Imagine if after deciding to eat a healthier diet, your peers picked on you extensively, calling you vicious names for eating certain foods you find empowering. Or if after nearly dying from ingesting intentionally-poisoned food, everyone around you snickered and posted photos of you vomiting all over social media. Now imagine all of this happening during your youth, when your sense of self is markedly vulnerable. Seems pretty cruel and ridiculous, doesn’t it?
“Slut shaming,” which is really woman- or victim- shaming, makes just as little sense. Countless girls and women are shunned for expressing their sexuality (which is as natural as digestion), for being brutalized by sexual predators or simply for being female. Most cases remain largely hidden, due to the victims’ understandable pain, embarrassment and fear of worse bullying. When we learn about such cruelty through the media, it’s typically due to a tragic outcome.
Emily Lindin, my guest on Girl Boner Radio last week, is out to change all of that. Devastated by the suicides of young women who’d been bullied after falling victim to sexual assault, Emily published her diary from adolescence, which details her own experience being slut-shamed, online. The UnSlut Project has since become a place for people of all genders and walks of life to share similar experiences and gain support. She’s also producing Slut: A Documentary Film, and speaks publicly about slut-shaming and its consequences throughout print media, social media, live events and on TV. I know; how awesome is she?
Tune in to our chat using the following link. You’re going to love what this awesome woman has to say!
Girl Boner Radio: The UnSlut Project: Putting An End to Sexual Bullying – An Interview with Emily Lindin
To learn more about Emily Lindin and The UnSlut Project, visit www.unslutproject.com and follow her on Twitter (@unslutproject) and Facebook.
What do you think of The UnSlut Project? What did you enjoy most about our interview? Have you or a loved one been slut-shamed? I always love hearing from you! ♥
What’s always astounded me during my time on this big rock August, is how men who go around and shag every woman they can, then deride them. Or the same men who then demand a virgin bride. Then there are the women who secretly want to be sexually liberated and deride those women who are. What it all comes down to is this, women have always been seen as property. In many cultures their virginity has a price on it, crazy. What’s even worse are the men who during their teens and early twenties are into everything, then when they marry and have children they want to shoot any boy who comes near their girl. You know I honestly don’t think anything is going to really change in this life. Sure we might get through to a few people but beliefs are so ingrained that it would be nothing short of a miracle for things to change for the better.
Cheers
Laurie.
Sexual assault… I had a friend… she was raped and it destroyed her. She committed suicide four years later.
It is terrible how some men seem to think they can take whatever they want…
Some others try to get you into bed and if you deny and tell them you don’t want to, they all of a sudden start bullying you…. it can be a nightmare.
Of course they’re others too… but isn’t it like everywhere? Usually it’s the bad parts that stay in mind…
Hey will you make an update when that documentary is out? I’d really like to see that.
It’s terrible how the “female libido”, as Simone De Beaviour calls it, is so misunderstood and repressed. Some even find it scary.
“A good key is one that opens many locks, but a lock that’s opened by many keys is not a good lock.” I hate this analogy but many think it’s a good one. Is it really fair to reduce men and women to the functions of keys and locks? Is virtue the thing women hide? Is virtue the thing men want and thus have to “open” the door to?
The problem, as detailed in “the other sex”, is that woman is largely described as a complementary being to man. She completes parts of him, but man can exist without woman whereas woman makes no sense on her own.
This is a strange thought but indeed one many, albeit unconsciously, entertains.
It’s a terrible thing to reduce half the population to the other half’s emotional accessory
–
I heard some terrible stories the other night about girls who sent sexual videos to guys who then shared the video. One girl masturbated with carrots, another just played with herself, another stripped.
Common for these stories was that when the videos got out these girls were bullied to the point of them having to move away. “The carrot girl” moved to the other end of the country, changed hair and name etc. but was still recognized and had to move out of the country.
That’s terrible! Ruining these girl’s lives over some stupid videos. If guys had sent a video around with them masturbating people would merely have said “eew, weirdo!” and left it at that.