“I hate that I’m saying this, but it seems kind of quaint.”
I’m on the phone with author and slut-shaming expert Leora Tanenbaum, and while I wouldn’t call what we’re doing reminiscing, it does involve looking back on a time that, while not great, was a little simpler. In this case, the subject is “Girls Gone Wild,” the video franchise that, from 1997 to 2011, was the first name in horny direct-to-consumer retail. Its commercials ruled late-night television, and its product was a mashup of voyeurism, misogyny and manipulation. GGW impresario Joe Francis and his camera crew descended on spring break locations, crashing parties and sweet-talking drunk girls into flashing the camera, making out with each other, and hopefully going further.
Tanenbaum’s most recent book, “Sexy Selfie Nation: Standing Up For Yourself in Today’s Toxic, Sexist Culture,” surveys a new generation whose responses to living in a hypersexualized consumer marketplace are regularly mistaken by parents, teachers and media outlets as reflexive capitulation to it.
The words “Gone Wild” did most of the franchise’s heavy lifting by suggesting that from Lake Havasu to Daytona Beach to Cabo San Lucas, millions of college women were one margarita away from debasing themselves on camera in return for a branded ballcap or pair of booty shorts. Of course, it wasn’t that simple, and eventually the stream of women coming forward to allege that they were coerced, tricked, and even threatened into performing for the camera brought Francis’ empire down. But no one claimed that its success was a sham: “At the end of the day, I’m selling naked girls,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “People want to buy naked girls.”
Tanenbaum sees the heyday of GGW as “a precursor to where we are now,” in that it marked a shift in adult content — not just from professional to amateur, but more importantly, to a place that blurred the lines between consensual and violatory. Social media was emerging as the dominant conduit for online interaction, and its combination of immediacy and anonymity made nonconsensual content — Reddit forums for upskirt photography, revenge-porn site Is Anyone Up? and a full spectrum of sexualized cyberbullying — seem inescapable.
Tanenbaum’s first book, “Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation,” centered on the sexual stigmatizing of middle school and high school girls whose “bad” reputations often had little connection to actual sexual activity, but were instead reactions to and assumptions about their bodies. What she then called “slut-bashing” was still a powerful force that circumscribed the lives of young women and blamed them for their own stigmatization. “Slut-bashing” eventually morphed into the more recognizable “slut-shaming,” and in 2015, Tanenbaum’s second book, “I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet,” surveyed technology’s role in a flourishing new category of image-based sexual abuse — and highlighted the ways young women used online spaces to challenge the normalization of online slut-shaming.
Ten years on, Tanenbaum’s most recent book, “Sexy Selfie Nation: Standing Up For Yourself in Today’s Toxic, Sexist Culture,” surveys a new generation whose responses to living in a hypersexualized consumer marketplace are regularly mistaken by parents, teachers and media outlets as reflexive capitulation to it. As with the previous two books, “Sexy Selfie Nation” goes straight to the source: Over the span of six years,Tanenbaum talked with approximately 60 young women and nonbinary people ages 14 to 30 who, for better or worse, occupy a unique place in the current culture: They’ve grown up knowing that a single image can be profoundly impactful in the hostile (or simply careless) hands of ex-boyfriends, frenemies and even teachers. At the same time, they’ve inherited a vocabulary that lets them talk about the toll of routine sexualization with a clarity that previous generations lacked.
@leoratanenbaum #booktok #sexyselfienation #notaskingforit #consent ♬ original sound – Leora Tanenbaum
With years of insight under her belt — since the mid-1990s, she’s talked with more than 1,000 girls and women about their experiences with slut-shaming — Tanenbaum has, unsurprisingly, received reams of emails and DMs from anxious parents seeking her guidance on how to talk their daughters out of crop tops, leggings and bikini selfies. She emphasizes that these are well-intentioned parents whose own experience with social-media dynamics can lead to emotional clashes in which parents’ stated beliefs (for instance, that girls should be free to dress in ways that make them confident in their bodies) are pitted against damaging messages internalized in their own youth (for instance, that girls are responsible when adults sexualize them).
“I would get DMs that were like, ‘You’re a feminist: Aren’t you also horrified that so many young women are objectifying themselves?’ Or: ‘I keep telling my daughter she has to change her outfit and delete her bikini selfies, but she won’t listen to me — what should I do?’” Tanenbaum recalls. What [parents] wanted her to tell them was what magic words they could use that would get these young women to change their behavior, but not sound like slut shaming. “I have a lot of empathy for parents in this situation,” she admits. “But I also knew that I was not going to be able to fulfill those requests in the way they wanted.”
