Slut Shaming / Literature

Slut-Shaming in Literature

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• Acid Row:
  • Fay calls Melanie a slut and a whore, both to other people and to Melanie's face, because she's a teenager who already has two kids out of wedlock and a third on the way (none of whom have the same father) and is rumoured to be a glamour model. Fay also acts scandalised that Melanie tends to wear short skirts and skimpy tank tops that leave little to the imagination. Melanie herself states that Fay is just jealous because she never had a relationship or children herself - and Melanie is actually right about this. Sophie also observes that Fay takes an holier-than-thou attitude towards women like Melanie partly to make herself feel better about being a spinster.
  • Laura's stepdaughter Kimberley calls her a tart and makes other disparaging comments - such as mocking the noises Laura makes when she has sex - because she knows Laura has only shacked up with Kimberley's father to put a roof over her and her daughter's head.
• Alexis Carew: Due to the patriarchal culture of New London's Fringe, the male crews on both military and merchant ships frequently brag about their sexual exploits on shore leave, whereas women have to be more furtive and discreet if they choose to visit dockside brothels or otherwise seek sexual companionship. Alexis herself uses a male prostitute a couple of times in the second book, but only as a shoulder to cry on due to her isolation aboard ship.^note The other officers are either sexist or scared of the captain, who hates her, and she can't fraternize with the enlisted crew even though they do like her. She eventually has her first time in the third book with her Love Interest Lieutenant Delaine Thiebaud.
• The Alice Network:
  • Both her parents and society in general shame Charlie for being pregnant out of wedlock. It doesn’t help that she doesn’t know who the father is.
  • The other waitresses call “Marguerite” a slut for Sleeping with the Boss.
• In Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Dr. Jordan has an affair with his landlady, whose husband has functionally abandoned her and left her impoverished. Kingston society scorns her after this, even though she was on the verge of losing her house and only Dr. Jordan giving her money kept her fed.
• In American Fuji, American expat Gaby Staunton keeps Alex Thorn at arm's length for fear that her Japanese neighbors and co-workers will assume that she's sleeping with him. Her fears aren't entirely irrational; she later learns that her mysterious firing from Shizuoka University was due to Lester and Marubatsu concocting rumors that she had an affair, which was enough to get her fired.
• Laura from Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is an eleven-year-old Huge Schoolgirl who hit puberty a few years before her peers. As a result of her precocious looks, some of her classmates are jealous of her and made up rumors about her going behind buildings with older boys. When Margaret parrots these rumors at Nancy she snaps, which causes Margaret to regret saying it because she now realizes the rumors were fake.
• The Aubrey-Maturin series plays the Double Standard for all its worth.
  • Aubrey has never learned to keep it in his pants and frequently gets into trouble at home and abroad, not least when a mixed race son by a favorite whore of his shows up later in the series and earlier when an unscrupulous woman blackmails him with the threat of showing up, pregnant, to his wife. When, in the first book, his dalliance with a superior officer's wife costs him a small fortune and an important promotion, others defend him because "It was her what set her cap for him! Everyone knows that!"
    • When Aubrey catches an STI in the first book, he's told by Maturin (acting as his physician) that "a lady of your acquaintance has been too liberal with her affections". Slut-Shaming and the Double Standard in one sentence.
  • Meanwhile Maturin ardently pursues a widow whose reputation is thoroughly blackened by "doing what a woman must to get by alone in this world". Otherwise, he was so chaste that his superiors in the intelligence community were for a time concerned that he might be susceptible to blackmail. For being gay.
• Common in the works of Jane Austen:
  • In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia's fling with Wickham almost ruins her entire family's reputation. They are saved only when Darcy pays off Wickham to marry her. Georgiana Darcy narrowly escaped the same fate when Wickham wanted to elope with her in order to get his hands on her fortune. However, Lydia, unlike most characters of her time, is breezily undisturbed by what her sisters regard as such a shameful disgrace.
  • Mansfield Park's Maria Rushworth is forever ostracized from polite society after leaving her husband to run away with Henry Crawford, who then refuses to marry her. She ends up having to leave the country.
  • Invoked in Sense and Sensibility when Elinor cautions Marianne about getting too close to Willoughby for the sake of her reputation. Willoughby is also revealed to have caused disgrace to Colonel Brandon's ward, with whom Willoughby had an affair and abandoned her when she became pregnant.
