BUST: “Gay Bashing vs. Slut Shaming: Aren’t they equally deadly?”

I have an unwritten chapter in my mind on this exact topic: Why the sexting suicides were blamed on “bullying” and the gay teen suicides getting attention this fall were recognized as the result of homophobia. We seem to finally have a storyline about the oppression of gay teens, which might be getting us somewhere. But there is still no sympathy–and crucially, no existing narrative storyline–for the girl people call a “slut.”

All of this has led me to wonder, why isn’t there as much outrage about this kind of slut-shaming as there has been about gay-bashing?Just try and imagine how wonderful it would have been if folks like Madonna (c’mon, MADONNA!), and President Obama, and Ellen Degeneris, and CBS, all had come out with a message for young women that slut-shaming is bullshit, all people are sexual and if the other students can’t deal with a girl who has sexual desires, it means they are sexists, which is just as bad as racists or homophobes? At the very least, doesn’t it merit a Glee episode? We discussed starting a similar “it gets better” video series here at BUST, and when I asked what we might want to call it, one editor shouted out “how about, ‘it doesn’t get better but you won’t care as much.'”

via BUST.