Slut-Shaming and Rape Culture on Social Media

A woman is crossing her arms in embarrassment.

Who is free to be sexual?

The point-blank question slut-shaming poses is who is free to be sexual? As in openly or discreetly. Loudly or quietly. Sexual in whichever way feels just right without being made to feel shameful, of being shamed, if you will. Just like that scene in Game of Thrones when Cersei is quite literally made to take the walk of shame while gathered onlookers shout obscenities and throw slimy trash at her. There’s even a neat “shame bell,” that became memeified because it all seemed so over-the-top and ridiculous. But when we think about slut-shaming on social media, the comment section alone on a lot of girls and women’s posts aren’t actually that different from Cersei's shame-walk.



Bring slut-shaming to social media and it’s not suddenly a new phenomenon that women have to contend with as much as it is a commentary on modern sexism. After all, it’s the same ole’ same ole’ on a modern platform in an otherwise evolving world. What’s up with that? Let’s take a look.



What is slut-shaming you ask?


Wikipedia’s definition is pretty good: Slut-shaming is the practice of criticizing people, especially women and girls, who are perceived to violate expectations of behavior and appearance regarding issues related to sexuality. It goes on to say that the term can be used to reclaim the word slut and empower women and girls to have agency over their own sexuality. Slut-shaming rarely happens to heterosexual men.



Award-winning writer and activist Soraya Chemaly’s definition from back in 2011, before the term had come into popular usage: “It’s embarrassing, insulting or otherwise denigrating a girl or woman for her real or extrapolated sexual behavior, including for dressing in a sexual way, having sexual feelings and/or exploring and exhibiting them.”



The words “perceived,” and “extrapolated,” cue us to the insidiousness of slut-shaming. It’s not always clanging a bell, a pointing finger, or voices shouting “shame!” Sometimes, we’re not even aware we’re participating because slut-shaming is a feature, not a glitch, of a greater rape culture called patriarchy. You can’t really discuss one without addressing the other.



Rape Culture 101


According to the Women’s and Gender Center at Marshall University, Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety. Rape Culture affects every woman.  The rape of one woman is a degradation, terror, and limitation to all women. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape.  This cycle of fear is the legacy of Rape Culture. 



Common examples of rape culture include victim-blaming, trivializing sexual assault, tolerance of sexual harassment, publicly scrutinizing a victim’s dress, mental state, motives, and history, gratuitous gendered violence in media, defining manhood as dominant and sexually aggressive, and the ever-timeless — teaching women to avoid getting raped instead of teaching men not to rape because - drumroll please - boys will be boys.



How Misogyny, Slut-shaming & Rape Culture online can show up IRL: The alarming case of Elliot Rodger


In 2014, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen others—by gunshot, stabbing and vehicle ramming—near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara before killing himself. He drove to a sorority house and after failing to get inside, shot three women outside, two of whom died. Before driving to the sorority house, Rodger uploaded a video to YouTube titled “Elliot Rodger's Retribution,” in which he explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him. He also emailed a lengthy autobiographical manuscript to friends, his therapist and family members; the document appeared on the internet and became widely known as his “manifesto.” In it, he described his childhood, family conflicts, frustration over his inability to find a girlfriend, his hatred of women, his contempt for couples, and his plans for “retribution.”



Rodger described himself online as an incela member of an online subculture based around its members' perceived inability to find a romantic or sexual partner. He frequented online forums such as PUAHate and ForeverAlone, where he and other men posted misogynistic statements. He also described his plan to invade a sorority house, writing, "I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blond slut I see inside there. All those girls I've desired so much. They have all rejected me and looked down on me as an inferior man.”



Disturbingly, Rodger has become a hero within the incel community. He is sometimes referred to as their “saint,” and memes in which his face has been superimposed onto paintings of Christian icons have been popularized. Some incels consider him to be the true progenitor of today's online incel communities. It is common to see references to “E.R.” in incel forums and mass violence by incels is regularly referred to as “going E.R.” Rodger has been referenced by the perpetrators or suspected perpetrators of several other mass killings including Alek Minassian, who killed ten people and injured sixteen in Toronto, Canada, motivated by revenge for perceived sexual and social rejection by women. At the time of his arrest, Minassian described himself as an incel to the police and in prior social media postings, and described the attack as the continuation of an "incel rebellion", started by the late Elliot Rodger.



Several news networks limited the use of the "Retribution" video posted by Rodger for fear of triggering copycat crimes.



Following the attacks, some on Twitter used the #NotAllMen hashtag to voice that not all men are misogynistic and not all men commit murder. Criticized for derailing the discussion away from violence against women, the hashtag #YesAllWomen was created in response to underscore that all women experience misogyny and sexism



Rage against Women: Incels and other misogyny online


While incels aren’t the bulk of the online world, or even the bulk of the male world, groups like this, too, have inevitably found community online, making the digital world another place where women must deal with misogyny and sexism. The language Rodger and others like him used to denigrate women online and the language overall used on “men's rights activists” forums is an extreme version of language that you see everywhere on the Web. The underlying ideology seems to be that men are owed sex and respect and love by women because that is their right as men. They shockingly feel entitled to it. And if they don't get it, they're also entitled to rape, beat and even to kill, as was the ultimate end of Elliot Rodger's unhinged manifesto.