  • Generally, any female character considered to be too flirtatious, or who breaks off an engagement to chase another man, is subjected to this (Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, Elizabeth Elliot, and others).
• The Battle Of The Virgins: Mariana's aunts Lola and Rosa blame the high rate of divorce in Puerto Rico on women who are unwilling to put up with husbands' shenanigans. Sadly for Mariana, Padre Ángel shares their perspective.
• In Blaze (or Love in the Time of Supervillains), it's portrayed in horrid, but realistic, detail.
  • Blaze joins her friends and all the other characters in ridiculing and Slut-Shaming Catherine Wiggan{s}, a large breasted girl known for her sexual exploits. She's not a slut. The rumours were started by the jealous girlfriend of a boy she attracted.
  • Blaze later slut-shames Mark by giving him the name, Mark the Shark and writes a comic warning young girls not to date him. In retaliation, he posts a picture of her online, wearing lingerie in a flirtatious pose. Upon seeing it, the entire town slut-shame her.
  • Later, a topless photo of Blaze gets released onto the internet and she has to endure her own gauntlet.
• In A Brother's Price some aspects of this are played straight; there is gossip about a man who was caught with his wives' servant after the engagement and before the wedding, and promptly returned to his family, as "damaged goods". Apparently, he is still able to show his face in public, but it is a stain on his reputation, especially as there is no cure for STD. On the other hand, this trope is averted in that theoretical knowledge about sex is considered to make a man more desirable. The same applies to clothes - the codpiece is very much in fashion.
• Petra suffers this in Caliphate. Being a woman is horrible in the titular fundamentalist state, but being a Christian woman is even worse since they are second-class citizens stripped of any rights and their women are naturally viewed as whores. She gets raped by her master's son and his friends, who accuse her of leading them on and the sharia court agrees that is her fault too. Though her rapists get flogged, she is sold off into slavery, turned into a prostitute and gets abused even more by the customers as a result.
• The Change Room: Eliza reflects about how while growing up as a teen girls called others sluts as the worst possible insult, even though all of them had sexual desires which they wanted to act on (and did). In later life, she embraces the term, no longer ashamed by her sexuality. Once she has an affair with Shar however, Eliza mentally denounces both of them as sluts at times, as does her husband Andrew after he finds out (though it has more justification then).
• In Corpies, Bubble Bubble is trademarked as a wholesome good girl, wearing modest dresses and generally acting nice in public. Then she's hit by a scandal. Apparently, years ago, she slept with a movie director, who later turns out to have been already in a relationship with a famous movie star. When the truth comes out, the director blames Bubble Bubble for "seducing" him, possibly using a secret Super ability (despite the fact that her abilities are well-documented). Her reputation destroyed, she nearly gives up, but Titan convinces his agent Lenny to take her on, and Lenny tells that the best (and fun) option she has is to rebrand herself and own what she really did (i.e. have consensual sex with a man, who lied to her about being single). She goes on a talk show, dressed in more normal clothing (halfway between "prudey" and "slutty"), where the host immediately pounces on her for the sex. She counters by point out that, yes, she had sex with a man she thought was single, but that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. When the shocked host tries to recover and bring up her being a role model, she keeps pressing him and insisting that the Double Standard on sexually-active women needs to go away. While some conservatives still grumble about her behavior, the majority accept her new "brand", resulting in the director once against being the subject of the scandal.
• The Diamond Girls: Apparently, the Diamonds’ neighbours at Bletchworth call Sue a “slag” behind her back, due to the fact she’s a single mother whose five children have all been fathered by different men, which her children are aware of but never tell her to spare her feelings. Sue's eldest daughter Martine later reveals what everyone thought of Sue and that she agrees in a fit of anger, devastating Sue. Bruce, however, disagrees, saying that although Sue has had many boyfriends, he thinks she’s a good mother and a good person. Sue’s other children vehemently disagree as well, with Jude threatening to punch anyone who says it.
• In Doctrine of Labyrinths, both women and gay men receive this treatment: Mehitabel gets fired from her position as governess and later ordered by a spy "go trawling" among her lovers for information, while Thaddeus claims that Felix will "believe anything a man tells you when he's buried in your ass." Malkar even calls Felix a "slut" and a "cheap whore"... right after raping him.
