One might expect, given a book titled Slut!, that we were returning to the world of the 1950s. Yet during that decade no publisher would have permitted such a title to adorn a book cover. So have we come a long way or not? Are women still being called names and having their reputations besmirched? More particularly, are young women today being stigmatized for their sexuality? Is there still a double standard? And can it be that just as we are about to enter a new millennium we must drag along the dirty laundry from the old one? Leora Tanenbaum would answer yes to all of the above

Tanenbaum sets out to show that "slut-bashing" (her term), is still happening thirty years after the second wave of feminism raised the consciousness of so many American women. In 1997, in Seventeen magazine, Tanenbaum, a journalist, wrote about her experiences of being labeled a slut in high school. "My body and face burned. I felt mortified. I contemplated suicide.... These events occurred in the 1980s, not the 1950s...." An overwhelming number of women who identified with her experiences responded to the article. The response provided the impetus for Tanenbaum to expand and investigate the matter further.

The result is a tightly packed book in which Tanenbaum explores four decades of name-calling and its effects on young women. She contends that girls still do not have sexual parity with boys; that the double standard is alive and well; that slut-bashing is nothing less than sexual harassment; and that school systems ignore or condone these humiliations. In her introduction, she writes that "two out of five girls nationwide - 42 percent - have had sexual rumors spread about them, according to a 1993 poll conducted for the American Association of University Women (AAUW) on sexual harassment in schools."

Tanenbaum uses interviews she conducted with fifty girls and women, from the ages of fourteen through 66, to support her contentions. A handful of these interviews appear as first-person narratives; they are intelligent, revealing and, in some cases, quite moving. However, their importance lies in their historical and psychological perspectives.

In one of these narratives, feminist author Phyllis Chesler recalls that being labeled a slut during the 1950s meant that her chance for a good marriage was forever compromised. She defines "good" and "bad" girls of the decade: the good were "centrists who never became obsessed with mathematics or poetry... the tramps.., were girls from very poor homes who dressed in a trashy way because that was what they could afford." The latter, however, did not hide their interest in sex. Summing up her own teenagehood, Chesler says, "My sexual bravado...was, I think, a typical sign of distress and of longing for love withheld and the desire to please.... It took my generation an entire feminist movement to teach us about sex."

Most would agree that the 1950s was a repressive decade in which the "virgin and the whore were the sole feminine archetypes portrayed in advertisements, TV, and film." Girls who "wore cone-shaped bras beneath tight sweaters...[still] had to maintain an illusion of sexual innocence." In the absence of the Pill, the specter of pregnancy was a "powerful prophylactic." Sexual experimentation was taboo. Containment was the watchword, and any attempt to break out (read: sexuality) was punished. "[G]irls seized one area of power available to them - the power to destroy another girl's reputation." The 1950s supermom "helped to assuage nightmares over the atom bomb because she represented stability. And if stability were to continue, teenage girls had to be groomed to replace their mothers."

In the 1960s and '70s, as Tanenbaum makes clear, there may have been a sexual revolution, but it did not affect the double standard. "[F]emales were still characterized as 'good' or 'bad.'" Males were expected, indeed encouraged, to have sexual affairs just for the fun of it; females were not. Nevertheless, those were breakout years, and women did engage in sexual experimentation. Yet, as Tanenbaum asks, "what good was it to be a sexually liberated woman if men regarded you with nothing more than a mingling of lust and contempt?"

The situation does not appear to have changed appreciably over time. Tanenbaum's interviews with women accused of being sluts in the 1950s and with their counterparts 25 to 30 years later uncover similar sad stories. Perhaps the only difference is one of duration. In the 1950s slut-bashing affected women through their college years; today it is confined generally to adolescence. But, in those teen years, when social acceptance is as crucial as breathing, slut-bashing can leave a harsh mark, and can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as alcohol or drug abuse. "Many develop a serious problem with sex that persists into adulthood," Tanenbaum notes. She contends that schools too often dismiss slut-bashing as part of the normal fabric of adolescent life, and she advocates that teachers and administrators be taught that teenage girls have as much right to be sexual as do boys. She sees slut-bashing as a form of sexual harassment, therefore illegal under Title IX, which entitles students to a harassment-free education.

Two major changes did occur in the 1960s and 1970s: the Pill was introduced, allowing women to enjoy sex without fear, and premarital sex became more acceptable when couples were "serious." But by the 1980s "a mood of sexual conservatism replaced the old idea of sexual libertarianism. The mainstream media...presented women who 'were fed up with casual sex'.... [S]ex was not worthwhile without...emotional connection...." Tanenbaum claims that the nail in the coffin of women's sexual liberation came in the early eighties with the news coverage of"the G Spot," celebrating the vaginal orgasm. And over the next twenty years, the sexual "rules for girls" became more confusing. "There are competing pressures to be sexual and also not to be sexual...girls who have never kissed a boy are ridiculed...and girls who wear clingy outfits...are made fun of for their overt...desperate sexuality."

Now, in the last decade of this century, the backlash against women is tinged with puritanism, infecting many segments of society, including the United States Congress. Tanenbaum quotes former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's 1995 avowal that "he wanted to institute the public stigmatization of sexually active, unwed girls," further evidence that sexuality continues to be used to discredit young women.

Tanenbaum points out that in every decade the severest critics of young women's sexual practices are other young women. If a girl is very attractive and has the attention of many boys, other girls may become envious and fabricate rumors to destroy her reputation. Tanenbaum knows about this first hand. As a high school freshman, she went out with a boy coveted by one of her popular friends. The friend became "so angry with me that she spread the word that I was a slut." And slut-bashing enabled a sense of personal virtue: if she is a "tramp," then I am in "the superior role [of] nice, good, and marriageable." But slut-bashing can have positive effects: "While many girls crumble, some muster the strength to defy the slut label." What's intimated here is that rough-and-tough experiences teach young women to become strong and resilient. "None of the 'sluts' I interviewed is a victim....Having a 'slut' reputation sharpened her thinking...made her acutely aware of...the sexual double standard."

There is a great deal of useful information in Slut!, though at times it is conveyed by way of too many similar examples. 'The important issue of class and its relationship to slut-bashing is raised briefly as a phenomenon of the 1950s, but not revisited in the decades that followed. Although the media would have us believe that we are all middle-class, it is likely that poor and working-class adolescents suffer the consequences of slut-bashing in greater measure than those whose families have the wherewithal to protect them, for instance by sending them to different schools.

Yet these are mere quibbles. Tanenbaum has written an important and alarming book; it deserves serious attention and should encourage serious action.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Women's Review, Inc.