It's a vicious circle. If you don't like them they'll call you a
tight bitch. If you go with them then they'll call you a slag
afterwards.
A woman's sexuality is central to the way she is judged and seen both
in everyday life and by the courts and welfare and law enforcement
agencies. The denial of non-gendered subjectivity (treating women as
human beings rather than as sex objects) is the major barrier to women's
equality. To speak of a woman's reputation is to invoke her sexual
behaviour, but to speak of a man's reputation is to refer to his
personality, exploits and his standing in the community. For men sexual
reputation is, in the main, separated from the evaluation of moral
behaviour and regarded as private and incidental.
The policing of women through sexual reputation starts in
adolescence, where a girl's sexual reputation is a constant source of
debate and gossip between boys and girls, as well as between teachers
and social workers. A girl's standing can be destroyed by insinuation
about her sexual morality, a boy's reputation in contrast is usually
enhanced by his sexual exploits.
When we set out in the early 1980s to talk to 15 to 16 year-old young
women from different social classes and ethnic groups about their views
of school, friendship, marriage, and the future, we did not intend to
focus particularly on sexuality and gender relations. It was the girls'
concern about their sexual reputations (epitomised by the ubiquitous use
of the term 'slag' both by girls and boys) that led us how sexual
relations were socially structured. This made us increasingly aware of
how frequently girls were the target of abuse from boys and other girls
and to examine the way that the term 'slag' , implying sexual
promiscuity, was used. The emphasis in youth culture studies on class
has deflected attention away from the power imbalance between boys and
girls, so that few studies have questioned the taken for granted
subordination of girls by the structuring of gender relations.
The chapter is based on a three-year research project in three London
comprehensive schools carried out in the early 1980s. A hundred 15 to 16
year old young women from varied social class and ethnic groups were
interviewed singly, in pairs, or in group discussions. The first two
schools were mixed: both had women head teachers and were attempting to
put into force an equal opportunities programme. The schools differed in
their intake. One was predominantly white working class; the other had a
high proportion of different ethnic groups. Most of the children had
been brought up in the area. The third school was a single-sex school
with a mainly middle-class intake where the fieldwork was carried out a
year later when the need to investigate the significance of social class
differences became evident. Thirty young men were also interviewed from
two of the schools.
The research objective was to explore the subjective world of
adolescent young women. I wanted to elicit the terms with which they
describe and handle their world and to follow up the meanings through
which they relate to the world, meanings both individually held and
collectively shared. Such an objective required a qualitative method
allowing the research to be sensitive to the girls' experience of the
world. All the discussions and interviews were tape-recorded and later
transcribed. The design of the research involved analysing the
transcriptions according to a schedule developed for the purpose. By
focusing on the terms girls used to describe five aspects of their lives
- schools, friendship, boys, sexuality and their expectations for the
future - light was thrown on how those individual experiences are
socially structured. Full reports of the research has now been published
(Lees, 1986, 1993a).
The structure of sexual relations and the concept of reputation
Boys and girls talk about sexuality in quite different ways. It is
possible to delineate three main differences. First, while a boy's
sexual reputation is enhanced by experience, a girl's is negated. Boys
will brag to others about how many girls they have made', but a girl's
reputation is under threat, not merely if she is known to have had sex
with anyone other than her steady boyfriend but for a whole range of
other behaviour that has little to do with actual sex. Second, a boy's
reputation and standing in the world is not predominantly determined by
his sexual status or conquests. More important is his sporting prowess,
his ability to 'take the mickey' or make people laugh. For a girl, the
defence of her sexual reputation is crucial to her standing both with
boys and girls, certainly around the age of 15 or so. The emphasis on
the importance of sex to a girl's reputation is shown by a whole battery
of insults which are in everyday use among young people. Finally, for
boys sexism appears to be very important in male bonding, in as much as
denigration of girls and women is a crucial ingredient of camaraderie in
male circles. The masculine tradition of drinking and making coarse
jokes usually focuses on the 'dumb sex object', the 'nagging wife' or
the 'filthy whore'. This is not the case for girls. As one girl told me
'One thing I noticed is that there are not many names you can call a
boy. But if you call a girl a name, there's a load of them. You might
make a dictionary out of the names you can call a girl'.
The vocabulary of abuse
This lack of symmetry between the variety of names to call a girl and
the lack of names to call boys is the starting-point for an
understanding of the role of verbal abuse focusing on sexuality in
reproducing, among girls, an orientation towards the existing structures
of patriarchal sex-gender relationships. The word which illustrates this
asymmetry more clearly than any other term is 'slag'. There is no
equivalent to 'slag' in the vocabulary of terms available to be directed
at boys. Derogatory words for boys such as 'prick' or 'wally' are much
milder than 'slag' in that they do not refer to the boy's social
identity. To call a boy a 'poof' is derogatory but this term is not so
much used as a term of abuse by girls of boys. As a term used between
boys, it implies a lack of guts or femininity; which of itself connotes,
in our culture, weakness, softness and inferiority. There is no
derogatory word for active male sexuality. The promiscuous Don Juan or
the rake may be rebuffed, as in Mozart's opera, but his reputation is
enhanced.
The potency of 'slag' lies in the wide range of circumstances in
which it can be used. It is this characteristic that illustrates its
functioning as a form of generalized social control, along the lines of
gender rather than class, steering girls, in terms of both their actions
and their aspirations, into the existing structures of gender relations.