What she could do was try to find out if what these parents saw in their daughters (wilfully inappropriate dress and attention-seeking behavior) reflected the intentions of their self-presentation at school and in selfies. “What they told me again and again is that most of the time they aren’t intentionally trying to be sexy, and they don’t think of their clothes as having anything to do with sex — certainly not the way parents and teachers did,” Tanenbaum says. Their experiences of being sexualized and shamed based solely on their bodies and clothing made these young women intent on reclaiming their autonomy from others. What parents saw as self-objectification, daughters told Tanenbaum, was an attempt to assert control over their bodies and images.
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Tanenbaum noted three recurring themes behind the desire for that control: Gendered dress codes that, in their arbitrary enforcement (a tank top that’s unremarkable on one body but “inappropriate” on another) made school a site of constant, sexualized scrutiny by both peers and adults; an increase in image-based sexual assaults that now includes digital violations like deepfake technology; and the pressure of being expected to control how others viewed them at all times. “They are challenging a relentless nonconsensual sexualizing and commodifying,” says Tanenbaum. “Their images of themselves are essentially being taken from them. They kept telling me, ‘I want to own my body.’”
That young women use the language of capitalism makes sense when you consider that a majority of them had early experiences in which their bodies were exploited by nonconsensual photo sharing, revenge porn, and even blackmail. Reclaiming those narratives can be a powerful coping mechanism, especially at a time when a dizzying number of people have embraced themselves as a product and monetize everything from their hobbies and fandoms to their families and relationships. If the bodies of women and girls are going to be simultaneously commodified and shamed for existing, isn’t self-objectification a form of resistance and control?
Their experiences of being sexualized and shamed based solely on their bodies and clothing made these young women intent on reclaiming their autonomy from others. What parents saw as self-objectification, daughters told Tanenbaum, was an attempt to assert control over their bodies and images.
In many cases, she found, the answer is yes. “Men treat us like sex objects even when we’re wearing sweatpants,” stated one. “They fetishize us no matter what we look like . . . [W]e might as well take advantage of it.” Some of them see ownership of their bodies in literal terms, selling their images on social media or embracing the creator-driven subscription-model platform OnlyFans. But Tanenbaum sees some pitfalls in this anticipatory strategy has some glaring pitfalls: “You create content for OnlyFans because you believe that is the only way you can control your sexualization by other people — You’re not going to take it from me. I’m going to do it. But those images can be, and are, stolen and distributed without consent, which is damaging not only financially, but also psychologically. Tanenbaum sees the belief in control as an illusion, albeit one that can make a lot of difference on an individual level: “The control is an illusion. But if it gives women the tools to go about their day, who am I to tell them not to do it?”
The tension between the choices young women make on an individual level and the dynamics they experience collectively, of course, is a reliable roadblock to systemic shifts in changing the belief that young women’s bodies are to be managed by committee. “I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but think about this act of ownership like turning on an air conditioner when it’s really hot. When you live in a really hot climate, I’m not going to tell you, ‘Don’t turn on your air conditioner!’, because in many cases, you need it; physically, it’s unhealthy for you to not have AC. At the same time, every time you turn on that AC, you weaken our global climate, and it’s bad for humanity.”
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The conflict between the individual and the collective is exacerbated by sites like OnlyFans in the sense that while plenty of individual creators are able to make a living from creating and publishing content, there’s also been a collective effect that’s best illustrated by former Jeopardy contestant Anji Nyquist, who, after winning a stunning upset in 2023, invited Instagram followers to ask her anything. She was probably expecting to field questions about the show itself from her audience; instead, they seemed more interested in whether she planned on starting an OnlyFans account. The OnlyFans effect can be seen any time a young woman goes viral for any reason, meaning that a latent expectation of nudity once focused more narrowly on actors, athletes and reality-TV stars has now crept into the lives of, in theory, any and every woman.
The corollary to Joe Francis’ assertion that “people want to buy naked women” is that buyers these days seem to care less and less about ethical sourcing and the enthusiastic participation of sellers. It’s possible that young men are so internet-poisoned that they believe that commenting “OnlyFans when?” on the Instagram feed of a woman they don’t know is a sincere gesture of flattery — they would hardly be the first to conflate harassment and compliments. In an atmosphere of political backlash and cultural resentment, women of all ages get plenty of reminders that, whatever their nonphysical skills and achievements, they’re easily reduced to the body parts that people most want to see. This doesn’t mean that men and boys don’t experience sexualization of their own. It also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address it. But it’s notable that when I follow up with Tanenbaum to ask a final question — what kinds of messages does she get from the concerned parents of sons? — her answer is a resounding “none.”
