I just turned 56, which to me feels well past the middle of middle age. My hair is going grey, my waist has thickened and I’ve been happily married for decades. Getting unwanted attention from men is the last thing I worry about—so I was stunned when, days after my last birthday, one man called me a “fucking bitch” and then another labeled me a “slut.” (My crime, in both cases, was declining to defer to elderly white men who insisted on butting ahead of me in public places.)
As a young woman, I endured catcalls from construction workers, whistles from random men in the street and the occasional sexually inappropriate remark from a supervisor at work. It was annoying—but then, somewhere along the way, it stopped happening. And even in my twenties and thirties, I was never been called a slut or a bitch. Hearing it in my fifties suddenly reminded me of those long-ago onslaughts.
It also brought back to the fore another feeling I’d long forgotten: fear. I flashed back to the 10-hour drive I used to make from my home in South Carolina to visit friends in Miami Beach, wearing shorts in the tropical heat, and the truckers who would slow down on I-95 and linger uncomfortably close to my Subaru, leering down at me from their cabs and honking their horns. I was single and traveling a long distance alone, in the days before cell phones provided women with some sense of protection. I’d stop for gas, but otherwise never left my car—not for a bathroom break or a cold Coca-Cola.
But eventually, I married, bought a home and began raising two sons. I organized my work life around soccer games and bike races, late nights helping with homework and early-morning preparations for school and band practices. Eventually, I became invisible. Eventually, I forgot all about being a target of men.
So when I found myself mystified at being “slut-shamed” in my fifties, I reached out to some serious scholars to work through it.
Dr. Belinda A. Stillion Southard, who studies and teaches feminist rhetoric at the University of Georgia, was not surprised that I suffered less harassment over the years. It’s the “age/visibility double-bind,” she said. “As you age, your visibility declines.”
My children are grown and gone now. I toss pantyliners in my shopping carts instead of tampons and sanitary pads. By American standards of beauty, I have lost my physical attractiveness. The hecklings I once felt threatened by no longer pierce my day-by-day consciousness of how to move and be in the world. By contrast, a younger, more “visible” woman would be seen by men as a “public woman.”
“Women in their twenties now may be empowered to make themselves known through a career or relationships,” Stillion Southard says, “but there’s ‘the flip side,'” too—that such women are considered “fodder for the public to objectify.” Growing older provides a comforting kind of freedom in retreating from all that, “but on the other hand, it kind of makes women over the age of 50 voiceless.”
Dr. Carrie Baker—Ms. scholar, Professor and Director of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College and author of The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment—blames politics. As women increasingly campaign for public office, their victories are threatening to some men who were socialized to believe women must defer their space and time to them. In 2018, a record 53 women filed to be candidates for the Senate, and 476 women for the House. Now, women make up 23.7 percent of the United States Congress—a record high. “I think men are not reacting well to that,” Baker told me. ‘Men see that as a challenge to their power. Men are feeling on the defense and so they are taking the offense.”
I was with my husband as I was called a “bitch,” driving home from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport after a college weekend with our son. We were inching through thick traffic, along a four-lane road, in our Honda Civic hybrid at nearly 5 p.m. on a Monday. I let a car turn in ahead of me from a side street as a courtesy, nodding to the driver, and then inched forward some more. When another car pulled up behind her, I looked that driver in the eye as well. Taking turns this way is something I do all the time, and I try to make eye contact for our mutual safety.
But this driver became enraged. He lurched forward, nearly hitting the back of my car with his sedan. Then he pulled up to the left of me and lowered his window. “You looked me right in the eye and didn’t let me through!” he yelled before driving off. “You looked right at me! You fucking bitch!”
“Bitch” is a very old slur, retaining its meaning from the Middle English bicche, which is derived from Old English bicce, and might even go all the way back to to “Old Norse bikkja for “female dog,” according to Merriam-Webster. A decade after American women won the right to vote in 1920 through the 19th Amendment, Ernest Hemingway was cultivating a macho image by hunting big game, getting into literary fistfights and popularizing this word. He called many of his female characters “bitch goddesses” and insisted, when signing a book to writer Gertrude Stein, that “a bitch is a bitch is a bitch.”
Stillion Southard guessed that it was making eye contact, as a woman, that infuriated this man. “Once you decided to be assertive, the movement of the car and the eye contact,” she explained, “I think that threatened him because you weren’t being passive.”
Odd, right? What I saw as acts of courtesy and safety, this man considered aggressive. I didn’t think more of it until a week later, when another older white man repeatedly called me a “slut” in the Costco line.
I only rarely shop at the Costco in Gwinnett County, Georgia. It’s about an hour from home, and I’m self employed and disciplined about my time—so when I go, I bring a long shopping list. When I’m done, my cart overflows. On this particular Monday, I joined a long line of customers preparing to show their receipts to an employee at the door, and after a couple of minutes, I was second in line. The receipt checker was smiling and laughing, chatting with two female customers ahead of me. As I was waiting, a man strode past me, pushing a nearly empty cart. When it was my turn to have my receipt checked, he shoved his hand out first, and the employee began to look over his receipt.
