What I am about to admit is horribly shameful to me. I am embarrassed by it, and I do not feel like it represents me as a person well except to that it is an exception to prove my general rules of functioning.
There is a person whom I truly hate. Now, we often say that we hate someone. "She's so perfect. God, I hate her." How many of us have screamed at a parent or partner in a time of intense argument, "I hate you!"? But before this, I had never hated someone in the way that I hate this person. This is a person who, when I see her, my heart beats faster, my palms sweat, I feel short of breath, and all my brain can do is scream at me, "Run, run, run, get away!" The reasons behind my hatred of her are personal and not really worth going into here, but for the purposes of this post, it is important to note that what set off this trend into hatred was a sexual incident for which she was not entirely responsible that ended up hurting me very much. The fact that her sexuality is at the root cause of this, though, is what leads me into a bit of self doubt and self shame over my hatred of her.
Okay, to back up for one second, one of the things I will talk about endlessly is slut-shaming and how absolutely horrible it is. For those who don't know, slut shaming is a type of violence in which someone's (usually a girl's) reputation is ruined because of rumors (true or false) that are spread about her sexual activity. Usually the rumors spread are not that she is doing anything particularly deviant. Typically, it's simply a rumor that she is having sex. Because good girls don't have sex, this is meant to be shaming and ruining. The unfortunate thing is, this kind of violence is usually perpetrated by women on women (well, usually girls on girls). It needs to stop because, as Ms. Norbury (Tina Fey) says in Mean Girls, "You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores." That is, not only do we perpetuate the idea that sex is shameful by slut-shaming, we also make it more okay for guys to hold women to a double standard.
Anyway, so I worry that I am slut shaming. I worry that the reason that I hate this girl is because I am frightened or threatened by her sexuality. I don't think that's the case partly because I'm not easily threatened by others' sexuality as my sexuality is pretty strong, partly because the hatred really has developed due to other personal issues that have arisen between us. But what if I am? What if I am an unconscious slut shamer? I don't know if I could deal with that.
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