Slut-shaming is the act of stigmatizing a woman for engaging in behaviour judged to be promiscuous or sexually provocative. The term is gotten from the word “slut” which often refers to a woman who is considered to have loose sexual morals.
This issue is a topic that never goes away since it is one of the gender anomalies that women face every day. It popped up recently during the ongoing season 6 of the Big Brother Naija (BBN) show.
Angel and Sammie, two housemates of the ‘Shine Ya Eye’ season, had a heated argument over Angel’s decision to kiss the new housemate, Kayvee, during a game of truth or dare. Sammie shared his frustrations with White money and Boma, revealing that he had held Angel in high esteem until she kissed and groped KayVee.
Angel, who overheard the conversation, confronted and accused him of slut-shaming her. Sammie stood his ground saying he didn’t slut-shame her and he was just discussing with his friends.
Slut-shaming can be obvious as someone literally calling you slut but this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, it can be so subtle that it goes unnoticed or worse, accepted and normalized. To settle the issue, here are three situations you might not realize are actually slut-shaming:
Judging the way someone dresses
Women often get judged by the way they dress because of the common Nigerian saying “dress how you want to be addressed.” However, the reality is that no one deserves to be labelled a slut because of the way she chooses to dress. Women and people, in general, should be respected based on their humanity, not their appearance.
Slut-shaming people because of the kind of content they put out
The social media age has come with the era of social media influencers. People put out different content in form of Tik tok videos, comedy skits, travel pictures to drive engagement and generate followers. As a result, people can now be slut-shamed based on the kind of content they choose to put out.
Blaming people for their leaked nude photos or getting molested
Blaming a girl when her nude photos are leaked is slut-shaming. Photos and videos of different persons get leaked by a second or third party but people are so quick to point fingers at the victim of the leak.
The same thing happens when someone gets molested. We immediately slut-shame the victim by asking questions like, ‘what were you wearing?’ We should always be on the side of the victim and band together to fight the perpetrators of these acts.
With this, we know that there are different ways we can slut-shame a person without realizing it. Hence, we should be more careful with the way we judge people based on their actions as it goes a long way in defining the person’s character to other people and oftentimes tampers with the person’s self-esteem.