We’ve all heard of the book, it’s the one we read the cliff’s notes version of in ninth grade, right? Or if you haven’t read the book, maybe you’ve seen the movie? If not, I’ll give you a short summary - Demi Moore is sexually repressed, takes a long bath, then finally gets it on with a gorgeous and young Gary Oldman. Either way, if you attended a high school in America, you’ve probably heard of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter," the scintillating tale of adultery and witchcraft. Hey, maybe you even enjoyed reading it.
It was way ahead of it’s time in exploring female sexuality. But if you’re like most of the people in my ninth grade English class, you got lost somewhere between the puritan-style English and the slow plot development, and missed out on the actual point of the story, which was.... What was it again? In case freshman English is an all too distant memory, I’ll give you a refresher. The book is about Hester Prynne, a young woman who leaves her husband in England to come to live in America. She settles in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she engages in an illicit affair with the town’s respectable minister, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester becomes pregnant, and is quickly branded an adulteress. As punishment, she is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” pinned to her clothing, so that everybody can see what a sinner she is. Every day, Hester is mocked and ridiculed by her community, forced to carry her shame all too publicly. Her lover is not found out, and continues to live what seems to all to be a virtuous life.
What interests me about this story, rediscovering it years after reading it for my English class, is that Hester may have lived over a century ago, but her story is relevant to a 21st century girl. After all, what was really going on? Hester was being slut shamed! She was being ridiculed for having sex, and being a sexual being! By engaging in sexual activity with someone she was not married to, Hester’s motivation for sex was not to create a family, but to experience the pleasure of the act itself. She was having sex because she wanted to, because it was enjoyable for her. As Shira Tarrant, a Cal State Long Beach professor said in an article by the LA Times, “[the term slut] is designed to insult women who have sexual agency or experience or want sexual pleasure... We don’t even have a word to describe a happy, joyous, sexually active female.”
The sad part is, it isn’t only men that are shaming women, we do it to each other. A study done by researchers from Cornell University found that women judged a fictional character named Joan more harshly when her description included a higher number of sexual partners. The control group, who read a description of Joan describing her sexual history as involving only two long term partners, characterized Joan’s personality as warm, competent, stable and dominant.
What is going on here? Why are we, a society which prides itself on being modern and progressive, stuck in a 17th century mindset about sex? Who cares whether Joan has slept with two people, or 200! It doesn’t matter. We all need to stop hating on each other for our sexual activity. “Slut” isn’t even a real term - there’s no concrete definition. We just use it to describe people who we don’t understand. Hester Prynne is no more guilty of being a slut than a number of powerful men who are idolized today for their many sexual exploits. The bottom line is that it isn’t fair to judge someone for behaving a certain way, just because we can’t understand it.
