Chapter 6 was basically all about isolation in high school versus being in the “popular” crowd. A few pages talked about this pyramid where the popular kids were on top and everyone below them in each tier would make fun of the ones below them, and so forth. The inverted pyramid of this is truly the real one though- where the isolated person is alone at the top of this (the slut) and then everyone else is below them and finally the popular kids make up the base of it. A lot of people who were isolated at schools had experienced bad home lives, including parents kicking her out and even parents sexually abusing their children. The isolation brings up a whole new realm of things including this idea that the slut is some sort of disease. “Even if boys claim to have slept with her, they are never really ‘with’ her; to show any loyalty to her would be to make themselves contaminated too,” (125). White brings up a survey that Cosmo Magazine took in 1999 asking readers if they should reveal how many people they’re slept with. People answered that whether or not it is true, the person should respond with a low number when asked how many people they have slept with. I feel uncomfortable with this and the idea of lying to someone. Especially if you are going to marry someone, they deserve to know the truth about who you are/were. The chapter rounds out talking about Janice Joplin and how she was a very independent woman. She had a lot of confidence in whatever she did and for many high school “sluts”, gaining the confidence to overcome their bad reputation or at-least cope with it better.
Chapter 7 was my favorite chapter so far. It was about the cruelty that girls have towards each other. I know we can all be mean at times, but why do we do it? One victim of rumors said, “Boys would run their mouths, say they had sex with you, but it wasn’t so much to malign you as it was to build his own image among his friends. The really vicious ones were the girls. They said awful things about you with no other aspiration but to hurt you personally,” (133). After reading this quote I felt so enlightened. Girls are just as much a problem in the slut rumors as the boys are. White brings up how the slut has a sense of secrecy in the acts she does because no one sees it happen but everyone talks about it. “Her techniques are a mystery,” (134). Not only are other girls a little jealous of the slut because of all the attention she is getting from the rumors, they also are wondering how the slut gets to be the way she was. What does she do? How does she do it? Why can’t I do that? Things of that sort. This is why an author named Naomi Wolf wrote a book called “Promiscuities” and she said, “We are all bad girls, in the best way possible. Shameful feelings surrounding female desire need to be relieved because they are compromising our pleasure; if the cloud of shame was lifted, the ‘inner slut’ would introduce us to new horizons of desire,” (146). I definitely agree with this statement because I think people hold back too much because they are afraid of how society will look at them if they act a certain way. The rumors that float around, especially in a high school hallway, can be so far out there. One girl named Christine experienced people coming up to her and telling her that they heard what she had done at a party she hadn’t even attended. We CANNOT believe everything we hear! It is so simple. But sometimes it’s not simple. People lie, even when we confront them to avoid drama. White ended the chapter by saying, “Maybe only after girls have finished with the wars in the hallways do they gain any perspective on why the wars came about,” (152). The big picture of everything is much more important than the nitty gritty details and petty fights. Girls need to be less snappy and more cautious to not believe everything they hear.
Chapter 8 was probably one of the scariest chapters I have ever read in a book, including horror books that I have read. It is called ‘Basement Histories’ and talks about girls getting sexually taken advantage of at ages as young as 7 years old. When adults say to them, “Let’s call this our little secret,” (155), they feel like they have an obligation to obey them and also feel a sense of being chosen for something, but for some reason they do not feel good being chosen for that, so they don’t know what to think in the end. A lot of “sluts” have had these experiences. White says that in her interviews the girls who talked about sexual abuse far outnumbered the girls who didn’t. This really says something disgusting about our society. Even if a girl gets with a lot of guys, it might not always be for the reasons that the gossipers assume. There were a lot of testimonies in this chapter that included people talking about boyfriends raping them at the age of 13, about fathers masturbating on young children and telling them not to tell the mothers, or even about gang-bangs on a drunk girl at a party. I just wanted to skip to the next chapter. I cannot even believe that things happen like this in real life, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. These girls had lost their innocence so early in the game and so unwillingly. I’m glad this chapter wasn’t as long as the others.
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