And although today those criminal cronies have finally received the social disapproval and penalization that they have long deserved, slut-shaming itself has only grown stronger and more acceptable. Here are a few surprising examples. The Slut-Shaming Mafia In Europe in the Middle Ages, violent gangs of teenagers known as the Abbeys of Misrule would roam the streets fighting other gangs, intimidating villagers, and, oddly, using bullying tactics to help enforce traditionalist social order.
Authorities of the day would tolerate and even sanction their violence, stealing, and terrorizing specifically because they helped keep slutty women in check. The students would trade this sadistic privilege for money from warm-hearted townspeople, effectively holding both people of Israeli descent and sexually-liberated women for ransom. I find it ironic that people found it socially acceptable to withhold money to beat a whore but socially inacceptable to pay money to fuck her. Incidentally, the price set by the government to release a whore from a student beating was one crown per whore about the equivalent of five sheep.
Also in Avignon during the same time period, both Jews and whores were legally prohibited from touching fruit or bread in public markets. For the French of the 16th century, anti-Semitism and slut-shaming were essentially on the same highly-esteemed level. Pussy Punishing In the 18th century, animal cruelty was commonly used as a slut-shaming metaphor.
Traditionalists would take their anger out on these zoological representations, inflicting barbaric torments on domesticated animals because physically torturing the sexually-liberated women and men was by then incidentally illegal. Cats were some of the most common victims used as effigies. Celebrations of the summer solstice, so widely linked with lovers, involved in France a horrifying variety of tortures to cats, tying them in bags, suspending them from ropes, setting them on fire and chasing them through the streets, or driving them into the traditional bonfire with a cermonious volley of rifle fire Darnton , By killing la grise, says Darnton, the workers in effect accused the mistress of being a witch and of sexual infidelity.
By assaulting her pet, the workers ravished the mistress symbolically. At the same time, they delivered the supreme insult to their master. You might be laughing right now, but why is it such a stretch to classify abuse of promiscuous nonconformists as a hate crime? Why is thrashing Jews now illegal but thrashing whores is still fine? In , the Anti-Defamation League was founded to fight anti-Semitism, but there is still no organization that fights for the civil rights of sluts with anywhere near as much political clout.
