A short history of slutshaming, after a woman told my employers I was a ‘SLAG’ My mum always asks me to give her a ring to let her know I’ve got home safely. She’s done […]

My mum always asks me to give her a ring to let her know I’ve got home safely. She’s done this since I moved out at 18, but recently, she’s started asking me to do the same whenever I log on to social media; did I get home safely?

The internet is certainly one of the most important invention of all time, but it can also be a damn scary place. It’s scary for everyone, but if you’re a woman with an online presence you will need to brace yourself for the inevitable dick picks, hate mail, death and rape threats, and I’ve had them all.

“A troll hacked into an online photo album, stole a photo of me dressed as Roxy Heart from Chicago and sent it to my employers under the heading ‘SLAG’.” The i newsletter cut through the noise Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

The trick is to only listen to the nice people, and (as always) there are far more of them. For every Neo Nazi trolling up my timeline there are a thousand happy stars that outshine them.

But, last month something new happened. A troll hacked into an online photo album, stole a photo of me dressed as Roxy Heart from Chicago and sent it to my employers under the heading ‘SLAG’. Outraged at the temerity of my holding both a doctorate and a loyalty card to Victoria’s Secret, the sender demanded my instant dismissal. My employers are thankfully progressive and decided to forego the ducking stool on this occasion, opting instead to support me in contacting the police.

Would David Starkey put up with this?

But what makes this incident particularly galling was that the sender was found to be a woman. Once this sunk in I found myself wondering, firstly, if David Starkey has to put up with this sh*t, but also are women really still doing this to one another? Do we not have enough issues to deal without tearing each other down as well?

‘Slut-Shaming’ is a huge concern to all feminist groups; hundreds of books have been written on the subject and who can forget the ‘Slut-Walk’ protests that came to global prominence in 2010, as men and women walked together in over 200 cities and 40 nations to reclaim the word ‘slut’. These demonstrations were brought about when a Toronto police officer advised students at York University that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized’. But, what is not talked about quite so openly is that women often slut shame each other, and that there is a very long history of this.

Was Queen Victoria a feminist? Was she heck

In light of the recent ITV smash, Victoria, Elle Magazine wrote an article asking if Queen Victoria was a pioneering feminist. Sadly, the answer to this is no, was she heck. In a letter to Sir Theodore Martin in 1870, the Queen directly attacked those fighting for women’s rights as unsexed, declaring that they “ought to get a good whipping” and that they were “the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings.” She continued:

“The Queen is anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.”

Vicky was angry at the suffragettes for upsetting the status quo and not being demure women, and she wasn’t the only one. History is full of powerful women scoring own goals.

As the first wave of feminism got underway in the nineteenth century, numerous Antisuffragist leagues led by women sprung up in Britain and America. Why would women campaign against their own emancipation? It wasn’t because they believed women were unequal to men, but because they felt a woman’s place was in the home and disrupting this would result in social chaos, as this anti suffragette leaflet from 1915 shows:

Writer, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825), responded to Mary Wollstonecraft’s trailblazing Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by attacking her in a satirical poem ‘Rights of Women’, and ultimately urged women to ‘abandon each ambitious thought’. Once Wollstonecraft’s husband posthumously published her memoirs, revealing her love affairs and suicide attempts, female writers turned their backs on her in droves, lest they be tainted by association.

Historical court records are full of defamation cases of woman calling each other ‘whores’ and all manner of other sexual insults. Tudor women were regularly brought before the courts for defaming other women as ‘hedge whores’, ‘begger whores’, ‘drunken bitch whores’, ‘black mouthed, witch whores’; and in 1627, Isabel Yaxley complained a neighbour alleged she was a ‘whore’ who could be ‘f**ked for a pennyworth of fish’.

In house slut-shaming is still alive and well

Frustratingly, in house slut-shaming is still alive and well in modern feminism. Issues of consent, sexual autonomy, bodily agency and the right to have as much damn sex as one pleases have been front of centre of every feminist manifesto since Betty Friedan pointed out that ‘No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor’. And yet the sex worker community continue to have the door slammed in their faces for not being the right kind of feminist. Not all feminists, of course, but many of the old guard, so called ‘rad fems’, are extremely hostile to their sisters in the sex industry. The ‘Radical Feminist’ community continues to fight for the right for women to do what they choose with their own body, unless (of course) that woman is choosing to have sex for financial gain. “Last year, the Woman’s March changed its manifesto from supporting sex workers to writing them out of it.

“Perhaps the story of an internet trollette stealing and sending private pictures to my employers in an attempt to embarrass me angered you, but the truth is that this kind of slut shaming is endemic in modern feminism and society at large.”

Feminist platforms, such as Feminist Current, maintain an abolitionist stance and exclude the sex worker voice. Whereas almost all the leading sex worker charities advocate for decriminalisation, many radical feminists still refuse to listen to the very women they claim to support. Despite excellent work of feminists around the issue of consent, this doesn’t seem to extend to sex work which is frequently conflated with trafficking and rape. Consensual sex work is precisely that – consensual. Anyone who is forced into any kind of work is a victim of gross abuse. If I forced you to bake a cake at gun point, it does not make you a chef. If feminism isn’t about respecting a woman’s right to do what she wants with her body, then we’ve lost our way.

Perhaps the story of an internet trollette stealing and sending private pictures to my employers in an attempt to embarrass me angered you, but the truth is that this kind of slut shaming is endemic in modern feminism and society at large. Ladies, if you attempt to shame and diminish another woman because of her sexuality, you are seriously letting the side down. (And if you find yourself hacking another woman’s photo album and stealing her photos, you’re really letting the side down.) However, if you are ever on the receiving end of such behaviour, my advice is twofold; firstly, remember women have been putting up with this crap for a millennia, but we are moving forwards; hold your head high, my dear. And secondly, (wherever possible) send back a signed copy of the photo.