The first thing that is striking about the use of the term 'slag' is
the difficulty of getting any clear definition of what it implies from
those who use it. This is true both for girls and boys. Take this girl's
description of what she calls a 'proper slag': 'I do know one or two
slags. I must admit they're not proper slags'. When asked to describe
what a proper slag is she says:
Available aren't they? Just like Jenny, always on the look out for
boys, non-stop. You may not know her but you always see her and every
time you see her she's got a different fella with her, you get to
think she's a slag, don't you. She's got a different fella every
minute of the day.
Interviewer: So it is just talking to different boys?
You see them, some of them, they look as innocent as anything, but
I know what they're like.
The implication here is that the girl who is called a 'slag' sleeps
around but this is by no means clear, and the insult often bears no
relation at all to a girl's sexual behaviour. Boys are no clearer when
it comes to defining what the characteristics used to define a girl as a
'slag' are, which is why they disagree as to who is or is not a slag. In
their book about boys, Knuckle Sandwich, researchers found:
The boys classified all the girls into two categories: the slags
who'd go with anyone and everyone (they were alright for a quick
screw, but you'd never get serious about it) and the drags who didn't
but whom you might one day think about going steady with. Different
cliques of boys put different girls in each of the two categorises
(Robins and Cohen 1978: 58).
So while everyone apparently knows a slag and stereotypes her as
someone who sleeps around, this stereotype bears no relation to the
girls to whom the term is applied.
An alternative to asking those who use a term to define it, is to
observe carefully the rules whereby the term is used. A look at the
actual usage of 'slag' reveals a wide variety of situations or aspects
of behaviour to which the term can be applied, many of which are not
related to a girl's actual sexual behaviour or to any clearly defined
notion of 'sleeping around'. A constant sliding occurs between slag as a
term of joking, as bitchy abuse, as a threat and as a label. At one
moment a girl can be fanciable and the next 'a bit of a slag' or even -
the other side of the coin - written off as 'too tight'. The girls tread
a very narrow line. They must not end up being called a slag. But
equally they do not want to be thought unapproachable, sexually cold, a
'tight bitch'.
How 'slag' is used
This constant sliding means that any girl is always available to the
designation 'slag' in any number of ways. Appearance is crucial: by
wearing too much make-up; by having your slit skirt too slit; by not
combing your hair; by wearing jeans to dances or high heels to school;
by having your trousers too tight or your tops too low. As one girl
said, 'sexual clothes' designate. Is it any wonder when girls have to
learn to make fine discriminations about appearances that they spend so
much time deciding what to wear? Who you mix with also counts:
I prefer to hang around with someone who's a bit decent, 'cos I
mean if you walk down the street with someone who dresses weird you
get a bad reputation yourself. Also if you looked a right state, you'd
get a bad reputation. Look at her y'know'. Looking weird often means
dressing differently from your own group.
Behaviour towards boys is, of course, the riskiest terrain. You must
not hang around too much waiting for boys to come out (but all girls
must hang around sufficiently); must not talk or be friendly with too
many boys or too many boys too quickly, or even more than one boy in a
group; you must not just find yourself ditched.
Almost everything plays a part in the constant assessment of
reputation, including the way you speak:
'If we got a loud mouth, when we do the same they (the boys) do,
they call us a slag, or 'got a mouth like the Blackwall tunnel'. But
the boys don't get called that, when they go and talk. They think
they're cool and hard and all the rest of it 'cos they can slag a
teacher off. Who would be calling you a slag then? The boys. They
think, oh you got a mouth like an oar, you're all right down the fish
market . . . They think you've come from a slum sort of area.
Thus 'slag' can just as easily be applied to a girl who dresses or
talks in a certain way, or is seen talking to two boys or with someone
else's boyfriend. The point is that irrespective of whether, in a
particular case, the use of the term 'slag' is applied explicitly to
sexual behaviour, since a girl's reputation is defined in terms of her
sexuality, all kinds of social behaviour by girls have a potent sexual
significance.
Exercising control
Perhaps the key to an understanding of 'slag' is its functioning as a
mechanism which controls the activity and social reputations of girls to
the advantage of boys. The taken for granted insolence of boys is
evident in many accounts:
Like this boy was calling me a bitch. I don't know what he was
calling me a bitch for. He was picking on me. 'You bitch' he goes. He
knew my name. He just wanted to make fun or something 'cos he had some
friends round there. He comes up to me and he says 'Hello sexy'. I
goes 'Who are you talking to?' 'You'... I was scared and 'cos my
friends were there we just walked off. So stupid, fancy calling
someone a sexy bitch.
Girls were preoccupied with what might happen after being dropped by
a boy. Then the next thing he'll be going around saying 'I've had her,
you want to try her, go and ask her out, she's bound to say Yeah'.
Another girl said:
Some boys are like that, they go round saying, 'I've had her.' And
then they pack you in and their mate will go out with you. And you're
thinking that they're going out with you 'cos they like you. But
they're not. They're going out to use you. The next you know you're
being called names - like writing on the wall, 'I've had it with so
and so. I did her in 3 days. And I've done her twelve times in a
week.'
It may not be a question of the-girl actually having slept with a
boy, she may land herself with a reputation as a result of going out
with one boy, then being dropped and going out with one of his friends.
The consequences for a girl are quite different from those for a boy:
'When there're boys talking and you've been out with more than two
you're known as the crisp that they're passing around . . . The boy's
alright but the girl's a bit of scum'.
