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girls—use sex as a means of self-harm. When we tell girls sex and sexual feelings are bad, when we tell them they are bad when they act sexually, they will believe us, and they will use it as a way to punish themselves on their own. If we make sex subversive, then we shouldn’t be surprised when girls use sex—something that should be, that is , perfectly natural—as though it were fraught with as many dangers as alcohol. And we shouldn’t be surprised when they wind up furious and hurt by the way our culture betrays girls in this way again and again.
    THE SLUT
    When Julia was twelve, her parents divorced and her mother moved them to a small town in another state so that her father would have no access to them. In her old school, Julia had a group of friends. But Julia didn’t know anyone at the new school, where the kids had been classmates since preschool. During the days, she walked through the halls, clutching her books to her chest, her head down. She had never thought before about her weight—she was just a little heavy—because she and her old friends hadn’t concerned themselves with that. But here, girls called her “fat.” Once, while she was at her locker, a boy from one of the older grades stuck his hand out and touched her breast through her shirt. Just like that. She stopped what she was doing, paralyzed. She couldn’t breathe, the heat from the place he touched spreading across her chest and into her neck and face.
    At thirteen, she found a friend: Audrey. And Audrey didn’t care what the other girls thought. She was a year older. They met after school and smoked cigarettes in Audrey’s living room. Audrey’s parents didn’t care. Audrey introduced Julia to beer, too, and sexy clothes, and she introduced her to boys. They went to the movies and came on to the older local boys, boys already out of high school, boys who were eager to take Julia’s large breasts and ass into their hands. She was eager, too. Eager for their attention, for what felt like caring, maybe even like love. Later, when they left, often not even taking her phone number, she felt like garbage, like the nothing she believed she really was. But she went back again and again, chasing that feeling.
    It didn’t take long for Julia to be labeled the school “slut.” Every school has one. The slut is so well known that she’s become an archetype—a product of a Jungian collective unconscious—as Emily White noted in her book Fast Girls. 3 The slut is always the same: desperate, dirty, curvy, asking for it. She is all desire, all sex. She is as bad as a girl can get.
    The narrative of the slut has been repeated so often that I almost don’t have to note it here. She has sex with lots of boys. She teases lots of boys. She wears sexy clothes. She will do anything boys want her to do. She gives blow jobs, hand jobs, rim jobs. She usually has big breasts. And everyone knows she is a slut. In fact, they are the ones who named her. White noted that when she interviewed girls, this slut myth, the belief in the slut as a real thing, was so powerful, so all-encompassing, that it overwhelmed any of the women’s stories. 4 I had the same experience with the girls I interviewed. They called themselves sluts, “blowjob queens.” They joked about being amazing in bed, how they perfected their techniques.
    They joke, but the truth beneath the myth is that these girls hurt. Virgin, slut, or (as we’ll soon see) empowered, all are limited by the outlines of their role, but none is as harmed by her title as the slut, for society heavily and thoroughly ostracizes the slut. Put any celebrity slut’s name into a Google search—Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton—and see the parents who rally against them and the endless blog writers who are disgusted by their behavior. Girls in middle and high schools exclude one another from their cliques with that label, reminding one another what is acceptable behavior or not. Parents don’t