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By J. Lawrence Scholer | Sunday, November 3, 2002

Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut is a post-Columbine study of troubled teenagers who inhabited a pre-Columbine world. As we all know, Columbine changed things. What exactly it changed is unclear, yet the event continues to appear in ill-informed sociological studies of today's teenagers. Such a statement about Columbine is truly meaningless, but for some reason it works. Just think of the 2001 film Storytelling where pathetic filmmaker Toby Oxman wants his documentary to focus on teenagers post-Columbine. Fast Girls is just as pathetic as Oxman, only it is not as funny. In fact, it is not even entertaining; rather it is a sad testament of what passes for serious analysis these days.

The author, Emily White, is not an academic, but a writer. She is steeped, however, in feminist theory, and she milks it to the best of her scant ability. Her writing attempts to be academic, but it staggers along, dropping the names of hip theoreticians and displaying a disdain for the simile as a legitimate figure of speech.

White's prosody aside, the subject of her book is what is most striking—teenage sluts, which White feels a step above the label of promiscuous. She attempts to deconstruct these girls in order to remove the blame from the young women and place it on society. Shocking. But, first White struggles to define the slut. Why are these girls branded with a name that banishes them to the periphery of the high school social scene? What exactly could it be? Is it something they have done? Well.... But White takes fifty-nine pages to reach the obvious conclusion: 'What is so monstrous about a sex-crazed girl? This perhaps the question at the heart of the whole slut story.' All traditional morals aside, there is typically something wrong with a person who is 'crazed,' no matter for what.

White is obsessed with sluts. She has spent hours researching these girls on the fringe. She has read Foucault, interviewed former sluts, and used the Internet. Her Internet research was perhaps the most intriguing. 'One morning I type the word 'slut' into the search engine of my computer. Over nine thousand sites come up, mostly porn.... I click from one to another—Teenage Sluts, Slutty Catholic Schoolgirls.' This research, after personal contact with sluts, was some of her most valuable. White also manages to deconstruct Internet pornography: 'These continually appearing windows brought to my mind the endless quality of the high school slut rumour, the way the girls who are on the inside of it cannot find a way to shut the story down.'

As remarkable as White thinks them, sluts are not that great. They are highly promiscuous teenage girls, ranging in age from their early to late teens. Some graduate from high school; others opt for their GED. Many abuse uncool and unattractive substances, like methamphetamine; others smoke pot. Most seem unintelligent, either because they were born that way or because mental illness debilitates them. They do, or did, however, have a lot of sex. White, however, finds them interesting, so much so that she brings up the topic with co-workers and with her family at dinner. And, guess what, everyone she encounters has a slut story of his own, and, this person can't wait to share it with the world. It is as if the urge to resist telling a slut story is too fierce to resist.

Oh my God, dude. There was this chick at my school...and there were these three guys...and it was like...and she...for real, dude...and then she got kicked out of her dorm because people found out...and she asked these two girls to...and it was like.... Oh sorry. I took my eyes off the screen. It just kind of happened—but now we're just gossiping.

Anyway, White interviewed hundreds of sluts in preparation for her book. She found that each told a similar story, one of alienation and degradation. These girls had rocks tossed at them, were duct-taped to trees, and called names. These girls have earned the scorn of decent society for no reason other than their unhealthy and odd ways of rebellion—they are on the outside looking in, and it is a permanent condition. The slut to our collective minds, according to White, is a 'universal girl who's gone too far, who can't come back, who has sinned beyond the periphery of redemption.'

The interviews with the women were the most disappointing part of the book. I was expecting interviews of the nature that one can find in books like Gig or Working—such as unaltered transcripts of interviews. Instead White takes the interviews and interprets them to fit her agenda, which is one of feminist theory and pathos. We'll start with Darby. Darby, sixteen and a slut, recently moved to Seattle from California with her mother, who is single. She has dropped out of high school and is enrolled in a GED program. Although long branded a 'slut,' she has kept her title a secret—from her mother and her twenty-two year old boyfriend. Darby, according to White, 'wears inch-thick black eye shadow, cutoff jeans, and ripped black tights.' Darby still cannot comprehend why the rumours won't stop, and she just can't deal. 'The experience made her so wary of high school itself that she won't enrol again, even though she has moved thousands of miles, to a city where no one knows her.' Maybe college will be better. Ha-ha.

Lola is another slut, but she somehow manages to avoid the rumours. She lives in Los Angeles and is a cocktail waitress, but she does have aspirations—she wants to travel to Central America and have a part in a Billy Crystal movie. 'I had been having sex since I was thirteen,' she said. 'I had fallen in love then and had sex. After that, after we broke up, I still wanted to keep having sex with guys. But there were a lot of people who thought there was something wrong with me.' So, kids thought she was a freak, but she never became a slut...how can this be? Look no further than her skin, under the heavy make-up. Lola is half-Mexican, and the slut rumours are confined, for the most part, to middle-class white America. Did someone just say 'Columbine' or was that internal?

Fortunately, White seems to have taken enough Women's Studies courses during her undergraduate years to have a cocktail party knowledge of Foucault and his History of Sexuality. Thus, she comes to her conclusion—it's all about power. Sluts are actually incredibly powerful; unfortunately they are women. Because the slut is ostracised, she develops an individualism that is raw and frightening to men. In order to prevent them from exercising their extraordinary gift, normal people give them the title 'slut.' This shuts them down and renders them useless. Thus, in a sense, sluts are but constructions of our patriarchal society. 'Why did we so effortlessly and automatically create a 'slut,' almost as if she were creating us?' White asks. Despite all our efforts to demonise these girls and strip them of their power, they actually win in the end.

Teenage sluts are oppressed and ostracised. They are but another minority group stricken by a blight that pervades our society. And, the future doesn't look bright—if White sees any sort of shift forthcoming, she doesn't foreshadow it. Maybe that will come later—for now, all we have is White's significant exegesis on the matter. So, sluts will remain on the fringes, like so many before them. They should probably start a club or something.

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