Read Dirty Little Secrets for Free Online Page B

allow their daughters to dress in slutty clothing, fearing that doing so means that their daughters are indeed sluts. Even in horror movies—all the classics, such as Friday the 13th , Halloween , and A Nightmare on Elm Street —the promiscuous girls are always the first to die.
    Milburn High School in New Jersey made headlines in 2009 when thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls were put on a “slut list.” Every year a group of senior girls created a slut list of incoming freshman girls, including degrading comments, such as, “I’m so desperate and hairy that I’ll give you drugs for free if you get with me.” More shocking to me was that this story made news. Ask your daughters: some equivalent humiliation of girls, because of their sexuality, takes place at plenty of schools throughout the nation. One of the girls who cowrote the list at Milburn High even said, “Really it’s all fun.” 5
    One of the more contemporary examples of highlighting the school slut is “sexting,” sending dirty electronic messages and/or revealing photos or videos through phones. Thirty percent of all teens have reported sending naked pictures of some sort through their phones, and 17 percent of recipients admitted to passing that photo along to others. 6 Most any girl you talk with will tell you that she regrets sexting for that reason—she never meant for the message to get around (see chapter 8 for more on sexting).
    Fourteen-year-old Fiona thought that she and Brian were girlfriend and boyfriend, or at least that he was her friend. They had been having sex. It wasn’t either of their first times. She decided one night to send him a picture of her naked torso. She wasn’t dumb. She had heard about what could happen to photos like that. But she honestly trusted Brian. At least that is what she said, crying, to her best friend, after the photo made its way through the school. In just one day, most everyone had seen the picture, and Brian acted like he didn’t even know her. She had never regretted anything more. Over the next few months, much of the school ostracized Fiona, calling her a slut. Boys approached her to ask for sexual favors, and when she tried to ignore them, they high-fived one another. That was a few years ago. Things have since settled down, but Fiona doesn’t think she’ll ever feel safe around these classmates again. Fiona asked me outright, “Why are so many kids so cruel when it comes to this stuff?”
    Amanda, who is now in her twenties, has a slightly different story. She didn’t do anything back in high school, she feels, to earn the label of “slut.” She just had a lot of energy and verve, which she thinks, looking back, got misinterpreted for sexual energy. Unlike many girls she knew, she didn’t get quiet and submissive when she hit puberty. Her mother worked hard to keep that from happening. Her mother spoke loudly about what she thought. She gave Amanda books to read about puberty. She took her to festivals that celebrated girls and their power in the world. At the same time, though, Amanda’s mother didn’t have great boundaries when it came to this sort of education. She had sex with her boyfriends with the bedroom door open when Amanda was home. She had parties—where everyone shared their art and poetry and music—that sometimes turned into orgies. And, again, Amanda was home.
    As a teenager, confused and aroused by all this activity around her, Amanda imitated her mother. She dressed like her mother did with low-cut tops and long, flowing skirts. She took off her shoes in class so she could be barefoot. She wore no makeup and let her hair dread. When she spoke, she did so loudly and with passion, just like her mother. And she did things that were shocking to her classmates, such as pulling a breast out of her shirt and shaking it at a boy or dancing provocatively on the school green. Her classmates didn’t understand her at all, and because there was some expression of sexuality in