I spoke up: “I am next in line,” I pointed out. “No you aren’t,” he said. “There are two lines and I am next.” Eventually, after a back-and-forth, the employee looked up, glanced at both of us, and declared: “she’s right.” The man checked my receipt and quickly marked it with his Sharpie, but I couldn’t move my cart. The man who had tried to cut me in this line had blocked me into it as well, standing in the way while the checker returned his attention to him.
I waited. And then the man turned to me. “You’re a slut,” he said. Part of me wanted to laugh: I’ve been loyal to the same man for more than 25 years. Slut? The word felt so out of place. Part of me wanted to shout out loud: What is happening here?
He repeated himself. I raised my voice a bit. Looking over the people in line, I asked: “Did everyone hear what this man just called me? He called me a slut!” No one responded. The man moved on to the parking lot. I was shaking, frozen. The whole exchange felt surreal. An older woman leaving the store touched my arm. “Shh,” she urged. “Let him go. In one ear and out the other.” I nodded and went to my van.
Then the man reappeared, looping around and pausing next to me in his pickup truck, determined to get the last word: “You’re upset because I called you a slut and hurt your feelings,” he said. “Boo hoo.” And then he left.
I loaded up my van and sat there, waiting and waiting. Could he be waiting for me around the corner, beyond the reach of Costco’s security cameras? Had he seen me get into my van? Was I a fool to call him out in public?
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “slut” comes from the Middle English slutte—a “chiefly British, disparaging” term for “an unclean or slovenly woman.” Like “promiscuous,” it has always been used in reference to the aforementioned “public woman.” Eighteenth-century Americans applied it to “women who were perceived to be not in their private space, not in a parlor with other women, not being escorted by their husbands walking down the street, not at church with their families, this kind of thing. Women who were alone in public were perceived to be prostitutes.
Abolitionist women crossed a line into the public consciousness in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By arguing against slavery—and then, for a woman’s right to vote—they were doing what had been regarded as men’s work, taking up room in political places that had been exclusively male domains.
“Women were not supposed to cross over,” Stillion Southard said. “Once they did, they were promiscuous. If they were willing to be in public and to be seen by men, like almost inviting men to look at them because they’re speaking and be seen by men, when they were speaking, they were considered to be a public, sexual woman, the same as a prostitute.”
Baker says the man’s decision to drive his car near mine and call me a slut yet again was clearly a threat, a way of telling me I’m “rapable.” But Stillion Southard says speaking up amid other shoppers and employees was a great power move. “You made yourself visible,” she told me. “And actually, what’s kind of awesome is that you made him make you even more visible, because you were not going to let this be a secret, right? You were like, ‘say it again.’ From a rhetorical perspective, you forced him to make himself known as misogynist, which was kind of awesome. You took the power back from that exchange.”
But I didn’t feel powerful then, and I still don’t.
Driving home that day, I had plenty of time to consider the dynamics. Neither man had any real power over me. They were irrelevant. Other men have stood in my way at other times and places; these were not them. But why now, after years of being left alone, was I taunted for being a woman?
While I was being slut-shamed at Costco in Georgia, 49-year-old Bruce Michael Alexander of Tampa was appearing in federal court in Albuquerque on a charge of abusive sexual contact. According to The Associated Press, he allegedy groped a woman who had fallen asleep on a Southwest Airlines flight, touching her on the breast with dirty fingernails and thick fingers. The criminal complaint says Alexander denied the accusations to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but kept bringing up President Donald Trump—explaining, in an apparent reference to the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced during the campaign in which the reality TV star bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” that “the president of the United States says it’s okay to grab women by their private parts.”
More recently, on February 8, 49-year-old Joey Landon Ritenour of Blacksburg, Virginia, was sentenced to a year in prison for “stalking several women, stealing their underwear and leaving semen on their cars”—because, according to the AP, he felt “disrespected by the women, with some having cut him off in traffic.”
“Our current president has not been quiet about his views about women, and he has said as much,” Stillion Southard said. “And he has not been held accountable. There’s been no redress, and there’s been a loud and robust and sort of raging movement to bring attention to the misogyny that he is promoting. But nothing has been done official to say this is wrong, and so, it goes on. It carries on.”
That brings us back to Baker—who studied and worked for two decades in Georgia, where the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Brian Kemp, a white man, narrowly won in a vitriolic campaign against Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, a black woman. “The political moment is relevant,” Baker said. “Kemp really ratcheted things up to a ridiculous level. It’s all of a piece. He’s a sort of Trump-like figure who is thriving on political divisiveness. People are not immune to that.” And, she added: “Whenever women are organizing on their behalf, they get backlash.”
As solitary gestures, my attempts to claim my place feel inconsequential. Many more women like me are going to have to hold their places in lines both visible and invisible. Only then will we have a collective response to this backlash that matters.
We should not be, as Stillion Southard put it, “slut-shamed for existing.”
