The Slut Uniform

This an expansion of a comment I made to Amanda's post at Pandagon about "How to dress like a slut", which is an expansion of this discussion to a post of Jill's at Feministe, especially the commenter who talked about "I see these 12-16 year old girls wearing the slut uniform as they walk home from school holding hands with Mr. Right-now".

My take:

You're all wrong. Sorry.

The post and comments in question, I believe, are referring to teenagers. So I asked my native informant, a HS junior, whether there is a "slut uniform".

"Of course there is!" said she. "It's the slut uniform!"

"How can you tell?" said I. "Doesn't 'slut' mean a woman who's comfortable with her body and sexuality, and feels like showing it off?"

"No no," she said. "In the first place, it's a *uniform*. It's worn by girls who feel pressured to dress just like everybody else, whether they like it or not. In the second place, it's not worn by girls who are doing it because they're comfortable with their bodies. Take it from a teenaged feminist." (I'm so proud.)

She then proceeded to describe the current Slut Uniform at her public HS in NJ. It is in the nature of such things that there will be regional variations, and it is certain that next year's Uniform will be different in style though not in intent. She also warns that no single element of the Uniform is a clear marker: it's not the items, so much as the way they're worn.

1. The fundamental idea is to show (or imply) as much skin as possible above the hipbones, while still staying within the school's dress code. Her school's code includes: no visible navels, no intentionally visible underwear, skirts must extend past the wearer's fingertips, tops must have straps of some minimum width (either one or two inches, she's not sure).

2. The top is either a tube top or a strappy top that does *not* conform to the dress code. Over this, the girl wears a diaphanous, code-conforming longer top, usually tied or wrapped in such a way as to push the breasts together and outward, to emphasize the cleavage, which most of them don't have a lot of. If you look at this picture of Paris Hilton and imagine her wearing a black tube top instead of the black bra, that would be exactly the look the girls are going for.

3. The bottom is more variable.

3a. If a skirt, it will be the minimum length allowed by the dress code. The skirt may have a ruffle at the bottom, which keeps the length within code but bounces up a lot.

3b. If jeans, they will be hip-huggers, the kind that look decent when you're standing up but when you sit down force you to either kind of lean back onto your chair or else prove to the entire class that yes, you are wearing your red thong underwear today. This is not a hypothetical example.

3c. If sweats or shorts, they usually have wording across the butt, which my informant calls "the back". I find these bottoms soul-searingly indecent, but my informant says no, wording on your butt doesn't mean you're a slut, it depends on what it says and who's wearing them. And how she wears them: if she walks so as to bounce her hips from side to side, bonding the boys' eyes to her butt with the krazy glue of puberty†, then yes, but not if it has the name of her team or hobby and she just walks normally in them.

4. The shoes should be flip-flops, or strappy sandals, or other footgear not designed for ease of movement.

The important point is that the Slut Uniform is *not*, as lb assumed, worn by "sluts":

assuming the definition of slut is that of the empowered slut (as opposed to, say, the insecure overcompensating slut, the derogatory slut strawman, or whatever other competing definitions there might be

My young informant's opinion is that, by definition, the Slut Uniform is worn by "the insecure overcompensating slut", because *hello*, teenage girl. "We're HS students, none of us have reached the empowered stage yet." The Uniform is worn by girls who want to fit in with other girls, and who are using male attention to gather "points" for a (normal human) social dominance/bonding game they play with other girls. It's also used by girls to reassure themselves and others about who they are: "I'm a girl! I dress just like the other girls! And boys notice me! So I'm a normal girl!"

My informant is also of the opinion that girls do this to give boys what they want, which is easy, whereas giving the Calculus teachers what they want is hard.

She also notes that the clothes worn by the athletic girls overlap with the Slut Uniform, but the athletes' clothes, even when very skimpy, tend to stay in place more when they move around. The athletes are, as a group, more comfortable in their bodies than the rest of the teenagers, and as an adult I think part of what the Slut Uniform is aping is that physical comfort. But I notice that the girls on the gymnastics and cheerleading teams (whose practices I watch while I'm waiting for Sprog #2 to finish her gymnastics class), though they wear sweats or shorts with words across the butt (the team name, usually), have tops that stay put. Even more noticeable is that they don't bleach their hair, and around here bleached-blonde hair is definitely part of the Slut Uniform (see Paris Hilton).

From my informant's POV, Ms. Kate's definition:

1) aggressive sexuality (or at least unapologetic)
2) lack of subtlety

is only half right. Lack of subtlety, no question, but it's not aggressive sexuality that *she* sees, it's

1) interest in giving boys (part of) what they want

I don't think it's just that my baby feminist here despises women who give men what they want. I think it's something about the culture as a whole, that one of the worst & most common insults for a women is that she gives men what they want. It's a fucked-up variant on "I wouldn't join a club that would take me for a member": "I wouldn't respect a woman who'd actually want to have sex with me".

†a great expression, but not my own.