Slut Shaming In The Scarlet Letter

In our modern society everything is labeled and it makes sense as to why. People want accessibility and ease of use, so clearly establishing what an object or event is just makes life easier in the scheme of industrialization. Today’s youth especially demand for the swiftness of information protruding through the accessibility of smart phones. In essence, people have been trained to assign black and white labels to the non-human and human. Yet this systematic labeling far extends that of products seen on the shelves of your local super market, and actually creates harmful connotations among people seen as “different” from the social norm. Harmful labels which create a sense of a right answer in a world that is clearly a spectrum to be determined

Further effects of societal labeling could be seen through the themes of The Scarlet Letter such as alienation, hypocrisy, and the policing of sins. In society today, an upward trend has been increasing constantly that is one of the final remnants of our theocratic history, that of slut-shaming.
Slut-shaming has always been a problem in the western world due to the religious backgrounds that created the long standing cultures and governments we know today. Basically, the thesis of slut-shaming is that those who are deemed sexually promiscuous, or that give the appearance of being so, are considered dirty or lesser than one who is more withholding. Extending towards any act of behavior that can be perceived as sexual in nature This central idea is flawed from the beginning, as Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold, writers for Gender and Education, point out saying that culturally “women are the bearers of morality, and essentialised understandings that this morality is held within the female body”(Ringrose). From this viewpoint the analysis of slut shaming becomes contextualized in way of social expectations, and using examples of slut-shaming as a window into

Looking towards one of history’s most accepting regions, the American South, this phenomena has become encoded into law. In 2013 the Florida state legislature passed a law, 134 to 16 mind you, stating that if a women wishes to put her child up for adoption, yet does not know the father, then the women must take out newspaper ads, not subsidized by the government but from her own wallet, detailing the women’s name, her physical description and every possible man that could be the child’s father (Pollitt). This shows just how in grained the ideas of slut-shaming are. Women, already burdened, must humiliate themselves in such a manner that any newspaper reader and the society she would belong to would see that she not only is wanting to put her child up for adoption, which is already controversial in such a right-winged state, but also for having pre-marital sex. This indignation is a policing force in women’s sexuality and is obviously a nightmare having to expose your private matters for the world to see. In this sense, slut- shaming is leaning towards stripping women’s rights of privacy, though this basic right isn’t the only take-away point women are experiencing in order for society to shame