If a boy takes you out or boasts that he has slept with more than one
girl he is more than alright, his reputation is enhanced: 'If a boy
tells his mates that he's been with three different girls, his mates
would all say: 'Oh lucky you' or 'Well done my son, you're a man.' The
pressure is on boys to boast about their sexual conquests. They have to
act big in front of their friends. As one girl explained:
'They might say, 'Oh I've had her.' Then it starts spreading round.
She might be really quiet or something and they'll say, 'Oh she's not
quiet when you get outside the school'. Someone else will take it in
the wrong way and it'll carry on from there'.
No wonder that girls always fear boys going behind their backs and
saying, 'Oh you know, had it with her'. It is the girl's morality that
is always under the microscope, whereas anything the boy does is
alright. A number of girls described girls who had not slept around but
had been out with a number of different boys in a short period 'because
they were unlucky enough to be dropped by a number of boys'. This led
people to start saying 'Oh God, who is she with to-night?'
The crucial point about the label 'slag' is that it is used by both
girls and boys as a deterrent to nonconformity. No girl wants to be
labelled bad and 'slag' is something to frighten any girl with. The
effect of the term is to force girls to submit voluntarily to a very
unfair set of gender relations. A few girls did reject the implications
of the label and the double standard implicit within it, but even they
said they used the term to abuse other girls. What becomes important is
not the identification of certain girls but how the term is used. A
useful way to understand how terms like slag are used is provided in a
study of the functioning of categories of deviance:
Their general function is to denounce and control not to explain .
. . They mark off the deviant, the pathological, the dangerous and the
criminal from the normal and the good . . . (they) are not just labels
. . (but) . . . They are loaded with implied interpretations of real
phenomena, models of human nature and the weight of political self
interest (Sumner, 1983).
To call a girl a slag is to use a term that, as we have seen, appears
at first sight to be a label describing an actual form of behaviour but
into which no girl incontrovertibly fits. It is even difficult to
identify what actual behaviour is specified. Take Helen's description of
how appearance can define girls, not in terms of their attributes as
human beings, but in terms of sexual reputation:
I mean they might not mean any harm. I mean they might not be as
bad as they look. But their appearance makes them stand out and that's
what makes them look weird and you think, 'God I can imagine her
y'know?' . . . She straight way gets a bad reputation even though the
girl might be decent inside. She might be good. She might still be
living at home. She might just want to look different but might still
act normal.
You cannot imagine a boy's appearance being described in this way.
How she dresses determines how a girl is viewed and she is viewed in
terms of her assumed sexual behaviour. Whether she is 'good' or not is
determined by how she is assumed to conduct her sexual life; that
sexuality is relative to male sexual needs.
The term 'slag' can be seen as part of a discourse about behaviour as
a departure, or potential departure from, in this case, male conceptions
of female sexuality which run deep in the culture. They run so deep that
the majority of men and women cannot formulate them except by reference
to these terms of censure that signal a threatened violation. Girls,
when faced with sexual abuse, react by denying the accusation rather
than by objecting to the use of the category. It is important to prove
that you are not a slag. So Wendy when asked what she'd do if someone
called her a slag replies, 'I'd turn round and say "Why? tell me
why?"' The term 'slag' therefore applies less to any clearly
defined notion of sleeping around than to any form of social behaviour
by girls that would define them as autonomous from the attachment to and
domination by boys. An important facet of 'slag' is its uncontested
status as a category.
A second important facet of the term is that, although it connotes
promiscuity, its actual usage is such that any unattached girl is
vulnerable to being categorised as a slag. In this way the term
functions as a form of control by boys over girls, a form of control
that steers girls into 'acceptable' forms of sexual and social
behaviour. The term is incontestable. All the girls agreed that there
was only one defence, one way for a girl to redeem herself from the
reputation of 'slag': to get a steady boyfriend. 'Then that way you seem
to be more respectable like you're married or something'.
Going steady establishes the location of a sexuality appropriate for
'nice girls', and that sexuality is distinguished from the essentially
dirty/promiscuous sexuality of the slag by the presence of love: My
research supported Wilson's finding that 'the fundamental rule governing
sexual behaviour was the existence of affection in the form of romantic
love before any sexual commitment. For most of the girls, love existed
before sex and it was never a consequence of sexual involvement. Deirdre
Wilson who studied a group of 13 - 16-year-old girls commented:
. . . given this threat of rejection (for sex without love) it was
difficult to discover just how many girls actually believed in the
primacy of love, and how many simply paid lip service to the ideal.
Nevertheless the fact that the girls found it necessary to support
this convention, whether they believed in it or not, was an important
fact in itself (1978: 71).
Nice girls cannot have sexual desire outside love, for them sexuality
is something that just happens if you are in love, or if you are
unlucky, when you are drunk: As Tracy put it 'You might be at a party
and someone just dragged you upstairs or something and then the next
thing you know you don't know what's happening to you'. If this happens
the general consensus of opinion is that it is the girl's fault: They
had no difficulty in attributing the blame. ' It happens a lot. But then
it's the girl's fault for getting silly drunk in the first place that
she can't she doesn't know what's going on or anything'.
Few girls were clear about what being in love meant, though
invariably love was given as the only legitimate reason for sleeping
with a boy. The importance of love seemed to be therefore in permitting
sexual excitement while offering some protection from sluttishness. This
failure to recognize sexual desire meant that girls often changed their
minds about whom they loved:
You think you're in love and then when it finishes you find someone
else you like more and then you think the last time it couldn't have
been love so it must be this time. But you're never sure, are you,
'cos each time it either gets better or it gets worse so you never
know.