Moreover, this kind of vitriol is sadly not just found on sites which are dedicated to hating and slut-shaming women — it's online video games; all over social media platforms, and it shows no sign of slowing down thanks to the lack of protections or controls in place to make these spaces safer. But, at the very least, there are people watching and taking note, hoping that it will affect change. One such group, known as UltraViolet, even issued a misogyny report card.



Social Media Report Card!


Developed by feminist group Ultraviolet, in collaboration with researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue think tank, the “misogyny report card” gave platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok subpar-to-failing grades for not taking greater steps to shore up their policies against harmful treatment of women. That’s especially the case for women of color, Ultraviolet wrote, who “face an onslaught of both racist and misogynist attacks, including vicious gendered disinformation campaigns. 



“Across the board, social media platforms fail the test when it comes to creating an internet experience that is safe and inclusive for Black women, women of color, and LGBTQ people,” Ultraviolent wrote in its findings, released Wednesday, which dozens of advocacy groups are rallying around to call for policy changes. The report card, which assigned sites letter grades from A to F based on how thoroughly they have implemented recommendations that groups say are needed to curb gendered abuse, gave top overall marks to Reddit with a C and Twitter with a C-minus. Take a look at the entire report card here.



Women working online


Aside from being a fun, social activity, or a mindless pastime, or where you make revenue as a content creator, existing online in some form or fashion these days is becoming less and less optional. Even if you don’t have Instagram, don’t belong to any Facebook groups, don’t frequent Reddit forums, or scroll Tiktok, you might still have a LinkedIn profile to network with other professionals in your field. But even on this so-called professional platform with over 700 million members, sexism and harassment continue to be a problem. Notwithstanding, like a lot of its peers, LinkedIn doesn’t seem to have the necessary protocols in place to take adequate action against this type of behavior. The platform, like so many others, relies on self-policing, blocking, and reporting. This means the responsibility is transferred to the women, in much the same way as we are told not to jog on our own or walk-in certain areas late at night.



It doesn’t just stop there. Beyond actual harassment, how women show up on the platform in order to feel safe is also an issue. According to LinkedIn’s own stats, if you have a 100% complete profile, you are 40 times more likely to be approached for speaking gigs, panel invitations, etc., and therefore completing your profile is helpful for career advancement. However, many women are reluctant to do this for personal security reasons.



Women existing online 


When women and girls show up online, they’re met with harassment, they’re sexualized, and when anonymous commenters want to silence them, they often resort to slut-shaming language or threats of rape or murder. In 2014, an online male mob threatened to rape or kill several female game developers in a months-long campaign known as Gamergate. Musician Lauren Mayberry went on record to delineate the way she is targeted simply for being a woman in the music industry. Blogger Jill Filipovic told the Guardian “The people who were posting comments about me were speculating as to how many abortions I’ve had, and they talked about ‘hate-fucking’ me,” after photos of her were uploaded to a vitriolic online forum. We’ve all seen the comment section of women we follow- which ranges from vile to absolutely terrifying. When Lauren Mayberry screen grabbed and blogged about the harassment she endures online, one response was “This isn't rape culture. You'll know rape culture when I'm raping you, bitch.”



To exist online, just like in the real world, requires a freedom to be that women and girls simply aren’t afforded - at least not to the extent of our male counterparts. And just like the real world, it’s another place where rape culture responds to harassment with the predictable classics: why did you post that, why did you share that, why weren’t YOU more careful.



Who is free to be online?


In her foreword to Plan International’s (a humanitarian org dedicated to advancing equality for girls) report titled “Free to be online?” the executive director of the South Sudan gender equity agency Resilience Organization, Kevin Abalo, said there was only so much an individual could do.  “We must all campaign for change, forcing governments and technology companies to put protection in place,” she wrote. “Girls and young women are sick of being harassed and in some cases driven away from all the opportunities that, in a better world, the internet provides. This is a human rights issue.”



Caitlin McGrane, the leader of the enhancing online safety for women project at Gender Equity Victoria, said the research was important, bringing a much-needed focus on the extent and impact of online harassment on young women around the world. “Online is particularly violent for young people from marginalized backgrounds or identities,” McGrane said. “Online platforms like Facebook and Instagram need to be listening to young women experiencing harassment and taking more action when it is reported. These actions need to include taking down posts, comments and messages that are harassing and removing offenders from the platform. It is also vital we take a preventative approach to online harassment by teaching young people, especially young men, about respectful, appropriate communication.”


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