Did you have one of "those" girls in your high school class? The
one everyone whispered about during passing periods and in the
cafeteria? "She did what? With who? Where?" Maybe she was new to
school, or from the wrong side of the tracks, or just a little bit
wild. Or maybe she was you. She was the slut, the girl who
disrupted the delicate and hormonally charged social structure that
is high school in postmodern America. Her life and experiences are
the focus of Emily White's new book, FAST GIRLS: Teenage Tribes and
the Myth of the Slut, in which she attempts to deconstruct the ugly
mythology surrounding the high school slut. Combining memoir,
social criticism, and investigative journalism, FAST GIRLS explores
the oftentimes sad lives of these scarlet women and looks at the
social order that produces their experience.

A writer for a progressive weekly newspaper in Seattle, White ran
an ad in a sex advice column asking for women who had been branded
high school sluts to tell her their story. She interviewed over 100
women across the country and visited various high schools in the
Pacific Northwest. She says, "I hope to shed some light on that
space in the high school hallway where so many vital and troubling
encounters occur." White uncovers some similarities among many of
the girls. Many were ethnically or racially different from their
high school classmates, many experienced an early puberty, and many
were victims of childhood sexual abuse. About halfway through the
book, I e-mailed my one of my best friends from high school, asking
him if we had a school slut. I couldn't remember any, but since
many of my high school memories are untrustworthy at best, I felt I
needed additional input. "Did we have a school slut?" He messaged
back, "I wish." We concluded our racially mixed high school did not
fit the mold Ms. White describes, predominantly white student
bodies located in seemingly safe strip mall suburbs.

The similarity of the young women's experiences led Ms. White to
explore the origin of the slut. "In considering the power of the
slut myth, I continually returned to Jung and his notion of
archetypes. Again and again, it struck me that...if the slut were
ever to cease to exist, it would take nothing less than a seismic
shift in the imagination of the world..." Whew! Quite a powerful
myth. She also explores the issues of rumor origins and mob
mentality, vital to the promulgation of the slut story. At times,
the theories simply become too big, too overblown, and White sounds
a little too much like a high school student attempting to
incorporate every resource she finds into her paper. Linking sluts
with Paleolithic goddess-centered societies seems just a bit much.
Is an 80-year-old pamphlet called "Unconscious Passion" really
relevant? An earnest writer obviously in love with her subject, she
looks for evidence of slut mythology and finds it everywhere, from
flappers and "It" girls, to the movie Splendor in the
Grass.

White is at her best when she tells the sometimes heart-rending
stories of the girls themselves. "Sixteen-year-old Darby, from
Southern California, told me, 'For a long time when I looked at my
past I would just see a violent porno.'" In interviewing now
30-something Karen, she says, "At certain points during our visit
I'll feel a little afraid of her, of how deep she might go into the
dark region of her memory, where the secrets are so difficult they
threaten to unravel her fragile self-possession." The stories are
so affecting, the women so honest, that you find yourself hoping
against hope that their lives end up okay. You hope for the
Hollywood ending, and sometimes it works out. She notes that former
high schools sluts work in all sorts of professions, are married or
divorced, some successful, some not. The most powerful images,
however, are of the girls who contemplate and even attempt suicide
as a result of their being labeled sluts. While White is adamant
about not offering solutions, at least in this work, it is obvious
that she hopes that by airing this very dirty laundry, she can make
life a little easier for these sad women.