The College Fix

Move over “white privilege” and “male privilege” – there’s a new privilege making its way in higher academic discourse – “sexual privilege.”

Rich female college students who sleep around avoid being “slut-shamed” thanks to their “privileged” status, a study published in this month’s Social Psychology Quarterly claims.

“Viewing women only as victims of men’s sexual dominance fails to hold women accountable for the roles they play in reproducing social inequalities,” said lead author Elizabeth Armstrong, associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, in a news release. “By engaging in ‘slut-shaming’ – the practice of maligning women for presumed sexual activity – women at the top create more space for their own sexual experimentation, at the cost of women at the bottom of the social hierarchies.”

In other words: “High-status female college students employ ‘slut discourse’ — defining their styles of femininity and approaches to sexuality as classy rather than trashy or slutty — to assert class advantage and put themselves in a position where they can enjoy sexual exploration with few social consequences,” states the study’s abstract.

“This is a form of sexual privilege,” the authors add. “In contrast, low-status women risk public shaming when they attempt to enter dominant social worlds.”

The sociology professors came to their conclusions after studying 53 women (51 freshmen and two sophomores) who lived on the same college dorm floor in the 2004-2005 academic year at a large, moderately selective university in the Midwest.

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