You think you're in love loads of times and you go through life
thinking 'God I'm in love' and you don't do anything. You want to be
with this person all the time. Then you realize you weren't in love,
you just thought you were . . . I thought I was in love and then I
went away and when I came back I realized I wasn't. It wasn't love at
all. So I finished it and I was much happier.
The girls here could just as easily be describing the way they felt
attracted to a boy and then lost interest. Some girls said they had
'been in love loads of times' whereas others said they 'had never really
experienced it': This is how Debbie described love:
It takes a while to happen. I mean it sort of dawns on you that you
finally love this person. Don't think it happens straight away. I mean
you might say, 'Oh look at him I love him', 'I think he's really nice'
but you can't really say that until you know him really well.
Given the ambiguity about what love involved it could well be that
love is used as a rationalization for sleeping with someone after the
event rather than, as Deirdre Wilson (1978) suggests, as always existing
before sex could occur. The confusion that girls experience over whether
or not they are in love arises from the confusion of using the word
'love' to express what is really sexual desire. Love is supposed to last
for ever or at least for a long time, and is the main reason that girls
give for getting married. The distortion of what is really sexual desire
into 'love' means that girls must find it difficult to separate their
sexual feelings from decisions about marriage and long-term commitment.
As Jacky said: 'Girls have got to keep quiet about sex and think it's
something to be ashamed of'.
However, it is quite legitimate to talk of love. The 'legitimacy' of
love is precisely its role in steering female sexuality into the only
'safe' place for its expression: marriage. The result is that a girl
either suppresses her sexual desire or channels it into a steady
relationship that is based on an unwritten contract of inequality - that
she will be the one to make compromises over where she works lives and
spends her leisure. She will bear the main burden of domesticity and
child care without pay and adjust herself, and indeed contribute, to her
husband's work, life-style and demands. The importance of the threat of
being regarded as a slag in pushing girls to channel their sexuality
into the 'legitimate' channels of love which results in marriage is
illustrated by the realistic, as opposed to romantic, view of marriage
which most of the girls had. Almost all the girls took it for granted
that they would get married, yet they were remarkably clear about the
grimmer aspects of woman's lot in marriage. As one girl put it:
The wife has to stay at home and do the shopping and things. She
has got more responsibility in life and they haven't got much to look
forward to . . . We've got to work at home and look after the children
till they grow up, you've got to go out shopping, do the housework and
try to have a career. The man comes in and says, 'Where's my dinner?'
when we've been to work. They say, 'You don't work.' It's because boys
are brought up expecting girls to do all the work. They expect their
mums to do it and when they get married they expect their wives to do
it. They're just lazy.
The realism about marriage was based on the observation of their
parents: 'My dad won't do anything, he won't make a cup of tea, he says
he does the work for the money and the rest is up to my mum. She does
part time work too'.
The most important reason that girls put forward for getting married
was that they saw no alternative. Life as an independent, unattached
woman is always open to risks: 'If you don't want to get married and
want to live a free life and you go out with one bloke one week and
another the next, everyone will call you a tart, like you've got to go
out with a bloke for a really long time and then marry him.
Besides the constant fear of being regarded as a tart or slag, living
alone is seen as too frightening. The need for protection emerged in a
number of the interviews. Charlotte describes how her brother is treated
differently from her:
Boys are a totally different physique. I could go out and be raped
whereas he couldn't. He'd have more chance of protecting himself. I
think that comes up the whole time. It's not that a boy is more
trusted. It's that he's freer.
The harsh reality existing in a male-dominated world was that women
needed protection from sexual harassment. Girls could never go out on
their own, or even with girlfriends, without fear: Say you have a boy
protecting you. It's as if no one can hurt you or nothing. You're
protected and everything. If someone does something to you, then there's
him there too and it just makes you feel secure'.
The threat of male physical violence takes its place alongside the
verbal insults associated with labelling a girl a slag to steer girls
into the acceptability of marriage. But it is not just the constraints
on an independent sex life that lead girls to marriage but that the of
needs for warmth and intimacy and love. Lesbian relationships can of
course offer these, but only if the girl manages to resist the pressure
towards conformity and, of course, if she is attracted to other girls.
In the face of these strong pressures the girls inevitably subscribed
to the idea that they wanted to marry. Nevertheless, their realism about
marriage, based on their observation of their parents, led them to
devise ways of rationalizing or cushioning its inevitable impact. Almost
all the girls wanted to put marriage off for some time. By delaying
marriage many girls thought that they would be able to have some fun;
they often fantasized about travel and seeing the world. Marriage was
something you ended up with after you had lived:
I don't really want to get married 'cos I want to go round the
world first like me dad did . . . they got married when they were 30,
they just sort of had their life first and then they got married and
had us but when you're an air hostess you don't start the job until
you're twenty so I want to work until I'm 35.
Girls who did want a career often realised that relationships with
boys might upset their intentions and therefore steered clear of them.
As Annie said: 'If a boy does ask us out we say 'no' don't want to know,
because we want a career and go round the world and all that lot. So we
just leave them alone . . . '. Janey put it more strongly:
I don't really bother about boys now - just get on with my
homework. I was brought up not to like boys really 'cos I've heard so
much about what they do, robberies, rapes and all that so I keep away
from them.
When asked what she meant by being brought up not to like them she
replied: 'Well my mum told me never to go with them because they're bad
and they damage your health and things like that, don't know'.
