New Archive:
March 2001 Issue
Talking Dirty: An interview
with Leora Tanenbaum,
author of Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
By Esther D. Kustanowitz
Picture five women you know. According to a 1993 American Association of University Women poll, the statistical likelihood is that two of them have had sexual rumors spread about them.
When Leora Tanenbaum was in ninth grade, she was the subject of such rumors, after just fooling around with her best friend's crush. The unfair branding stuck and, Leora remembers, hurtful alienation followed. High school became oppressive as whispers in the halls led to out-loud name-calling. Friends began to drop her. Taking refuge in her studies, Leora went to Brown after graduation and managed to suppress her memories of what had happened.
In the summer of 1994, then a successful freelance writer, Leora was eating breakfast in her Brooklyn apartment and reading the New York Times when she came across a report of the results of the AAUW poll about sexual harrassment in high schools.
"A light bulb went off," she recalled. "That was what happened to me--I hadn't dwelled on it since high school. The second thing that hit me was the number, 42 percent. That's a huge number, two out of every five. When I was going through it, I felt very alone; like I was the only one."
With the AAUW poll as a catalyst, Leora realized she was not alone. She found herself delving into memories that had been long-buried and began to reconstruct the details of her experience, first for Ms. Magazine, and later, in an expanded article for Seventeen Magazine. The articles provoked a stream of letters from teens who related to Leora's story; she realized that there were other stories to be told and that telling them could make an impact. She began intensive research for a book, tracking down and interviewing fifty women of varying ages who had experiences similar to her own.
Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation, which took four years from inception to publication, includes statistics, stories, and historical background of the slut label. Because Leora has "been there," the book's tone offers camaraderie and support, effectively saying to readers, "you may feel alienated, but you are not alone."
What kind of response did the Seventeen article provoke?
A lot of girls felt that I had gotten what I deserved, because I betrayed my friend, a crime so heinous that I deserved the punishment. I was really taken aback by it. I did deserve punishment, it was selfish and foolish of me, my friend had every right to be angry with me, but she should have addressed it privately instead of creating a public humiliation. Female friendship is really precious, I broke the basic commandment, but it is not a drama to be brought out in front of an entire school.
How did the article become a book?
Finding people was very difficult. I spent about two to three years tracking down people who had had similar experiences and persuading them to be interviewed--whenever possible in person or over the phone--transcribing and analyzing the interviews. I placed classified ads in alternative and college newspapers around the country. I found high school kids through Seventeen letters, the Internet, through newsgroups on sexual identity. Personal contacts led me to some of the older people featured in the book. Zines and newspapers written by teenage girls helped me to find people who had already written about their experiences. Fifty people agreed to be interviewed. Others didn't want to rehash their experience, and were worried that people would be able to identify them from their stories.
How has the book changed your life? How did people in your personal life react to your story?
It was heady and exciting to have the national media attention, and a nice ego trip after the book was first published. But I don't feel I am fundamentally changed as a person: I am still the same Leora. But for a nice Jewish girl, writing a book with such an ugly, incendiary word as a title is hard. I have a baby son who is ten months old. How am I going to explain this epithet to him? It is an important word to use and to know because we need to address the language issue. Certain relatives of mine don't really know about the book's publication. In my synagogue, I try to keep a low profile. My grandmother still doesn't know about it.
When I went through it in high school I never told my parents; they had no idea. I felt that I deserved the treatment and therefore had to put up with it, so I didn't feel like confessing to my parents. I was very depressed; and even contemplated suicide, which is very common for people who are humiliated in this way. My parents saw that I was depressed, and let me see a psychologist, but respected my privacy and never asked me why. When I began working on the book, I was very cagey with my parents, I didn't feel ready to tell them. So I told them the book was about sexual harassment among teenagers. Two or three months before publication, they read the manuscript, and that was the first they learned about my experience.
It was very cathartic for me, writing the book. Repression had had its uses. It was good for me to open up and re-examine it. I learned a lot about myself by revisiting the incident and was forced to think about important things, like social exclusion, how girls are "damned if they do and damned if they don't," the sexual double standard, the nature of cruelty.
This article first appeared on MzVibe.com.
Esther D. Kustanowitz is the author of Hidden Children
of the Holocaust: Teens Who Hid from the Nazis and has written for GenerationJ.com,
the Jewish Theological Seminary, Hadassah, and Camp Ramah. She lives in
New York!
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