Slut-shaming

In human sexuality, slut-shaming is a form of social stigma applied to people, especially women and girls, who are perceived to violate traditional expectations for sexual behaviors. Some examples of circumstances wherein women are "slut-shamed" include violating dress code policies by dressing in perceived sexually provocative ways, requesting access to birth control, having premarital, casual, or promiscuous sex, engaging in prostitution, or when being victim blamed for being raped or otherwise sexually assaulted.

Slut-shaming is defined by many as a process in which women are attacked for their transgression of accepted codes of sexual conduct, i.e., of admonishing them for behavior or desires that are more sexual than society finds acceptable.

Slut-shaming is used against women by both men and women. Jessica Ringrose has argued that slut-shaming functions among women as a way of sublimating sexual jealousy "into a socially acceptable form of social critique of girls' sexual expression". The term slut-shaming is also used to describe victim blaming for rape and other sexual assault; e.g. by stating that the crime was caused (either in part or in full) by the woman wearing revealing clothing or acting in a sexually provocative manner, before refusing consent to sex, and thereby absolving the perpetrator of guilt. The study "Birds of a feather? Not when it comes to sexual permissiveness," published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, notes that sexually lenient individuals are judged more negatively than non-permissive peers, which places those who are more permissive at risk of social isolation. The researchers from Cornell University found that similar sentiments appeared in nonsexual, same-sex friendship context as well. The researchers had college women read a vignette describing an imaginary female peer, "Joan", then rate their feelings about her personality. To one group of women, Joan was described as having two lifetime sexual partners; to another group, she had had twenty partners. The study found that women—even women who were more promiscuous themselves—rated the Joan with 20 partners as "less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who'd only boasted two".

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