Boyfriends and marriage could easily interfere with career
intentions: the girls could see what had happened to their mums and how
little autonomy they had. Another way of attempting to avoid the
predicament of marriage as to attribute the unhappiness they saw in
marriages around them to the wrong choice of partner. The subordinate
position that many women found themselves in was often attributed to the
lack of good se in choosing the right husband rather than to the general
structural constraints on women at home with young children.
Alice, looking at the 'mistake' her mother had made in choosing the
wrong man, believed: But not all marriages are like that though are
they? Like if your mum's goes bad, yours might go good, it's what
husband you pick'. She is right in one respect. Some men allow women
more autonomy than others. She does not however criticise the unfairness
of the marriage deal itself, particularly if children are involved.
Although having children was something that most girls wanted, again,
the way in which this inevitably constrained freedom was recognised.
Helen explained 'I think that once you decide to have kids then you've
got to accept the fact that you are gonna be tied down for a while.
That's why it's important not to get married too early- until you're 28
or so'.
In short, the girls were not aware of positive attractions attaching
to the married life. Romanticism about choosing the 'right man' can be
seen as a way of attributing personal responsibility for structural
oppression, but the fact of structural oppression is realistically
understood. Nevertheless, despite the unattractiveness of marriage the
question is, as a girl from Diana Leonard's study (1980) in Cardiff put
it, not of choosing to get married or not but whether you fail to get
married. My argument has been that what forces this closure on all
alternatives to married life is above all the power of the 'slag'
categorisation for the unattached woman who is sexually active. Once we
understand the way in which female sexuality is constructed and
constrained by the categorisation of slag, how a woman's femininity and
sexuality is only rendered 'safe' when confined to the bonds of
marriage, we understand why until recently there is just no alternative,
as the girls see it, to married life.
Race, class and subculture
As I have noted, most studies of male youth culture have been
conducted from a subcultural standpoint in which youth culture is seen
as resistance to, and temporary escape from, the pressures and demands
of society. Yet the experiences of the girls portrayed here can hardly
be seen as resistance or escape. On the contrary, the processes which
have been illustrated are very far from resistance; they are the
processes of constraint and the channelling of aspirations and behaviour
along the well-established paths of sex and gender relations exemplified
by the institution of marriage and the role of women in the domestic
sphere. To see the rehearsal for entry into a major social institution
such as marriage and the domestic sphere as a form of 'subculture' or
resistance is, in effect, to deny the reality of the domestic sphere as
a social institution akin, say, to economic life and social class
relations and to see it purely as a cultural phenomenon. In this way the
questions of subculture and the debate over sex and class relations are
crucially linked. If the main structural forces or forms of
stratification in our society are seen as economic class structures
then, of course, rehearsal for domestic life, when seen from the
stand-point of those structures, will be seen as a form of cultural
behaviour unrelated to class, or possibly as a form of resistance to the
consequences of class- determined life chances - in the way in which,
for example, Paul Willis (1977) describes the process whereby
working-class boys reconcile themselves to working class jobs. But if
gender divisions are seen to be of equal significance to economic class
in the constitution of social structure and social institutions then it
is less easy to view girls' behaviour as 'subcultural'. It is important
to analyse the constraints that the structuring of gender relations and
the double standard of sexual morality places on girls.
The importance of reputation varies between different religious and
ethnic groups. Amrit Wilson, who undertook the first British study of
Asian girls in the late 1970's, described how in conversations she had
with girls from many language groups and religions, in every part of
Britain, 'reputation came up all the time' and was the 'bane of their
lives from adolescence to the early years of marriage. It controls
everything they do and adds a very tangible danger to any unconventional
action' (Wilson 1978:102). Girls as young as 12 are frightened to go out
with boys least it affects their reputation. Sofia, a Muslim girl of 19,
described how if you go out with a man in Southall:
He will go around and boast to his friends that he's been out with
this girl and he's done this to her and that to her. Even if he
hasn't, he'll boast about it. Then they get the girl's name bad.
That's why girls try and keep it quiet when they're going out with a
bloke, because they don't want anyone to know. It's quite different
for boys. They can get away with it. Their names can't ever get
spoilt.
Reputation is a conservative force controlling everything in Asian
communities, as male pride or izzat depends on it. A young woman's
family can be disgraced by imputations on her reputation. Issues of
identity, nationality, race, and religion (exacerbated by the rise of
fundamentalism) intersect on Asian women's rights to self determination.
Some young women are very unhappy about this control and are resisting.
As Roy (in Griffin 1995: 107) describes: 'Asian girls constitute a
battle-field that traditional male controlled community groups see as
theirs to own'.
In this way religious customs operate in such a way to control female
sexuality, in so far as most relations lay down moral codes relating to
virginity and sexual behaviour.
The processes by which girls are labelled slags, becomes one
component of the way in which racial stereotypes are constructed and
perpetuated. The category of slag and slut is part of the raw material
out of which racist views are elaborated. There are two reasons for
this. First, racist and sexist stereotypes operate in ways which,
although not identical, are in some respects similar. I have already
argued that there is a vacuousness and ambiguity about the term slag
which detaches it from any particular characteristics of a young woman's
behaviour and thereby enables it to function as a general mechanism of
control of her sexuality. Racial stereotypes operate, as Allport
explained, in a way which has some analogies:
There is a common mental device that permits people to hold pre
judgements even in the face of much contradictory evidence. It is the
device of admitting exceptions ' There are nice Negroes but.' or 'some
of my best friends are Jews, but...' This is a disarming device: by
excluding a few favoured cases, the negative rubric is kept intact for
all other cases. In short contrary evidence is not admitted and
allowed to modify the generalisations; rather it is perfunctorily
acknowledged but excluded (Allport 1954:23).
