^ Along those lines, girls who develop early are targets for slut-shaming. It’s as if the fact that their bodies are sexually arousing gives people license to see them as manipulative, attention-seeking, sexual available, and freaky. I wouldn’t be surprised these girls were most likely to be victimized by sexual predators, not because their bodies are attractive as much as pervasive assumptions that girls that look like that are consenting to “trouble” just by existing.
Some of the stories I’ve heard from other women make me want to cry. How scary it must be to find yourself in elementary school being whispered about simply because you grew boobs overnight? As if puberty makes you a bad person, less innocent than the girls with girlish bodies?
This is a manifestation of slut-shaming that isn’t much talked about it, but to me, it’s evidence that many our hangups concerning female sexuality goes much deeper than the merits of anti-promiscuity preferences or whatever.
The slut bogeyman typically emerges in our lives right when we start finding new and exciting ways of sorting ourselves into cliques based on social norms; it also coincides with when we become acutely aware of our own sexual feelings. I don’t think this is a coincidence.
A girl that distinguishes herself early on a sex object–either by developing before her peers or by her own sexually curious actions–is giving others permission to use her as a source of validation at a time when the need for external validation is at its peak. If you’re a boy, not only do you have a safe outlet for relieving your own sexual frustrations by ogling, harassing, and groping her because she’s a “slut” and therefore is asking for such treatment, at the same time you can also ingratiate yourself to the pack who champions male sexual prowess.
And if you’re a girl, by starting whisper campaigns about her and withholding kindness and friendship, you can assert social power over her and establish yourself as her superior. You see how the boys talk about her and instead of questioning it, you feel proud of yourself for not doing anything that gets you treated similarly. Because you respect yourself and obviously the slut does not.
We bring all of this thinking into adulthood and act as if there is a rational, intellect-driven basis for it. But really there is nothing more to it than a bunch of juveniles taking the puritanical messages they’ve absorbed from adults and converting it into rules that make their sad little junior high school experiences less complicated and morally ambiguous.