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Facebook’s new slut page: a monument to girl hatred

By Melinda Tankard Reist - posted Thursday, 11 March 2010


Since when did it become OK to hate women and girls so publicly and to judge them so mercilessly?

There’s a new page on Facebook. It’s just over two-weeks-old but already has more than a million members. I’m not going to post the link but of course it is easy to find. You don’t have to go far to find online domains where women are held up for ridicule and contempt.

This is a site for anyone who wants to post pictures of girls they have judged to be sluts.

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Some girls appear in overtly sexual poses.

Others are doing that common tween pouty thing with their lips and surprised eyes. Which apparently means they are sluts.

Then there’s the young girls of 13, 14 or 15 having fun with their friends, smiling and fooling around as young girls often do and somehow ending up on this site. Because even innocent mucking around with your besties is to be interpreted as sluttish behaviour.

One average normal young woman is standing in a front yard looking relaxed and happy in a long blue summery dress. This girl cops a torrent of abuse on the site. Because girls can’t just look or actually be relaxed and happy. They must be covering up for the fact that they’re really sluts.

Other images are of larger sized girls posted purely to be ridiculed. And they are. Condemned for being alive, though some men comment that despite their obvious hideousness, they could still manage to find some use for them.

There is even a picture of a woman with a bashed face.

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It is revealing that the girls whose images have been put up here are either condemned for their whorish ways - or condemned for not deserving the slut title. So they can’t win. Either they are too slutty or not slutty enough.

Each girl or woman is analysed based on her body parts and what she is wearing. The text includes allegations of their prostitute-like ways, describing multiple STD’s, multiple pregnancies to multiple fathers, and all the sexual acts they have ever allegedly performed on multiple men.

Some images are clearly posted for revenge. Often full names are used. What means do these women and girls have to defend themselves? How do they deal with it? What does it mean for them in their daily lives at school or work or at home or anywhere, to be identified to the whole world as a slut?

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First published on Melinda Tankard Reist's blog on March 6, 2010.



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About the Author

Melinda Tankard Reist is a Canberra author, speaker, commentator and advocate with a special interest in issues affecting women and girls. Melinda is author of Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief after Abortion (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000), Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (Spinifex Press, 2006) and editor of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls (Spinifex Press, 2009). Melinda is a founder of Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation (www.collectiveshout.org). Melinda blogs at www.melindatankardreist.com.

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