Sexual like racial categorization are forms of labelling which are
difficult to pin down to any hard specific content which could be shown
to be untrue and lead to a withdrawal of the label. For slag this
because of the ambiguous way in which it is used, and in the case of
race by refusing to allow any exceptions to modify the basic racist
stereotypes ( Allport calls this 're-fencing'). it is thus easy to see
how slag can come to fulfil the requirements of racism. Racial
stereotypes of blacks by whites and whites by blacks occurs among the
girls at the same time being used by both girls and boys in a way which
ends up constraining the freedom of girls irrespective of racial group.
Morality and sexual behaviour: slags
My research into the language of sexual reputation amongst young
women revealed three things. First, that names like 'slag' function as
terms of abuse, to control single girls and steer them towards marriage
as the only legitimate expression of sexuality. Second, what became
clear was the interdependence of male 'non- gendered subjectivity' and
female sexuality. This manifested itself in the way girls continually
take on responsibility for male actions - especially violence or other
behaviour that is irrational or sexually motivated. Girls also bear the
moral responsibility for the consequences of sexual relations by taking
steps to ensure contraception.
Third, the repression of sexuality to the conventional pattern of
marriage means that female sexuality has little autonomous expression
but is constrained by social station and its duties. The woman becomes
the housewife and her virtue comes to consist of the correct performance
of the 'duties' of the marital relationship, being a 'good wife', in
which sexual expression is allowed only to the extent of meeting her
husband's 'legitimate' sexual needs. When women are charged with petty
criminal offences social workers and law enforcement agencies have been
shown to give weight to sexual reputation and the performance of
domestic duties in sentencing. There is also some evidence that girls
are sent to institutions on grounds of sexual conduct rather than the
nature of the offence. For men sexual reputation is, in the main,
separated from the evaluation of moral behaviour and regarded as private
and incidental.
If in the private sphere it is woman's duty to keep quiet and be a
good wife, in the public sphere her inability to achieve non- gendered
subjectivity closely follows from her having to take on the
responsibility for male sexuality. Because the male 'rational man' is
only possible where his sexual and irrational behaviour can be
attributed to 'woman trouble' or other feminine influence it is
obviously impossible, under present circumstances, for men and women to
co-exist as non-gendered subjects. Women's escape from sexual
stereotyping in the public sphere would require men to take on
responsibility for, and integrate their sexuality into their public
behaviour.
For women, this situation limits the possible forms of behaviour in
the public world. One can of course 'latch on to' a man and go places
but, conversely, a woman who does achieve in terms of skills and
capacities other than 'sex' stands in danger of either having her
achievements attributed to her sex (that she 'slept her way to the top')
or being regarded as sexless (one of the boys and therefore
undesirable). To be an honorary man is to be so masculine and
'unattractive' that men and other women will come to dissociate her
completely from any concept of sexuality. Thus a type of false non-
gendered subjectivity is achieved but only as a residue: a woman is
evaluated in terms of her achievements only because no men find her
sexually interesting.
For men, on the other hand, virtue is achieved irrespective of
sexuality: in public life sexual reputation is largely excluded from the
moral evaluation of conduct. In private life too men's sexual conduct
does not define moral standing. A man can still be a 'good father' or a
'good husband' and have illicit sexual relationships outside marriage.
Conclusion
Michel Foucault argues that identities have to be created by modern
discursive practices and that power is produced in social relations.
Rather than seeing power as possessions of a particular group, Foucault
envisages a network of power relations 'as forming a dense web that
passes through apparatuses and institutions' (Foucault 1990:96). In this
chapter, I have shown how the policing of a woman's reputation takes
place through language and are intrinsically connected to the
development of identity. Foucault's ideas that prevailing forms of
selfhood and subjectivity are maintained not through physical restraint
but through the individual's self surveillance and self correction to
norms is directly relevant to the way that women police their own and
each other's behaviour. Such exercise of power therefore operates
without any external surveillance or coercion.
Girls do of course resist, some more successfully than others.
Foucault (1990:96). envisages points of resistance:
producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing
unities and effecting regroupings furrowing across individuals
themselves, cutting them up and remoulding them, marking off
irreducible regions in them in their bodies and minds.
Postscript 1996
Stunned broad, dog, bag, and bitch are words that apply to girls as
well as worse words. I don't hold these words against them. I don't
think any of these words apply to me. .... The trick with these silent
words is to walk in the spaces between them, turn your head sideways,
evade. Like walking through walls (Atwood 1988: 244-245).
This research was undertaken over ten years ago during which
significant changes have taken place. In this postscript I shall briefly
discuss some ways in which insults can be subverted and overview the
changes in girls approach to marriage. There is some evidence that young
women are not only more aware of the atmosphere of verbal abuse and
misogyny but are beginning to resist the insults. One strategy Margaret
Atwood aptly depicts in the above quote is ' walking in the spaces
between the words, rather like walking the gauntlet'. Even avoidance
carries the risk of being labelled too tight or a lesbian.
The most successful forms of resistance appears to involve verbally
subverting or challenging the terms of the abuse or collectively
resisting the insults. Occasionally girls did take action against the
boys as in the following account:
The boys love coming into the girls' changing rooms. This boy right,
we made a decision next time he comes in, grab hold of him and start
taking his clothes off and see how he feels. All the girls were watching
him. He never came back.