• Dollanganger Series: In her youth, Cathy has lots of ill-advised sex. She keeps multiple men on the hook at one time and purses relationships with two Domestic Abusers, her Parental Substitute, and her Brother. So in the final book there's a Parental Hypocrisy element to how she tells her daughter she shouldn't be having sex so young—but it's slowly Deconstructed. Cathy, now in her 50s, looks back upon with youth with different eyes. She doesn't want to see her daughter make the same mistakes she did. She warns her daughter to take it slow with sex out of a desire to protect her, though it takes a while for her to be able to articulate this well.
  Cathy: Your father and I want only the best for you. We don't want you to be hurt. Let this experience with Lance teach you a lesson, and hold back until you are eighteen and able to reason with… more maturity. Hold out longer than that if you can. When you grab at sex too soon, it has a way of biting back and giving you exactly what you don't want. It did that to me, and I've heard you say a thousand times you want a stage and film career, and husbands and babies have to wait. Many a girl has been thwarted by a baby that started because of uncontrollable passion. Be careful before committing yourself to anyone. Don't fall in love too soon, for when you do you make yourself vulnerable to so many unforeseen events. Give romance a try without sex, Cindy, and save yourself all the pain of giving too much too soon.
• In Dragonlance, Laurana gets subjected to this by her father and brother the first time she sees them again after running off to go adventuring with her love interest Tanis Half-Elven and his mostly human traveling party, and they basically accuse her of whoring around with them. She's so shocked by this that she faints on the spot.
• Earth's Children: Most cultures in the series, including the Zelandonii, are usually pretty open and accepting when it comes to sex, with promiscuity and open relationships being considered quite normal. However, even they're not completely immune from slut-shaming attitudes. In The Shelters of Stone, Ayla and Jondalar meet a group of teenage girls who are preparing for First Rites, where they're ritually deflowered to mark the passage into womanhood. Some of the other girls look down on Janida because she "cheated" by not waiting until First Rites; she's already pregnant by her boyfriend and is only having her Rites because she isn't 'officially' an adult if she doesn't, meaning she can't legally marry her boyfriend. Janida herself isn't too concerned because she's happy her first time was with a boy she loves and plans on mating; her mating is also regarded as lucky because she's already pregnant. Nor does she have to experience the same uncertainty and awkwardness the others do regarding the Rites. Ayla also treats her with sympathy, wondering why it should matter so much if a girl has sex before First Rites unless force was involved.
• Evernight: In Balthazar, Madison repeatedly mocks Britnee for being in a relationship with Craig (which allegedly began before he dumped Skye) and for the way she dresses, and calls Skye a slut and a whore for allegedly sleeping with their substitute teacher. She herself has no issue flirting with her teacher and talking about hot guys constantly, though. When Britnee gives her a polite but brutally honest "Reason You Suck" Speech (partly in defence of Skye), she outright calls out Madison's behaviour as slut-shaming and "anti-feminist".
• The Squire of Dames from The Faerie Queene laughs and publicly mocks Florimell for being guilty of lust, as proved when she is unable to wear a magical belt made for chaste women.
• Fifty Shades of Grey:
  • Somewhat inverted. Christian talks of Ana's virginity as an "issue" or "an obstacle to be removed". Kate also mentions that she has been waiting for Ana to lose her virginity for 4 years (as if she had nothing better to do).
  • On the other hand, Ana herself tends to be uncomfortable with women having casual sex. At one point, she even worries that she's being a "kept woman" for Grey.
  • It's worth noting that while Ana considers a couple (Kate Kavanagh and Elliot Grey) kissing publicly to be altogether too public a display of affection, she herself gets penetrated digitally in a crowded elevator, screws in a car in full view of a major thoroughfare, a highway, and numerous businesses, and gives Grey a handjob at a large party while sitting at a table adjacent to his grandparents. None of these things are considered remotely inappropriate, even in view of Grey's insistence that Ana must always behave discreetly and properly in public.
• In Going Too Far by Catherine Alliott, the protagonist believes that she cheated on her husband while spending the weekend away with friends. It didn't happen. The guy drugged her and signed them both in at a hotel so he could use her as an alibi while he committed a burglary. Afterwards, she discovers she's pregnant. She is driven to despair, not only because her husband throws her out, but because of this trope she fears being rejected by her friends and family (who are largely sympathetic while acknowledging that her problems are her own fault) and struggles to tell her gynaecologist that she doesn't know who the father is. It's her husband's baby - the other man is infertile and didn't have sex with her anyway.
