Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut

This book really scared me. I guess it's about bullying per se, but it is also about violence against girls AS WOMEN, just for their sexuality, for the threat of it. In one story a girl is taken outside and tied to a tree and spat on! Girls really opened up to White as an interviewer, and her writing between the interviews is the hightlight.

I couldn't put this book down. Reading it I felt as if I had entered an intense, urgent world--this is how White writes, with urgency. It is NOT a book which relies on statistics about "promiscuous girls" at all. The author seems mistrustful of data and pseudo science, and more power to her. It is also not a book which attempts to explain everything. Rather White is interested in exploring the deep mystery of why we as a culture want to talk about girls who are sluts, why we want to punish them. Highly recommended, groundbreaking work.

This book is very honest, and whether people like to read it or not -- it is true. As a person who was singled out for a good portion of my school life, I know how lonely the slut life can be. Regardless of behavior, we are treating ourselves and other women badly by even uttering the term. We should have more faith in sisterhood, and accepting people as they are.

This book is beautifully written, lyrical in style and fiercely analytical in content. It tells the stories, sad and profound, of individual girls and women while pulling from those stories the threads of ancient myths and fears that keep us all enmeshed in the myth of the slut. Reading Fast Girls has the complex effect of making us squirm with discomfort while empowering us with the knowledge that the myth of the slut is greater than ourselves. Like Foucault's Discipline and Punish (but a much better read)the author shows how we are all victims of language and culture. Yet, this book doesn't force us to see past the wall of letters SLUT, it shows us the cracks, compellingly and deliberately, until what's revealed is what we already know in our hearts to be true. In a lesser writer's hands this might make us all breath a sigh of relief that it's okay then, not our fault. Yet Fast Girls manages to communicate the possiblity of a better way. The writer is a kind of poet-journalist, provocative without being strident, sensitive without pulling punches. Everyone should read this book (despite its weighty subject matter, it's a page turner!) AND it should be required reading for all preteen boys and girls. It could just change the world.

So many feminist books are published each year and they're mostly written in dull, predictable prose. Not so with this. White's a fiction writer by training and she writes like one; this book is full of great images and poetic writing. I felt like I was reading a novel half the time. Absorbing and unique.