One difficulty facing girls who resist is that there is no vocabulary
of abuse to level at boys. The label 'stud' is a compliment and words
such as 'poof' imply femininity. Criticising the sexism of boys in no
way enhances femininity. Quite the contrary. Girls who contest the
unfair subordination of girls are likely to be regarded as show offs,
kill joys or lesbians, which is why so few young women find it easy to
declare themselves feminists.
Radical feminists particularly have argued that language is man made
(Daly 1979. Spender 1980) and have attempted to develop a 'feminist'
language or way of 'subverting discourse'. By adopting the word 'slag'
as subject rather than as object, it is possible to subvert the misogyny
embedded in the term. Mae West and Madonna are stars who successfully
subvert the term by applying it to themselves. Madonna is an example of
a woman who enjoys her sexuality and avoids being portrayed as a sex
object. 'I'm not ashamed,' she asserts. In an interview she told how her
grandmother used to beg her not to go with men, to be a good girl. She
plays on the madonna/whore dichotomy and declares that being sexual,
being a 'whore' is fine. In videos she often plays two roles one
questioning the other as if debating the two views of female sexuality:
the moral 'virgin' versus the voluptuous 'slag'. She sings voluptuously
dressed like a prostitute, Making a mockery of her grandmothers and the
churches view that women are either virgins or whores. In an interview
she explains 'If you can create yourself, you can recreate yourself' ...
Madonna's video company is named 'Slutco'. She is a triumphant slut who
challenges the derogatory meaning of the word and turns it into a symbol
of female freedom. Nor is she unaware of the power involved in resisting
male dominance 'It's a great thing to be powerful. I've been striving
for it all my life', she asserts.
Madonna sees change is important because it means you have grown. By
wearing a suit and monocle, she ironically subverts the constraints of
being constructed as male or female. She dresses like a prostitute. She
is successful at gently exploding myths. Take her contribution to the
condom campaign:
You never really get to know a guy until
You ask him to wear a RUBBER
Hi you, don't be silly, put a rubber on your willy
(My Blond Ambition).
The use of the word 'willy' cuts the embarrassment and male obsession
down to size. There is a certain contradiction in the way Madonna
presents herself both as a porn star and as a sexually liberated woman.
Mae West too rose above the term and took on a dominant active role in
her sexual relationships. Such subversion requires confidence and for an
ordinary girl to declare herself a slag carries considerable risks.
Donna Eder (1995) in a study of adolescents in MID West America shows
how talk (and teasing in particular) is used as a collective process as
a way to transform gender relations and can be seen as a form of
resistance to traditional female roles. Such mocking comments were
directed at a boy as 'Come over here I'll run your family life'. She
illustrates how girls mock many aspects of traditional female behaviour.
Teasing often takes the form of goading girls about being sexy or can
have a romantic aspect. Girls who are sexy are teased for having a
'dirty mind'. It seems to be OK to be sexual but not too sexual.
Another strategy girls adopt is to 'de-sex' the interchange. On one
occasion, described by Donna Eder, the boys were doing pelvic thrusts to
get their attention and in their imitation of them described the
behaviour as inept attempts at skiing. It seems the most effective way
is to combine humour with an insult about ineptness or stupidity.
Another strategy is for girls to mock boys possessiveness. Eder quotes
an example of this where two girls pretended to fight over a boy.
Through satire, they transformed the concept of ownership to one in
which boys are the property of girls instead of vice versa. By
pretending to fight physically over him they mocked the stereotypical
notion that girls are always competing for boys (See Eder :142).
On the other hand, Beverley Skeggs (1991), illustrates how
'sexualising' verbal interchange can also be effective. Referring to a
study of young women and men in England, she describes how students felt
able to make regular confrontational stands which sexualised classroom
interaction in order to embarrass and humiliate male teachers by goading
them about assumed size of their penises. She quotes this example:
Mandy: Bloody hell, what the heck could you do with that, not much.
Therese: Can't believe he's got kids with one that size you'd think
he'd never be able to get it up.
These comments challenge the prerogatives of masculine power even if
momentarily. Girls refuse to take masculinity seriously. They understand
its vulnerabilities, size, performance and potency. These young women
are able to use their knowledge of masculinity to subvert the regulatory
mechanisms (Skeggs 1991:134).
Some girls in my study were well aware of male power and the
limitations of resistance. Lily, for example, described the way boys
behaved as though they owned you by buying you drinks: 'Some boys think
they're flash because they've got a bit of money and think they can buy
you. l said to one boy 'Ditch your money' and he wouldn't let me so l
thought 'He thinks he can just do what he wants'.
Other girls assimilate to the boys behaviour, by, trying to be 'one
of the lads' assimilating characteristics of 'maleness' such as bragging
about sexual exploits. Tania told me:
She just turned round and said 'Yeah we went to his house and he
put it in me and we had it off. My mate was sitting in the next room
and she didn't even know. Then we thought his mum was back but when we
found out she wasn't we went to the bathroom and we did it again.
Other girls boasted about being on the pill:
This group I know, certain groups of about seven girls are on the
pill and they really love talking about it. Not sex but that they're
on the pill. They say 'I sort of went out with him and got off with
him'. They just do it to impress.
Some boys resented tomboys for subverting 'natural' differences.
Gender dichotomies require collective activity to maintain them and
although individuals can deviate their deviance will give rise to
disapproval. An example of this was one boy's mixed feelings about
Jasmin's tomboyish behaviour which he found threatening: 'The girls with
the big mouths. They keep running me down. Jasmin. She copies all the
words I use. In D & T (Design and Technology) she always talks to
me. She's got the same type of interests. She likes the same type of
music'. He is aware that Jasmin shares his interests and faces a
contradiction in her refusal to adopt the submissive feminine role, and
to criticise him. Such contradictions illustrate the complexity of
identity formulation and how feminine and masculine identities are
constantly evaluated.
