The Mindset of Slut ~ Let's Get Lucky Blog Hop

Hello,

Welcome to my stop on the Let’s Get Lucky Blog Hop…where I am not going to promo a new release.

I have a couple, don’t get me wrong. But there’s something more important on my mind or, rather someone.

Her name is Rehteah Parsons. She’s seventeen years old and she will never be eighteen. She’s dead, by her own hand. Rehteah was raped by four young men at a party. She was fifteen at the time.

What came next was worse.

I won’t regurgitate the story. (You may read a report here, if you haven’t heard about this outrage.)

I do want to focus on one aspect, the way other young women sent her text messages calling her a slut.

Slut. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/slut

A four-letter word much harsher than any other four-letter word I can think of. Slut. As a rape survivor myself, I’d say those messages were more harmful than those from young men asking if she’d have sex with them, and I am not saying the messages from young men weren't harmful. But for the love of God, where's the solidarity, the sisterhood, the support from other woman we all need to get through something like this? And who raised these young? They need to step up and be handed their measure of shame.

Rehteah posted this image on her Facebook wall prior to taking her life.

I’m a widow. I’m a mother. By September, I’ll be a grandmother—twice.

And I write erotic romance. In part, I chose the genre because I wrestle with the line between ‘nice girl’ and ‘sexual being’—and why that line exists.

I think it’s time we stop the shame game, because all other issues aside, at the core of the behavior by the young women who tortured this child with social media and who shunned her as though her rape were somehow her fault, is the mindset of slut, the idea there are two standards of sexuality, one for men and another for women. It pisses me off that women are still slinging this kind of mud on other women, resulting in a new generation all too ready to pour the water of superiority into the dirt of shame. A generation who has the magic of social media at their fingertips to carry the message far and wide.

Women need to stop judging each other for sexual choices made, much less for a rape. Let Rehteah Parsons be the last women to take her life because those who should stand in support turned away—then circled back to attack.

Let us wipe the word ‘slut’ off our lips, and those of our children. Rape is a crime, but the behavior of others toward a victim after the fact in many cases, is an equal, if not larger crime. No woman needs others to make her ashamed of her sexual history, particularly for an entry not made by choice.

Thank you for dropping in. I’d love if you’d join my blog and my Facebook page, but those are requests, not conditions.

I’ll be delighted to give anyone who reads this entire post a free copy of my latest release, Breaking Glass, no strings attached. Tell me your preferred format, .mobi or .epub, and your e-mail address and I'll send you a copy of the e-book. You may use the “Contact Eden” form at top right, or post a comment below.