By Briona Price, Staff Writer
Kimberly Hall, mother of teenage boys and owner of a blog geared towards mothers, has been under criticism for a few months now because of her apparent “slut-shaming.” Please note that slut shaming is not the condemnation of the South Lake Union Trolley. It is, instead, a tactic used to make women feel inferior if their sexual lives deviate substantially from the norm.
Hall decided to write a blog to us teenage girls entitled: “FYI (if you’re a teenage girl).” How original, no? In her holier than thou attitude, disguised as concern for all of the girls who are friends with her sons on Facebook, she says they should seriously stop taking pictures of themselves in which they are: wearing shirts but are not wearing bras and striking a “red carpet pose, the extra-arched back, and [a] sultry pout.” You can understand why there’s such backlash against this lady. Also, she seems to be a bit loony because she opens the article with, “Last night, as we sometimes do, our family sat around the dining-room table and looked through the summer’s social media photos…” Because sitting around a table with your husband and teenage sons as you peruse through pictures of braless adolescent girls is totally normal. In addition, it’s also none of her business how these girls dress. Surely, this upsets you. But, are we really that different here at F&M in regards to how allegedly promiscuous women are treated?
I remember a particularly disturbing moment during Freshman Orientation last year. We were given a speech (on who knows what? We had so many speeches that week) when an upperclass student told us that we needed to be aware of the reputation that we’d make first year because it would follow us around forever. She then gave us an example of a girl who slept with multiple guys her freshman year. Apparently, the girl had a reputation as a slut years later because of what she had done her freshman year. Oh, we were also told that the girl didn’t have friends because “no matter how hard she tries, no one wants to be friends with her.” What the hell? There are so many things wrong with this. First, the part about how no one wants to be her friend is baffling. Why wouldn’t anyone want to be friends with someone because of their sexual history? It seems like she’s better off not being friends with people like that. This behavior also encourages an attitude that people with multiple sexual partners deserve to be raped, as in the case of Kylie Angell a student at the University of Connecticut.
When Angell reported that she had been raped (which had to take an incredible amount of courage), she says that one of the campus officers told her that “women need to stop spreading their legs like peanut butter or rape is going to keep on happening ’til the cows come home.” Disregarding his completely stupid, completely outdated, backwoods Georgia slang, his indifference to the situation is disturbing. However, biases such as this will never cease until we stop using someone’s sex life against her. If you participate in slut shaming, you should ask yourself why you care about something so personal that doesn’t affect you in anyway. If you can’t do it because you can’t find an ounce of decency in you (I don’t know how you measure that but maybe there are special measuring cups at Target. Call them.), you really should do this so that you don’t get sued like the campus cop is being right now. However, he may not have much to worry about since Angell has Gloria Allred representing her. Why Kylie? Why?