on that?
00:11:06
Speaker
I think, you know, I try to stay away when it comes to like personal experiences saying it only happens to this person and that. So I'm sure there are some men and non-binary people who have experienced slut-shaming. But I think culturally in our culture,
00:11:28
Speaker
it does really happen to women a lot more because there's kind of the reverse effect of men where it's like, if you are engaging in, I mean, that's the pressure that's put on men is you are supposed to be engaging in casual sex. You are supposed to want to have sex all the time and explore kink and have rough sex and do all that. And it's not to say that slut shaming doesn't harm men because that reverse effect that it does have on men
00:11:56
Speaker
harms them you know to have that pressure that you should have to be this hypersexual person at all times um but yeah i do think as a whole it happens a lot more to women i agree and i think that you can't take slush i mean outside of its historical context where this has been a way for hundreds of years to police women's sexuality and you can go back to victorian england you can go back to
00:12:26
Speaker
I think the term in a miracle.
00:12:28
Speaker
widely used in the 1950s is the first time we started seeing slut shaming. And the crazy thing about slut shaming too is that it has its roots in racism and classism. Yeah. Where the only people who could be called sluts or middle class and upper class white women, because at the time other women were viewed as so hypersexual that the norm was for them to be quote unquote slutty. So calling them a slut doesn't take anything away from their legacy or who they are as a person because
00:12:57
Speaker
We as a racist society already sees them as hypersexual, which of course is not true. But this is the historical context of 1940s, 1950s America. And then that term was slowly targeted at white women. And now as we're seeing the pullback of the idea that all women of color are hypersexual,
00:13:17
Speaker
negatively the term slut has started to expand to target women in general and I think that understanding the historical context that this word as one targeted at women for all of history is why
00:13:33
Speaker
Men can be victims of purity culture, and also women and non-binary people, people born in people who are assigned female at birth. I think men can be victims of purity culture, and on an individual level, men can be victims of slut-shaming, but on a macro and societal level under patriarchy, men cannot be victims of slut-shaming due to the context of the word and where it's rooted in. I don't know if that makes sense, but I just went on a nerdy rant.
00:14:02
Speaker
No, no, that makes
Reclaiming 'Slut' for Empowerment
00:14:04
Speaker
sense. And that's what I was going to say, too, is you also can't talk about slut shaming without talking about how it varies beyond racial lines and different demographics. I mean, particularly going all the way back to slavery times, Chateau slavery times, when, you know, there was this super toxic idea all
00:14:31
Speaker
these female slaves were getting assaulted and raped left and right. And the racism was so deep that people couldn't conceptualize that it was about power and not about sexuality. So people were like, well, you know, why is my husband raping this slave so much? Why is, oh, she must be a slut. And that just kind of feeds into today's society where
00:14:59
Speaker
black women are put on such a high pedestal where if they ever do anything outside of the purity culture norms, they are heavily, heavily scrutinized more so than white woman, cis white woman who can get away with a little bit more. You know, we see figures in our society of how black women are just heavily, heavily scrutinized for doing anything that is remotely sexual.
00:15:26
Speaker
And kind of building on that, the idea was, and the time of chattel slavery was, oh, the reason why these women are hypersexual is look at their body. It had nothing to do with what they were wearing or their behavior. Just if you have naturally a bigger bud or like bigger breasts, people use that as an excuse to assault or you must be asking for it because
00:15:50
Speaker
Oh, well you should have done a better job of covering it up. And I think that goes back to the point that women could be doing absolutely nothing. You could have slapped with no one. You could not have any fantasies. You cannot have war revealing clothing. But if your body's shaped a certain way that's viewed as over sexual in our patriarchal society, society finds a way to slut shame you. And if something happens,
00:16:14
Speaker
to you, they use that as an excuse to say, well, you didn't do a good enough job covering up your body. It's a lose-lose situation that women can't get out of. I guess the idea, there's a lot of people going around with the idea of reclaiming the word slut. We have slut walks. We have the amazing work that Amber Rose is doing over there. Do you think, one, that we can reclaim the word slut? And two, do you think that we should want to reclaim the word slut?
00:16:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think reclamation comes with overcoming things. Of course, it exists on an individual level. You don't have to reclaim any word you don't want to, whatever that word is, whether it's something that's sexist, homophobic, racist. But I think history has proven that reclamation can be very powerful. And we see reclamation
00:17:12
Speaker
in every demographic that is marginalized. So yeah, I think reclaiming the word slut kind of goes hand in hand with how to overcome slut shaming. Because that's really the thing I would say to women is when you are putting up with these people who are shaming you for X, Y, and Z, kind of the response should be, so what? You know, just kind of showing people almost how
00:17:40
Speaker
idiotic they're being, you know, if you sit back and you allow people to shame you and you allow them to make you feel bad by the word slut, you know, it's kind of letting them win. Whereas if you're like, yeah, I've slept with this many people, I enjoy sex. So what? And I think going back to your point, and it's not solely my place as a man to say that the worst slut can and should be reclaimed.