• Affects most of the female characters in The Golem and the Jinni. Anna has to hide her premarital pregnancy. Sophia has to hide her fling with the jinni, and her engagement is eventually broken because of the rumors. The golem marries a human who doesn't know what she is, and when they engage in "marital duties", it's all good for him...but the one time it starts stimulating her in a pleasurable way and she moves to pursue that, he thinks it's "immodest" and unbecoming of a wife. Because she can sense his desires, she shuts the feeling down.
• The Beautiful Slave Girls in Gor will use this to taunt and/or insult each other, at least when they're not taunting and/or insulting each other over how frigid the other is.
• This is done in kid-friendly terms in Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria. One of the signs that Bait was a Deceptive Disciple to Cicero was when he accused Caffeina of being a "tramp".
• Guardians of the Flame: Karl finds his character's personality coming out with this attitude, dismissing Doria's initial reluctance to have sex with a man in return for passage on his ship by saying she's already been with a lot of men, thus what's one more? She naturally slaps him. Karl apologizes to her over it later.
• The Han Solo Trilogy: Han calls Bria a lowest-level streetwalker in Rodian when he's mad at her, based on her past (fake) relationship with a Moff. She's so appalled at this that Bria's driven to tears and nearly draws down on him. Note too that she wasn't actually promiscuous at all- the accusation was enough.
• Harry Potter:
  • Ron and the twins take a dim view of Ginny's boyfriends. Her brothers seem to be fine with Harry being her boyfriend, though.
  • Ron reacts poorly to finding out that Hermione had snogged Viktor Krum. In Ron's case, it seems to mostly be jealousy due to his own inexperience, and Ginny calls him out for this when he comes dangerously close to using the word.
  • Mrs. Weasley is mentioned as still calling overly flirtatious/promiscuous women "scarlet women" (Hermione finds the term silly, probably showing how Mrs. Weasley is still kind of old-fashioned in her choice of vocabulary) and is rather cold towards Hermione when Rita Skeeter paints her as playing with the affections of both Krum and Harry. However, given that she sees Harry as a surrogate son, her resentment of Hermione was really just disapproval over her seemingly manipulating and hurting Harry. Once Mrs. Weasley learns the truth, she clearly feels like a complete idiot and goes to great lengths to once again show kindness to Hermione.
• The Heartstrikers: Bethesda the Heartstriker is the epitome of everything wrong with dragons. She is vain, greedy, petty, entirely self-centered, and hypocritical whenever it suits her. She murdered her own father (who loved her dearly) for power, and then ruthlessly eliminates any of her children that she suspects might plan to do the same to her. She encourages her children to fight and scrabble with each other for her favor, and then will sacrifice even her most valuable children out of nothing but her own petty pride. None of that has anything to do with why other dragons hate her. They simply hate her because she has lots of children. Most dragonesses lay eggs once or twice in their lives, with at least five hundred years in between. Bethesda has clutched ten times, roughly once a century, with a different male dragon each time. Other dragons consider this a horrible debasement of herself and derisively refer to her as "the Broodmare." Everything else she does? They consider that just being clever.
• This trope's subverted in The Hedonism Handbook by Michael Flocker. The term "slut" is listed as one of the "Ten Insulting Terms That Are Actually Quite Flattering" explaining:
  Why? It means you are sexually irresistible.
• Robert A. Heinlein loved My Girl Is a Slut and only made villains prudes. However, he frequently set his characters in a society similar to that he grew up in (early 20th century Midwestern America), which meant there was plenty of shaming going on, and his characters had to be devious to get away with doing what they wanted, and never felt bad for it.
• Robin Hobb deals with the subject realistically and without condemnation (from the author, plenty from the societies she creates).
  • The Realm of the Elderlings features restrictive roles for women and plenty of Slut-Shaming.
    • Molly has to go to great lengths to hide her relationship with Fitz and flee the castle once she gets pregnant, Fitz is killed in disgrace, and the coastal duchies nearly collapse during the war.
    • Fitz himself meets with a great deal of disapproval for his dalliance, but the consequences for him would never be as severe. Sure, he got killed a few times, but never for sex.
    • Conversely, his relationship with Starling never met with the same disapproval, because she's a minstrel, and the rules are different for minstrels.
    • Althea in the second series, in a more conservative climate, is routinely shamed for her activities, which include pursuing a man's career (sailing) and a man's sexual appetites (having any). Her niece, Malta, is portrayed as a man-eater in bud, which may be budding sexuality in a young woman or simple starvation for mental stimulation.
