Yeah. Given how I can’t get these thoughts to go away I guess I need to write them down.
So - slut shaming. Making women feel like shit since the year dot.
From being a sexually sheltered (on paper at least) teenager I was suddenly catapulted at the age of 16 to a sixth form college far away from home - boarding college in Wales. I had only just turned 16 and this was an International College so I was one of the youngest there.
It had seemed brilliant when I’d visited my older sister who had been there in the couple of years just before me, but just as we were very different people, our experiences were obviously different too.
Picture this. A campus of 250 horny teenagers stuck deep in the middle of nowhere. One pub within walking distance. One bar on campus, licensed to serve alcohol to all these horny unsupervised teenagers. One Kiri, fresh from the wilds of Derby - sheltered, broken, desperate for friendship and affection. No prior drinking experience to speak of (partying with friends in the normal teenager way one of the many experiences missed out on.)
Looking back, I’m sure other people got up to similar things but they were just more discreet. Discretion has never been one of my strong points anyway, but as I found out at the end of the two year scholastic experience, I was never going to achieve discretion (and therefore miss out on the utter helplessness of being slut shamed by everyone you are trapped on a tiny campus with) because two of my best friends had been reporting my exploits to the entire school. Every fortnight.
That this still plays on my mind so frequently shows (at least to me) that these kind of things do matter. I was young, impressionable, away from home for the first time. And desperately trying to fit in.
We had this thing called The Back Page, you see. It was the back page of our fortnightly college newspaper, and it featured all the college gossip. People were given anonymity through the use of nicknames. One of my highly disguised ones was, for instance, Derby Girl. So - not rocket science to work out who was who. The only thing that was a heavily guarded secret was the identities of the writers of the Back Page. No one ever knew who was writing it - other than the editor and the writers themselves.
I was featured in almost every edition. Every time I got drunk, and yet another horny drunk boy got a kiss off me, it was there. It was awful and hideous and I was singled out and bullied.
So imagine my surprise when at the end of the two years the identities of the authors came to light. One of them was one of my best friends. Everything made sense now. She betrayed me in the crudest way imaginable. And to keep my circle of friends, I had to accept that it was just one of those things and accept my abuser as a friend.
I am still scarred from this. And I still have trust issues as a result. And it compounded that message that even when you’ve been bullied and abused you shouldn’t make a fuss.
This shit hurts, people.