Social class and slut-shaming among college students (from The Atlantic, May 2014)
This article is nearly a year old now, but it's the first time I am seeing it. If you haven't read it before, I would definitely recommend it. It provides some fascinating insights, IMHO.
A few key excerpts:
...in the process, they began to notice that the (young) women’s attitudes about sex were also influenced by their families’ incomes. On top of asking the students about GPAs and friend groups, the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.
“We were there on the floor when these dramas would emerge about slut-bashing,” Armstrong told me. “We saw working class girls walk out of their dorms to visit boys, and the privileged girls would say, ‘why are you wearing that?’"
As Armstrong and Hamilton write in a new study published in Social Psychology Quarterly, economic inequality drove many of the differences in the ways the women talked about appropriate sexual behavior.
The two classes of women also defined “sluttiness” differently, but neither definition had much to do with sexual behavior. The rich ones saw it as “trashiness,” or anything that implied an inability to dress and behave like an upper-middle-class person.
Armstrong notes that midway through their college experience, none of the women had made any friendships across the income divide.
To Armstrong, it seemed like even though the wealthy and poor women were slut-shamed roughly equally in private, it was mostly only the poor women who faced public slut-shaming. And it only seemed to happen when the poorer women tried to make inroads with the richer ones.
By Armstrong’s tally, more rich women than poor women took part in hook-ups throughout college. The poorer women seemed to notice that their wealthier dorm-mates were more sexual, but felt they couldn’t get away with being similarly libertine. The wealthier women, meanwhile, seemed unfazed by accusations of sluttiness if they came from their lower-status peers. (Think of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, for whom public displays of sexuality were the rocket fuel on which they jetted to fame.)
“The high-status women would literally snub or look through the poorer women,” Armstrong said. “They would blow them off entirely. We spent a lot of time asking who would say hi to who; who would let the door slam in someone's face.”
According to Armstrong, one sorority member said, “I only see people who are Greek; I don't know who the other students are. They are like extras.”
The rampant slut-shaming, Armstrong found, was only a symptom of the women’s entrenched classism. But more importantly, the allegations of sluttiness had little to do with real-life behavior. The woman with the most sexual partners in the study, a rich girl named Rory, also had the most sterling reputation—largely because she was an expert at concealing her sexual history.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-slut/371773/?utm_source=SFFB
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