I coined the term “slut-bashing,” the precursor to “slut-shaming,” and am passionate about exploring the ways that girls and young women behave and cope in a culture of slut-shaming. I also am curious about how they face other unique challenges—such as the risk of harassment and assault, the pressures to achieve an impossible beauty ideal, and others. All girls and women experience sexism, while many girls of color— and lesbian, queer, and trans girls— face numerous intersecting pressures. The works I recommend here are aching, powerful, and unforgettable.
I wrote...
I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet
Young women today are encouraged to express themselves sexually. Yet when they do, they are derided as “sluts” or “hos.” They are caught in a double bind of mixed sexual messages. To fulfill the contradictory roles of being sexy but not slutty, they create a sexually sophisticated identity on social media—even if they are not sexually active—while ironically referring to themselves and their friends as “sluts” or “hos.”
But this strategy can become a weapon in the hands of peers who circulate rumors and innuendo—elevating slut-shaming to harmful and even deadly levels, with sexual assault and suicide common among those who are targeted. In I Am Not a Slut, I share my research on the experiences of a wide range of teenage girls and young women from a variety of backgrounds and point them in a new direction to eradicate slut-shaming for good.
This play, inspired by the experiences of a racially diverse group of New York City teenage girls, explores the intersection of slut-shaming and sexual violence. At its core, the play questions the wisdom of girls embracing the “slut” label for themselves. “Slut” may seem like a carefree term of endearment, and it is—until the moment Joey, a member of her school’s dance team, informally known as the Slut Squad, is sexually assaulted by two boys from school. She brings charges against them, and every sexually provocative thing she previously has done is used as evidence that she is lying. If you want to understand the pressures teenage girls face today, this play breaks it down for you.
SLUT: The Play offers communities and individuals the real-life insight into rape and bullying culture necessary to inspire change in the attitudes and practices surrounding girls and sexuality. The story and the performance creates much-needed space to discuss—openly and honestly—experiences with shaming, sex, and violence, thus providing a crucial antidote to slut-shaming culture.
Audre Lorde writes about her young intersectional life—Black, poor, lesbian—by combining memoir with history and myth. Lorde shares how, from childhood in the 1940s through her post-college years, she lacked a language to describe her experiences with racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. How could she explain to a White friend that she needed a dangerous, illegal abortion—obtained the day before she turned 18—because Black babies were not regarded by White parents as adoptable? What words could she use to tell her White gay friends that even though they are oppressed, they will never understand the oppression of racism? What does a woman’s body look like in a woman-centered world? Lorde discovers the power of language, and along the way writes a beautiful book that is both personal and political.
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive
A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles - through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde's story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet', it changed the literary landscape.
In this 1976 literary classic, composed of five stories that blend folktale and memoir, Kingston describes growing up as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She is confused about what it means to be a girl and what is expected of her as she becomes a woman. Kingston wonders: Will she grow up to become a surgeon, as her mother had been in China; a fierce woman warrior; or like the ill-fated No Name Woman, who killed herself and her baby, born out of wedlock, after bringing disgrace to her family and village? She learns that women are the ones tasked with cultural preservation—and that this work can drive one mad. The trick is to create stories from this nonsensical and patriarchal world.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With this book, the acclaimed author created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.
“A classic, for a reason” – Celeste Ng via Twitter
As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of…
In this classic series of vignettes, 12-year-old Esperanza Cordero grows up in impoverished and violent Chicago. She yearns for autonomy and is excited as her physique becomes more shapely and womanly, but she is sexually assaulted at her first job and raped by several men at a carnival. Her best friend is abused physically by her father and, to escape, marries before she enters the eighth grade. Though she wants to leave Mango Street, Esperanza remains rooted to her patriarchal Mexican-American heritage and community. This is a book to savor slowly—the text, as Cisneros has written, “is as succinct and flexible as poetry, snapping sentences into fragments so that the reader pauses, making each sentence serve her and not the other way round.”
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic, acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Told in a series of vignettes-sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous-Sandra Cisneros' masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers.
Brainy and beautiful Esther Greenwood lands a coveted internship at a prominent glossy magazine in New York City, but the experience only magnifies her depression. From confronting the sexist double standard that makes a sexually active young woman a slut but her male counterpart just a regular guy, to her near-rape, to the patronizing attitude of her psychiatrist, who prescribes electroshock therapy that traumatizes her, Esther feels suffocated by the bell jar of sexist culture experienced by young White women in the 1950s. She breathes more fully only after seeing a woman psychiatrist and obtaining a diaphragm--her ticket to sexual liberation. This compulsively readable novel was published after author Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, but many of the obstacles for young women remain strikingly similar today.
When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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