    • In the third trilogy, Fitz shames Starling a bit when, on learning of her marriage, he turns her out of his bed. He then shames his son for taking up with a young woman when he didn't have the ability to make an honest woman out of her and gets in a fight with the girl's father over the same. Fitz receives some shame himself when the world at large believes he's gaying it up with his foreign-born employer. The Fool himself also seems to disapprove of Fitz sleeping around with women he doesn't love, but not on moral grounds; his reasons are more complex and more specific to their relationship.
  • The Soldier Son: The eponymous son becomes, thanks to a disease, grotesquely obese, which warrants disgust from everyone he meets, and colors their opinion of any desire he might express. His father's disgust is deepened when he believes the boy caught the disease from a prostitute (false), and he flees town ahead of a mob for supposed necrophilia (also false).
• At one point, Honor Harrington is maligned by her socially and religious conservative enemies on Grayson for having had a romantic relationship before marriage with her murdered boyfriend, Paul Tankersley. Being from a much more liberal culture, and having a mother who keeps insisting Honor needs to get laid more often, the criticism doesn't bother her personally.
• The House of Night:
  • Aphrodite is constantly put down by the narrator, Zoey, for being a "slut", despite only being involved with two guys in the whole series, the second with whom the relationship is incredibly serious. This despite the fact that the main character has had several boyfriends (some at the same time) throughout the series. The plot also occasionally derails to talk about how bad blowjobs are.
  • At one point in the series, Zoey refers to a group of girls from her old high school as "hateful sluts". Since we never actually meet them, that's the only reason we really get as to why we're supposed to be angry at them hanging around Heath. Kayla is also lumped with the group, and earlier Zoey threatens to drink her blood for trying to date Heath after Zoey repeated said she wasn't interested in him anymore.
  • In the prequel novella Neferet's Curse, the night she became a vampire, Neferet was abandoned by her fiance because she was raped by her father and thus considered unclean by him.
  • In Hunted, the protagonists walk in on Stark drinking the blood of a vampire girl, clearly against her will. While Zoey doesn't view this as right, she goes on to argue that Stark can be a good person and kisses him to win him over, with the heavy implication that Nyx herself wanted her to do it. The vampire girl, meanwhile, is mocked by the characters for not being properly degraded by the experience, despite them all knowing that she (and the rest of the students on campus) are being brainwashed into loving Neferet and those who work for her.
• In the Hush, Hush series, Marcie Miller is shamed for her alleged sexual exploits at every possible opportunity. When she goes out to a nightclub, Nora and Vee whisper about how her dress is so short, her thong can be seen from under it. At one point, Nora pointlessly brings up how Marcie is rumored to put a tennis racket in the window, so boys know when she's offering sexual favors. Even Marcie's own Slut-Shaming is turned on her when Nora tells how she spray painted the word "whore" on Nora's locker. Nora adds that Marcie ought to have done that to herself.
• Lords of the Underworld: Because of her mother's justified reputation for promiscuity, Anya was bullied and sexually assaulted by both genders. In a futile attempt to stop the mocking, she dressed conservatively and rarely asserted herself socially. (She eventually realized that if people were going to bully her regardless of what she did, she might as well dress and act however she liked.)
• Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn has this in full effect. When a girl falls for a beautiful man's blandishments, she feels ashamed. When a young man she's been friends with forever finds out about it, he (still a virgin) is hurt and shames her, but eventually comes around.
• Victor Hugo's Les Misérables presents the tragically ironic tale of Fantine, who became pregnant following a summer fling. When this news reached the town of Montreuil sur Mer, the Slut-Shaming she faced, barred her from legitimate work, forcing her to prostitute herself to survive and provide for her daughter, increasing the Slut-Shaming that she faced. The man who impregnated her, naturally, suffered the horrible, terrible fate of becoming a rich and well respected Parisian lawyer.
• A recurring theme in both One of Us is Lying novels, unsurprising given that the plots revolve around having secrets exposed.
  • Addy gets this treatment and loses all her friends when it is revealed that she cheated on her boyfriend.
  • Leah had her life ruined with this in the backstory, resulting in her Attempted Suicide.
  • In the sequel, Phoebe gets this when the Truth or Dare game reveals that she slept with her sister's ex. This was set up deliberately by the person running the game to make sure people take the Dare.
