Slut-shaming: “she was asking for it’’
Slut-shaming: “she was asking for it’’
What is the phenomenon of Slut-Shaming? Why is it dangerous for women? What can online therapy do?
Slut-Shaming (“slut”: slut, tramp / “shaming”: to make someone feel ashamed). In other words, slut-shaming is the pillory to which people, mainly women, are subjected in order to make them ashamed of their choices, actions, ways of behaving or presenting themselves; a demeaning, arrogant and unsolicited judgment, which undermines the right to free choice and to the free life of the individual, often dictated by a patriarchal mania of control that insists on seeing women within pre-established standards and behaviors, in order to control and subjugate them.
Judging: a bad habit
In psychology we use the technical term “fundamental attribution bias” to indicate that mental behavior that tends (erroneously) to transform our subjective judgments into reality.
This mechanism is enacted by most people continuously; once a judgment is built, it is perpetuated as experience, yardstick, concept to quickly and roughly determine whether something is right or wrong.
We should remember, however, that an opinion, a term of Greek origin, literally means “a form of knowledge based on subjective experience,” and therefore does not constitute and does not possess the objective certainty of truth (doxa-treccani.it).
Seeing beyond our opinions
Seeing beyond subjective opinion, linked to limiting and personal beliefs, is an act of intelligence, maturity and openness. It is important always to be able to shake up our points of view, to make them collapse and rebuild, to enact a more humble understanding of things, aware of the fact that ours is not the only truth, and that everything that discriminates and hinders the free choice of others remains a toxic and inadequate behavior, not only for those who receive it, but also for those who enact it, barricaded behind their egocentric, limited and, precisely, subjective vision.
Slut shaming: she was asking for it
Let’s go back a few years. It is 2011 in Toronto, Canada. On a university campus a girl is the victim of rape.
In the courtroom, the officer in charge of security pointed out to the judge his opinion that the girl’s clothing was flashy and provocative (hence the real sense of the term slut-shaming). In such a traumatic and monstrous event in the life of a young woman, the physical and psychological crime, as well as the damage to a person’s freedom, should not be pushed into the background because of a prejudice about appearance. Faced with a rape, the officer therefore did not first of all see a woman, violated in her essence and in her freedom, but a layer of clothing distant from his personal rigid vision of what a woman should be.
There are no clothes, colors, nudity whatsoever that allow anyone to touch another person’s body and appropriate it without consent. Following such a demeaning and unacceptable event for the city of Toronto, the city itself organized a protest march throughout the country. Many other marches called “slut-walks” followed, to remind and stir public opinion that no prejudice and no choice of clothing can justify a terrible act, an ogre’s act, like rape.
“Slut” as stigma
Here “slut” becomes in detail “the woman”; defined as a slut since she has moved away from the rules imposed by patriarchal society. An idea linked to a social stigma of shame and authoritarianism. Moving away from social expectations and the judgments that derive from them can still, in our time, attack women, demean them, make them feel inferior, wrong, but above all guilty.
This happens even more in a digitalized age where people no longer know the limits between free expression and gratuitous attack, and feel entitled to denigrate and to express their opinions on issues and people they often do not even know and that do not even concern them personally, feeding the phenomenon of slut shaming and sometimes leading the victim to suicide.
What can online therapy do
If years of damage from prejudice, from rigid, patriarchal, discriminatory and restrictive visions have made women prisoners and extinguished their personal and feminine power, with online therapy the most important process to undertake is precisely to regain it.
Through online therapy, first of all, it is possible to support the woman victim of slut-shaming not to feel guilty, to put the event into perspective, returning to the real awareness of the feminine, before patriarchy controlled the feminine to take away its power. In shamanic culture, which restores power to the feminine, the woman represents a teacher for man, who has the task of guiding him toward a more spiritual dimension, elevating the masculine beyond its attachment to earthly and material goals. For this very reason, freeing oneself from guilt and regaining one’s personal power becomes of fundamental importance for the woman and for those around her, reclaiming her creative power, rekindling that inner flame that had been extinguished and that instead has the right to shine, and to be freed from all those patriarchal schemes induced by society, by the family, now unfit for the era of evolution and spiritual progress to which present times call us.
For information write to Dr. Jessica Zecchini
Email: consulenza@jessicazecchini.it, WhatsApp: 370 32 17 351
