‘Have you ever been slut-shamed?” asks the back of the proof of Beth Ashley’s Sluts, which is billed as “a groundbreaking investigation into the history of slut-shaming”. Well, not to overshare in a family paper, but yes, I have, more than once, and I was not a fan. Sounds like me and this book will get along great!
Before I tell you why me and this book did not, in fact, get along great, I should explain what slut-shaming is. According to Ashley it’s “the process of embarrassing, insulting or belittling a girl or woman for her sexual behaviour to oppress her”. Slut-shaming means women are punished for having sex (or merely for being deemed sexual) and held responsible for men’s sexual behaviour.
In other words, it’s a newish term for an ancient form of misogyny. Mary Wollstonecraft worried about this double standard in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when she wrote of her “lively compassion for those unfortunate females who are broken off from society, and by one error torn from all those affections and relationships that improve the heart and mind”.
In the 19th century some suffragettes campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Act, which subjected any woman suspected of being a prostitute to mandatory testing — followed by imprisonment if she was believed to be infected. This was invasive and humiliating (simply the suspicion of soliciting could ruin a female reputation). Meanwhile, the men who drove the sex trade were entirely spared punishment.
Slut-shaming could be used to justify a woman’s death: until 2008 men who killed their wives had access to the partial defence of provocation, nicknamed the “nagging and shagging” defence. If a man could convince the jury that he had “lost control” because his wife had been unfaithful, he would often be convicted of manslaughter rather than murder. (Needless to say, the provocation defence was not available to women who killed abusive husbands.)
Advertisement
When police in South Yorkshire dismissed the victims of grooming gangs as “child prostitutes”, allowing endemic abuse to continue unchecked between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s, that was a form of slut-shaming. Because the girls were sexually active (by definition, because they were being sexually abused), they were deemed worthless and unreliable.
I didn’t get any of this from Ashley’s book, by the way (she briefly mentions the Contagious Diseases Act, but not the feminist response to it). If you want depth and detail you’re better off reading Horrible Histories. Sluts is flimsy, tendentious and frequently dislocated from reality in ways that the word “wrong” can barely begin to cover.
Let’s start with her assertion that James I was “a big slut”, which she claims is “demonstrated in his many ‘illegitimate’ children”. Well, it’s half right. James I was indeed alleged to be voraciously promiscuous, but he wasn’t conceiving any children from these affairs, because they were — famously — all with young men.
So Ashley is bad on the details, but maybe she’s better on the broad sweep of history. Alas, no. She offers a garbled version of the Marxist feminist theory that patriarchy arose from the invention of agriculture, and then informs us that “a lot of historians trace the origins of slut-shaming back even earlier, arguing that the Ancient Romans . . . are to blame.” Is she trying to say that there were no Roman farmers? How does she think they got all the wine for their slutty orgies?
The big idea of this book is that slut-shaming is, somehow, an outcrop of capitalism. Whatever capitalism is: Ashley defines it as “a system that revolves around increasing state growth”, whereas “socialism is more about sharing a country’s wealth evenly among people and ensuring all are treated fairly”. I feel like some Cubans might want a word.
Advertisement
Ashley thinks that capitalism hates sluts because sex is a form of “leisure” and therefore antithetical to productivity. But she also says that women in “free market countries” have “freer sex” — again, she seems hazy about what words mean, and appears to be using “free market” to mean “social democratic”. It’s all very confusing.
Yet somehow not as confusing as her conclusion, which is that she wants the reader to embrace “slut power” and “love being a slut”. She does pay very brief lip service to the idea that “prude-shaming” (pressuring women to be sexual) is as much of a problem as slut-shaming, but you can tell her heart’s not in it. She seems to believe that if we all simply banged more, the walls of the military-industrial complex would come tumbling down.
Generously, this seems unlikely. Far from disdaining sex as unproductive, capitalism has been very efficient at turning sex into a commodity. Pornography and the sex trade operate at global scale. Instead of punishing women for being sexual, all the economic incentives align to make sluttiness near-obligatory: slut-shaming is woeful, but given that the Cardi B song WAP (which stands for “wet-ass pussy”) went to No 1, I’m not sure we can say it stands as the cardinal problem of our era.
If anything, some of Ashley’s book will make women feel less powerful, especially her alarming misinformation about the law. She writes that “there’s technically nothing stopping you from being prosecuted” for having a termination in England or Wales. Technically, there’s the Abortion Act: some women have been prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies, but Ashley is scaremongering. It could frighten some women away from seeking medical attention.
Sluts is a deeply confused book for a deeply confused political position: a vapid, vibes-y “sex positive” feminism that can engage with reality only in the vaguest way. Its only achievement is to tell readers that Ashley is very happy with her own sex life. I’m not going to shame her for that. I am, however, going to say that she and her publisher should hang their heads for producing something this sloppy.
Advertisement
Sluts by Beth Ashley (Penguin £14.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
