Slut Shaming Study Claims Sex Fight Is Really About Class Warfare

A slut shaming study is claiming that these insulting “sex fights” are really about class warfare, with the poor and rich girls both using the term “slut” in order to protect their turf.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, one girl protested being shamed for wearing shorts by putting up posters proclaiming that girls are not sexual objects. There’s also the issue of fat shaming, which became ridiculous when a skinny third grader was sent home with a letter saying she was overweight.

The study, which is titled “‘Good Girls’: Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus,” found sociologists from the University of Michigan and the University of California declaring that slut shaming has little to do with whether someone is actually sexually promiscuous and instead claim it is more a statement about personal wealth. The college girls in the study were divided into high status and low status groups: the former being comprised of rich kids who joined the sorority system while the latter was girls who came from middle class to low income families.

Sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong said in a news release that slut shaming in reality tends to be applied in an opposite manner as would be expected:

“By engaging in ‘slut-shaming’ — the practice of maligning women for presumed sexual activity — women at the top create more space for their own sexual experimentation, at the cost of women at the bottom of social hierarchies. Surprisingly, women who engaged in less sexual activity were more likely to be publicly labeled a slut than women who engaged in more sexual activity. This finding made little sense until we realized that college women also used the term as a way to police class boundaries.”

These sociologists claim that “high-status women employ slut discourse to assert class advantage, defining themselves as classy rather than trashy, while low-status women express class resentment — deriding rich, b***hy sluts for their exclusivity.” In short, poor girls used slut shaming to demean rich girls who are materialistic and cling to cliques, while rich girls equated being a slut to being “trashy.”

In essence, the meaning of a word is being transformed by the latest generation. Slut shaming has also been shown to play a major role in suicides by girls and young women. Sociologists believe their findings should be used in campaigns against bullying.

Do you agree that slut shaming in fact is only about class warfare as these sociologists claim?

[Image via LiorakPhotography]