00:18:07
Speaker
But again, speaking of historical context, a lot of marginalized communities subvert the meaning of words that were used to put them down by reclaiming them in their own community. I mean, the word queer is a perfect example where you go about 60, 70 years ago, the word queer was an insult. And now it's reclaimed so much by the LGBTQ community that the word queer is inside LGBTQ.
00:18:35
Speaker
And I think that's the, or the N word in like black communities where that was a word that was used to dehumanize and control them and
00:18:48
Speaker
generations go by. Now, this is a word that's exclusively used inside the community. And people can have their feelings one way or the other about reclaiming words that had derogatory meanings at one time. But what we can't debate is that words do change, meanings change, and contexts change. And if there's a pattern of
00:19:08
Speaker
marginalized communities using vocabulary to sub to subvert their oppression and their oppressors then I think that's like a perfectly fine way to do that and I think that the word slut can be used to say that like hey, I'm someone who Enjoys my sexuality. I'm someone who finds pleasure in sex. I'm someone who even if I don't find pleasure in sex. I'm someone who I
00:19:31
Speaker
I'm comfortable enough in my sexuality that I'm not going to be policed by purity culture, by religious trauma, by your expectations of behavior norms, where you using this word against me is the insult. Because what I'm going to say is this word just means I'm free from the standards and policing that you have put on top of me. That makes sense. And I think that that's like a really
Embracing Sexual Exploration Without Shame
00:19:53
Speaker
important part of reclaiming words is to change the meaning of what those words mean on a cultural level.
00:19:59
Speaker
And I think that you can get to a place where being a slut can be a genderless term for everybody, just means someone who's comfortable enough in their sexuality to get what they want, to do what they want, as long as they're not hurting other people. Yeah. So I guess for the final note, in the last couple of minutes, how important is it for people to overcome slush? I mean, I think it's really huge if you are somebody where you're on
00:20:25
Speaker
a journey if you want to explore your sexuality, specifically being a woman. Because, you know, when you're gonna explore your sexuality, and when you want to move to a place where you're more free with your sexuality, you are going to encounter it. And that's where I would say, as a woman, you need to be really careful about like who you do lead into your life on this journey.
00:20:52
Speaker
You know, don't go home with just anyone. Don't allow just any man or any woman or anyone to be a part of your sexual journey. I would really say try to seek out people where they're not going to slut chain you for this exploration.
00:21:12
Speaker
Um, cause I think that's what holds a lot of women back, especially straight or bi woman who are pursuing men is there's kind of this fear to ask for what you want or tell them what you want. And I think that's where you need to like develop your own boundaries and understanding of like the behavior you will or won't accept. And slut shaming is just something that you shouldn't accept and something that you should stick up for yourself when you come in contact with it.
00:21:42
Speaker
And I think on an internal level too, you really have to unpack it with yourself of what's holding me back from exploring these fantasies, exploring my sexual side, and that sort of thing. And kind of building off your point, I think that the reason why it's important to overcome slut shaming is because as the podcast says, for a lot of people, sex is fun. Most people, no matter what their gender is, men, women, non-binary,
00:22:12
Speaker
Sex is a theme that we fantasize about and it's an important part of forming relationships and exploring pleasure. And once you get to a point where you're saying, where you say, Hey, I'm going to take my sex life into my own hand and I'm going to hands and I'm going to enjoy pleasure as it's offered to me in a way that is
00:22:34
Speaker
doesn't harm other people. You can separate morality from pleasure. It allows you to live in a more enjoyable life and to form connections with people who have other shared interests. I think that there's a lot of people who wish, well, I think, again, going back to Dr. Lee Miller's study, there's a lot of people who want to explore different forms of sex. They have all these fantasies and then they end up dying without exploring the things that would bring them joy to their life.
00:22:59
Speaker
And that comes from a combination of slut shaming and like religion trauma, religious trauma, and a lot of baggage to society of policing your sexuality. When in reality, you can live a really, really fun life if you just take a second to say that, hey, I'm going to do with my sexuality, whatever I want to do with my sexuality. Yeah.
Conclusion and Thanks
00:23:18
Speaker
All right. Well, this is it for the Fun with Sex Podcast episode two. Thank you for listening.