Tomboys appear to be more confident than other girls. They do not see
themselves as different from boys. Tania, a black girl, describes how
she goes nicking with twenty or so boys aged between fifteen and twenty
five years of age. Chloe explained the meaning of 'butch': You're quite
boyish, thinking about mostly boy things, you know, say you don't want a
husband - think they're no good. You get a motorbike 'cos most girls
have mopeds'.
Subverting racist language can also be seen as an effective form of
resistance whereby the oppressed are enabled to break their silence and
speak out. Three examples spring to men. Grace Evans (1980), a black
teacher in a London school, described how West Indian pupils used patios
as a means of subverting the school curriculum in response to the racism
of teachers who disparagingly referred to them as those 'loud black
girls'. In another study group, Asian girls resisted teachers'
stereotypes that Asian pupils had language difficulties by insisting on
speaking Urdu in class (Brah and Minhas 1985). Finally , in Mirza's
study of African Caribbean girls in the late 1980s, black girls rejected
and challenged teachers' low expectations of them (Mirza 1992|).
Girls adopt different strategies to deal with insults. Some of these
are more successful than others and some (like feminism) carry the risk
of ostracism. But all girls spend inordinate amount of energy finding a
way to cope with or survive the objectification and subordination that
entraps them. Yet increasingly girls are contesting the sexist
discourses and questioning the sexism that a few years ago were so taken
for granted.
As Howe (1994) explains there are real penalties for breaches of the
language of sexual reputation where the use of language becomes a pain
in itself. Judy, for example, had stopped going to discos in London
because all the girls were bitchy, shouting abuse at her making her life
a misery. She described what upset her:
The main thing that comes to mind is 'Look at that slag' or
something like that... I don't think most of them know the meaning of
the word really 'cos calling someone a slag you've got to really have
proof haven't you? I don't think it's very nice but it does upset you,
it starts me thinking that why are they saying it to me. I don't go
after boys all the time but I like to enjoy myself'.
What is most significant about the stigma attached to sexual
reputation is that young women police each other. Bitching typically
involves calling other girls names and often casting doubt on their
reputation. As one young woman said 'What people say when they bitch.
They say they think some girl's a slag or something like that. If
rumours spread about you it can be unnerving'. Another young woman
commented
If it undermines my own confidence to such an extent that I start
feeling uncomfortable then yes it bothers me. And if it isn't true, if
it's false, it also annoys me if no-one had a nice word to say about
you, it's going to upset you. I must say I get quite paranoid. Such
policing has material effects in constricting young women's social
life. The slag categorization and constraint on a young woman's sexual
expression act as a very effective way of restricting both the
expression of her sexuality and her freedom of action - her
independence.
Change in the Status of Marriage
Resisting marriage by delaying or even rejecting a long term
commitment, appears to be on the increase, which indicates that not all
women are being policed into marriage (See Howe1994: 183). More couples
now cohabit rather than marry, at least prior to marriage. The number of
women who have cohabited with their future husband before marriage has
risen tenfold in a generation from about 5 per cent in the mid 1960s to
over 50 per cent today. More children are born out of wedlock than ever.
Births outside marriage rose from 54,000 in 1961 to 236,000 in 1991, and
births within marriage fell from 890,000 in 1961 to 556,000 in 1991.
Divorce has also increased six fold over the past thirty years, a higher
increase than in any other European country. Almost half of marriages
now end in divorce, and seventy per cent of divorce petitions are taken
out by women.
Other changes in young women's lives have occurred that have widened
their choices. There has been a dramatic increase in university
education and for the first time in 1993 more young women entered
university than young men. Access to jobs, albeit low status and low
paid, has opened up for women. During the period 1952 - 92 the
proportion of women at work increased from 31 per cent to 45 per cent of
the labour force. At the same time male unemployment, in particular of
young men, has increased. While the trend to increased female employment
runs in the opposite direction to increased male unemployment, they are,
of course, both reflections of a single process of economic change. The
old structure of the family established during the nineteenth century,
in which the men worked for a family wage while women managed the family
is rapidly being undermined. Marriage is no longer a necessity for women
and it appears that women are realistically weighing up the pros and
cons of the marriage deal.
Research into the attitudes of young men and women to marriage and
family life reflect this realism. Sue Sharpe in her 1994 updated version
of her book Just like a Girl first published in 1976, returned to the
schools where she had interviewed fifteen year old girls then and
compared them with girls to-day. The most remarkable change she found
related to the girls changed views of marriage which had dramatically
dropped in popularity. Over three quarters of the girls she interviewed
had said yes to marriage in 1972. By 1991 this had dropped to under half
. Most girls did not want to get married but saw it as something to be
approached with extreme caution.
In unpublished research with Mike O'Donnell, she explored the
attitudes, ideas and expectations of marriage and family life of 15 to
16 year old boys. Boys' attitudes had changed far less. In contrast to
the girls, three quarters of the boys uncritically assumed that marriage
would be part of their future life. Boys saw marriage as an important
way of committing themselves to another person. As Jim said,
For myself I think marriage is pretty important and the father and
mother have to be there for the child. I'd live with them and then I'd
feel as you get older that marriage is the official statement of your
love like, so I'd get married eventually.
|