Is slut-shaming having a retro-moment? Or is it rather that, for the slut-shamed, it never really goes away? Monica Lewinsky, the self-declared “patient zero of losing my reputation online”, has been in conversation with the Washington Post columnist, Taylor Lorenz, author of a new book about the internet, Extremely Online.
Elsewhere, the new Netflix docuseries Beckham, deals with reports of David Beckham’s alleged infidelity circa 2003. While the documentary doesn’t mention names, it led to the dragging back into the spotlight of Rebecca Loos, his former PA.
At the risk of seeming facetious, these two women’s names popping up together in the same week was like witnessing some kind of global slut-shaming convention. Or a slut-shaming Greatest Hits. It also hit home how long they’d lived with the stigma. Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton when he was US president was first made public just over 25 years ago. The alleged Loos incident is two decades old. Two cases loosely coinciding with the rise of the internet. Two women “cancelled” before cancellation existed. But in a way that means they’re never really cancelled, and their very cancellation will always be news.
Is there such a thing for a woman as a post-slut-shamed life? Or are they doomed to stay forever struggling in the quicksand of their hyper-public humiliation? A case of once slut-shamed, forever slut-shamed. Like a virus you just can’t shake off.
Georgina Baillie is another whose file has recently been dusted down from the “scarlet woman” archives. In 2008, Baillie was dragged into “Sachsgate”. (In an incident broadcast on Russell Brand’s BBC Radio 2 show, a crude message was left on the answering machine of her grandfather Andrew Sachs, who had played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, saying Brand had slept with Baillie.) In a recent interview, Baillie talked of the subsequent years (alcohol, drugs, thoughts of suicide). While not all her problems are necessarily related, it doesn’t make her suffering any less heart-breaking.
What is it about slut-shaming that makes it an international bloodsport, even today? Is it a misogynistic throwback to the higher demands placed on female virtue? A double standard hardwired into the system? Certainly, any men involved seem generally judged less harshly. It’s usually women who carry the stigma, like branding on cattle. Feminists lashed out at Lewinsky, furious at the undermining of the Clinton presidency. Loos was taunted by Sharon Osbourne on a celebrity version of The X Factor (“Try doing tomorrow’s performance with your knickers on…”). Then again, in different ways, to varying degrees, slut-shaming has long been an unofficial branch of the entertainment industry.
While increasingly there are women who refuse to be slut-shamed, it hasn’t stopped it happening over the years. Behold Amber Heard while in court with Johnny Depp. But there’s nothing new under the harlot-decrying sun. Even keeping it in multimedia times, in the 1980s, Madonna was slut-shamed (denounced; excommunicated) by the pope and the Catholic church. Today, Taylor Swift is routinely judged for “getting through a lot of men”. Swift, surely the western hemisphere’s most hardcore serial monogamist, is living proof that any woman can be slut-shamed for any reason at any time.
In part, this is the story of the internet: the empowerment of the mob mentality; the normalisation and amplification of mass-abuse. The internet is also the entity that renders scandals eternally fresh and cruelly indelible. Like an electronic elephant, it never forgets. But is pointing to online grot letting humanity off the hook? While the internet has served as a powerful accelerant, haven’t the urges (Gossip. Judge. Destroy. Repeat.) always been with us?
Why does it matter? For many reasons, not least because the young are watching: the females grasping that they’d better comply or risk similar harsh treatment; the males learning that it’s acceptable to use sex to attack and humiliate women. Anyway, isn’t everyone just sick of it? The grim endlessness of it all. How women are not only slut-shamed, but turned into lifers, with no hope of parole.
Like Loos, who initially did kiss and tells, glamour shoots and reality shows, but who, in recent years has been living quietly with her husband and children in a remote area of Norway, practising yoga. All so off-grid that, in tabloid terms, she may as well have settled on Mars.
Or like Lewinsky, who’s spent years intellectualising, contextualising, and TED-talking through her experience. Don’t criticise Lewinsky for not doing something else (has she ever been allowed to?). Lewinsky has played a strange and terrible situation well: she’s been about as erudite and philosophical about her experience as it’s possible to be, and yet still she lives every day in its jaws.
What does this tell us? That, whatever such women do, however articulate they are, however quietly they try to live, they can’t escape. They remain perpetual, reputational roadkill.
So, I was wrong. Slut-shaming isn’t having a retro-moment, it’s happening all the time. And the “buzz” isn’t really about the sex somebody had blah-di-blah-years ago, it’s about the humiliation they can still be made to suffer all this time later. So, whose “shame” is it now?
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
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