• In the Parthelon series, by PC Cast, Rhiannon is subjected to this almost from the first instant she's brought up in the narrative. All of the characters view her as spoiled and a bad person overall for sleeping around with multiple partners and refusing to be monogamous for even a year. While she is revealed to have done genuinely amoral things, Shannon tends to forget about those in order to make mean-spirited jokes about what a slut Rhiannon is. It becomes considerably more unsettling when the second book reveals that this behavior stems from her first sexual encounter being rape and it being hinted in a flashback that Rhiannon still being a virgin was the reason she acted reserved when faced with a handsome naked man.
• The Power: Allie is angrily beaten and raped by her foster father because she hung out with boys, letting some at least feel her up in the past.
• Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai: A boy starts spreading rumors of Tomoe's promiscuity to get back at her when she refuses to go out with him, including about her and main character Sakuta. Sakuta shuts him down for good with a very public rant that not only are he and Tomoe not sleeping together, he's a virgin.
• Ravensong: Polly is assumed to have had sex with Herb and is Driven to Suicide by the Slut-Shaming she endures.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Played for Drama with Ophelia Salvadori. Because of her succubus ancestry, she Smells Sexy (and can't turn it off) and is able to breed chimeras in her womb using male essence. When she came to Kimberly Magic Academy, she was subjected to severe sexual harassment over these powers, which was compounded by her past trauma from having been used in her mother's eugenics experiments as a de facto Breeding Slave. Despite the efforts of her comrades in the Campus Watch to care for her mental health, she ultimately snapped and embraced the image of the succubus, and now haunts the upper level of the labyrinth preying on male students for her experiments.
• The Scarlet Letter: As punishment for having a child out of wedlock, Hester Prynne had to wear the eponymous Scarlet Letter, 'A' for 'adultery'. Bear in mind, however, that the townsfolk also want to know who the father is so that he can share in the punishment, and so that Pearl can know who her father is, so at least there isn't the same kind of double-standard one often sees with this trope.
• In The Secret Life of Bees Lily's dad won't let her wear skirts that are above the knees. He says he doesn't want Lily to end up pregnant like another girl her age who wears short skirts did, though Lily thinks it's a coincidence that she ended up pregnant.
• Something to Talk About:
  • Emma gets this multiples times over her supposed relationship with her boss Jo, which is thought to be for career advancement.
  • Barry Davis, the film director Emma admires most, sexually harasses her, assuming this. Emma is devastated over his behavior.
  • Jo's father calls Emma a slut and Jo should fire her. This infuriates Jo, who orders him to leave.
• A Song of Ice and Fire plays with this trope; whores are a totally unremarkable fact of life for the lower levels of society, (and the only higher-ups concerned about this are considered religious fanatics by their peers) but the nobles can be a different matter; the shame attached to sex outside wedlock is totally dependent on who the people involved are, and whether it benefits their allies or enemies to go one way or the other. Because of the extreme misogyny in the setting, though, female nobles are much more likely to be prosecuted for whoring, whereas for male nobles, this is considered normal (their bastards, however, will always be condemned to a rough life, whether they are male or female, unless they are legitimized).
  • Lord Tywin Lannister famously had his father's mistress stripped naked and paraded through the streets after his father died, but this is strongly implied to have been a case of putting the lowborn whore in her place (since she had gained considerable political power and wealth), rather than strictly because of moral objections to her being a whore. He frequently rebukes Tyrion for his use of whores, citing the shame he brings on his house, even though he is shown to (discreetly) use them himself, and may just object to Tyrion's flaunting his activities, rather than the activities themselves.
  • After Margaery Tyrell marries her surviving son, Tommen Baratheon, and begins influencing his conduct in court, Cersei Lannister spends much of A Feast for Crows attempting to plot Margaery's downfall, by planting false evidences of her adultery with many men. She is eventually successful, and Margaery is imprisoned, but one of the accusers later retracts the confession and implicates Cersei's role in the death of the High Septon, which leads to...
  • In A Dance with Dragons, Cersei Lannister is forced to walk naked through King's Landing by the Faith Militant as penance for her adultery, but this is only permitted by the nobles because the political situation makes this beneficial to various players. To Cersei, this is considered a better alternative than confessing to her roles in the murders of the High Septon and Robert Baratheon, which would have earned her a capital punishment, but she is still obviously traumatized by it, especially as her attempt to retain dignity is broken when crowds begin to jeer at her. When Game of Thrones got to that part, featuring a repeated chant of "Shame!", viewers were quick to point out it counted as a literal Slut-Shaming.
