The Panopticon of Slut Shaming

A panopticon prison at Presidio Modelo, Isla De la Juventud, Cuba.


Roy Baumeister, author of "Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions," which blew my mind when I read it on Mark Regnerus' recommendation a few years ago, has a new book out, Is There Anything Good About Men? I sure hope he answers that question, because I'm dying to know.

In a recent blog post on the Oxford University Press website, Baumeister writes that men incur more "costs" for sex, by which he means men "pay" more for it. Women suffer more "consequences" for sex, which can be measured in social "cost." Case in point: a woman's "value" goes down if she gets a reputation for "selling" at too low a price, i.e., being labeled a "slut."

Baumeister argues that by every available measure, men have a higher sex drive than women. While I agree that by the indicators currently available (including frequency of fantasy, sex, and masturbation) men do show a higher desire than women, he fails to note that we don't yet have a way of measuring how women are successfully curbed by our social system that promises punishment if they act out sexually and that they are collectively responsible for their own sexual regulation. He might want to check in with Cindy Meston about this question.

I can't imagine a more effective way of curbing sex drive than by the constant threat of disease, social ostracism, and possibly death(!!!). Patrick Carnes, the founder of the Gentle Path sex addiction treatment program, writes about the effectiveness of sex-negative culture at causing "sexual anorexia" in his book by the same name(p. 47). Sexual anorexia creates in its sufferers a fear of sexuality and its consequences so great that all desires are sublimated.

Baumeister (and Kathleen Vohs, with whom he has written about sexual economics) makes the clear case in his seminal article that women moderate their sexual behavior because they want (and need) to maintain their social and sexual "value" by selling at a high price to get men's "resources." Regnerus supports this finding in his new book on college student sexual behavior, Premarital Sex in America.

On college campuses, the fiercest guards of sexual behavior are women, not men. Women police eachother's sexual behavior and shame eachother for "selling" at too low a price: witness the number of girls who spread rumors about so-and-so's having sex under the wrong circumstances, with the wrong guy, or with too great a frequency. You see this shaming at its ugliest when women respond to another woman's sexual assault with questions about whether she was really raped at all.

The idea, of course, is that if a woman you associate with sells at a low price that affects your own value, so you can slut-shame her away from you and maintain your own high price. Men don't care--they'll take whatever sex they can get.

Foucault described the panopticon, a prison where the guard can see all inmates at once but they can't tell if they're really being watched, as the perfect way to create a system of self-enforcement to make naturally individualistic humans compliant for maximum profit. The panopticon of slut shaming puts women in a position of monitoring eachother while never being sure if the people in power--men--are really paying attention.