1st Event- Documentary Screening

         For one of my required events, I decided to participate in the screening of Unslut hosted by the Gender and Women’s studies department located in suite 1B in the Adams library. This documentary had a plethora of interviews, true life stories and specialists speaking on the topic of slut shaming and the use of the word “slut”. The word holds fear, shame, sadness, hurt, anger and so much more; and the fact that people throw this word around labeling women without the knowledge of how damning this word is, is sad.  

A woman in the movie said “All it takes is a rumor of a girl that has sexual activity and she is labelled a slut”. The quote goes directly with a true life story another woman talked about in the movie about a young lady named Rehtaeh Parsons who committed suicide due to being sexually bullied. They showed a cartoon reenactment on how the pictures of Rehtaeh were spread throughout the school. She was unable to defend herself, so obviously the story of the initial sender of the pictures was the “accurate” and “true” story. She was labelled a slut, because the story that was told made it seem as though Rehtaeh wanted to sleep with both abusers, but the truth being that she was gang raped. Rehtaeh was eventually sexually bullied, being called slut among other names, which unfortunately ended in her suicide. This cruel story shows how one rumor can affect someone. 

 To conclude, I think there should be more places that women have available just to help if things like sexual assault happen. But to get back to the word slut, there are a lot of slutshaming movements happening throughout the US today. I think it will take a lot more than protests to get rid of that nasty stigma associated with that word. Things such as: educating people on the history of the word, like in Gender classes and planning events that can take these negative words used to describe women and men and trying to get to the root of why people feel the way they do about the words.