  • In contrast to the rest of the Seven Kingdoms' attitude towards adultery, Dorne is generally more sexually liberal, on account of their Rhoynish culture, which doesn't really make a big deal about adultery. Obery Martell openly brings his "paramour", Ellaria Sand to the court, and she is more or less treated as his wife rather than mistress.
  • Daenerys Targaryen likewise has no moral qualms about taking Daario Naharis as paramour, and (while wary of the political consequences of someone openly talking about the affair) doesn't seem to mind that everyone knows about it.
  • Inverted with people from the Summer Isles. In their culture, Sex Is Good, and those who are prudish about sex outside marriage are looked down upon. In fact, highborns are expected to serve for a few years in brothels after they have come of age, to improve their skills in "giving pleasures" as well as honor the gods.
    Kojja Mo: All you Westerosi make a shame of loving. There is no shame in loving. If your septons say there is, your seven gods must be demons.
  • This features heavily in the series' prequels, Archmaester Gyldayn's Histories. Princess Rhaenyra's detractors, the Greens, used her sexuality as a weapon against her. They claimed that her three eldest sons were bastards fathered by her supposed lover Harwin Strong, that her uncle would take her to Dragonstone to teach her about sex in private, and that she would turn the Red Keep into a brothel if given the chance. In the opening paragraphs of The Princess and the Queen, her stepmother and half-brothers never missed a chance to call her a whore. One account claims she tried to seduce Ser Cristian Cole and he was so disgusted by her that he became one of her worst enemies. Another account mentions rumors that she had threesomes with Laenor Velaryon and Qarl Correy. This could be a deconstruction of the trope, as these accusations were made with the intention of discrediting Rhaenyra as heir to the Iron Throne and have little proof to support them. Only the accusation that her sons were illegitimate has some basis in fact since they don't look anything like her or her husband^note The boys had dark hair and eyes, while their parents had silver hair and purple eyes. They also had pug noses and common features as opposed to the otherworldly beauty of pure-blooded Valyrians. Either way, it should be noted that while Gyldayn goes on and on about Rhaenyra's alleged promiscuity, he only makes a few brief mentions of her brothers' sex lives.
• In Sorcerer to the Crown, Prunella is mistaken for a prostitute simply because she travels with Zacharias (even though she is accompanied by a female servant specifically to prevent damage to her reputation), and is not even given food in the inn they stay at. When a servant questions this mistreatment, she is told by the innkeeper that a decent woman would rather have died than allowing herself to sink so low.
• The Sunne in Splendour A newly crowned and stern Richard III sets about to scrub away the decadence of the royal court. He forces his dead brother's mistress, Jane Shore, into a walk of shame, which backfires as the crowd has sympathy for the charming and good-natured courtesan. Furthermore, Jane's lawyer seeks Richard's permission to marry her after he meets with her once. A baffled Richard tries to talk the man out of it but eventually agrees and wishes them well. Truth in Television since this is very close to the historical record.
• Sweet Valley High:
  • Annie Whitman is called "Easy" Annie at school and has a "reputation" that the cheerleading squad thinks will make them look bad if they let her join. After Jessica and her friends spend the book bullying Annie to try to force her off the team, she tries to kill herself and they learn the moral that Slut-Shaming is bad. Jessica herself suffers this from her sister Elizabeth, who constantly chastises her for having many boyfriends (hypocritically forgetting that she herself often cheats on her own boyfriends).
  • An especially cruel example appears in the book Nowhere To Run, when a character's Wicked Stepmother comes home to find her practicing the drums with her bandmate. Despite the fact that they are doing nothing improper, the woman screams at her that she's turning into a tramp like her Missing Mom.
• Tales of the Pack: Brian makes frequent remarks on Lexie supposedly being promiscuous, as bad jokes. It turns out he did this with Anna too, before raping her. Both are not actually promiscuous-this is clearly just a mark of his misogyny.
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles:
  • Tess shames herself far more cruelly than most other people shame her for having a baby out of wedlock; to make matters worse, she was at best heavily pressured into sex and at worst raped.
  • Tess' own community knows her well, and it's implied that they have seen this kind of thing happen before (and it was not uncommon for girls who went to work as servants). They are therefore quite understanding, and might have been even more kind if she hadn't become withdrawn from shame and emotional pain (which nobody seems to quite realize). It's only when she gets involved with the middle-class Angel Clare, who had been working on the land and congratulating himself on fitting in and shedding his bourgeois values, that this trope ruins her life.
• Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: In "We Two May Meet" Magdelene two frequently insults Magdelene one for being a slut. She just fires back that Magdelene two is a prude.
• Tower of Somnus:
  • Anna claims Kat gets everything she wants by Sleeping Their Way to the Top. Accusing her of sleeping with Arnold, while incorrect, at least makes sense, since Arnold clearly has a crush on Kat. Accusing her of sleeping with Dorrik and Kaleek, on the other hand, makes so little sense that Kat can't even be offended. Their reproductive systems are completely incompatible, and Kaleek often jokes about how ugly Kat is to him.
  • Iris very specifically does not shame her friend Alicia for sleeping with famous musicians. Alicia doesn't help by insisting that she didn't sleep with all of them.
• In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Francie witnesses a girl named Joanna being harassed by a bunch of housewives because they believe she has no right to show her illegitimate child in public. They go so far as to throw stones at her, and the narrative explains that they only do this because they're bitter about their own loveless marriages.
• Under Suspicion:
  • In I've Got You Under My Skin, lot of the characters who knew Betsy Powell well tend to use words like slut, whore and tramp to describe her. Considering she was a Gold Digger who romantically pursued a man knowing he was seriously dating someone else (and rubbed it in her face for years afterwards), cheated on her husband with another married man and quite a few other men, as it turns out and used sex to manipulate people, the disparaging comments come off as more justified than is typical for this trope.
  • The Cinderella Murder: Madison claims that her college roommates would make catty comments or otherwise signify their disapproval over her flirtatious behaviour and tendency to hook up with various men. It's not entirely clear how true this is or whether Madison was just projecting; while Nicole didn't much like Madison (and vice versa), Susan actually defended Madison to Nicole as "just a harmless flirt" (though she was unaware that Madison was sneaking around with her boyfriend behind her back, in which case she would've been a lot more justified in judging Madison's behaviour).
  • In Piece of My Heart, Sandra says she regards herself as "very traditional" when it comes to relationships and children, and that she could've handled it better when her daughter Michelle revealed she had gotten pregnant by a one night stand, noting that Michelle may have "felt judged" by her reaction. Michelle's friend Lindsay reveals that Sandra was even harsher on Michelle than she let on, treating her as though she was permanently tainted and never letting up how disappointed she was in her, which contributed to their estrangement and Michelle's spiral into depression and drug addiction. It's also revealed that Michelle's pregnancy wasn't the result of a random hook-up with a stranger, but that she discovered the father (whom she was serious about) was already married; Michelle lied to her mother about this because she was afraid Sandra's reaction would be even worse if she knew the truth.
• Rose suffers from this in Vampire Academy, when both Jesse Zeklos and Ralf Sarcozy claim to have had sex with her and were allowed to drink her blood.
• In Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War, this is the Confederation's hat, since they are extreme social conservatives who believe in strict traditional morals. Their leaders relish the destruction of "the sluttiness that had overflowed the late United States," and strive instead to restore something like the social values of Colonial America (complete with witch-burnings), so it is little surprise that they believe all sexuality belongs in the marriage and nowhere else.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Gender inverted. Matrim Cauthon Really Gets Around (though the text rarely implies that he does more than kiss women, and when he does he tends to be monogamous), for which shame is copiously heaped upon him, mostly by the women in his life. Notably, Elaine is disgusted with his ongoing sexual relationship with a Queen of the country they are visiting. When he finally tries to explain to Elaine that this is an abusive relationship in which he's regularly raped at knifepoint and he's powerless to get out of the situation, she laughs at him, saying she's getting a taste of his own medicine.
  • Berelain, one of, if not the, most beautiful women in the series, has accrued a reputation for having many lovers and being a seductress, to which some of the female characters react negatively. Perrin wonders if the devotion of her guards is possibly related to their hope of sharing her bed. Berelain later tells Perrin that, despite the rumours, she has actually only had sex with 3 people for non-political reasons. It can be assumed that her reputation and skills in seduction are another of her political tools as a very capable Queen of her very small and weak country, similar to her secret proficiency in martial arts.
• Elphaba's mother Melena from Wicked gets a good amount of this from her childhood nanny after she ends up pregnant with Elphaba. Elphaba is not her father's biological daughter, instead being the child of Elphaba and the future Wizard after he drugged Melena and raped her unconscious body. Melena's lack of a memory of her impregnation only provokes Nanny more. The fact Melena slept around often in her youth is also a source of Nanny's complaints.

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