interview
The “sexy selfie” rebellion: Reclaiming what slut-shaming tried to take
An expert on slut-shaming explains how young women are owning their sexuality in the attention economy
Published
September 4, 2025 12:00PM (EDT)
Selfie life (Jordi Salas/Getty Images)
“I hate that I’m saying this, but it seems kind of quaint.”
I’m on the phone with author and slut-shaming expert Leora Tanenbaum, and while I wouldn’t call what we’re doing reminiscing, it does involve looking back on a time that, while not great, was a little simpler. In this case, the subject is “Girls Gone Wild,” the video franchise that, from 1997 to 2011, was the first name in horny direct-to-consumer retail. Its commercials ruled late-night television, and its product was a mashup of voyeurism, misogyny and manipulation. GGW impresario Joe Francis and his camera crew descended on spring break locations, crashing parties and sweet-talking drunk girls into flashing the camera, making out with each other, and hopefully going further.
Tanenbaum’s most recent book, “Sexy Selfie Nation: Standing Up For Yourself in Today’s Toxic, Sexist Culture,” surveys a new generation whose responses to living in a hypersexualized consumer marketplace are regularly mistaken by parents, teachers and media outlets as reflexive capitulation to it.
The words “Gone Wild” did most of the franchise’s heavy lifting by suggesting that from Lake Havasu to Daytona Beach to Cabo San Lucas, millions of college women were one margarita away from debasing themselves on camera in return for a branded ballcap or pair of booty shorts. Of course, it wasn’t that simple, and eventually the stream of women coming forward to allege that they were coerced, tricked, and even threatened into performing for the camera brought Francis’ empire down. But no one claimed that its success was a sham: “At the end of the day, I’m selling naked girls,” he told The New York Times in 2008. “People want to buy naked girls.”
Tanenbaum sees the heyday of GGW as “a precursor to where we are now,” in that it marked a shift in adult content — not just from professional to amateur, but more importantly, to a place that blurred the lines between consensual and violatory. Social media was emerging as the dominant conduit for online interaction, and its combination of immediacy and anonymity made nonconsensual content — Reddit forums for upskirt photography, revenge-porn site Is Anyone Up? and a full spectrum of sexualized cyberbullying — seem inescapable.
Tanenbaum’s first book, “Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation,” centered on the sexual stigmatizing of middle school and high school girls whose “bad” reputations often had little connection to actual sexual activity, but were instead reactions to and assumptions about their bodies. What she then called “slut-bashing” was still a powerful force that circumscribed the lives of young women and blamed them for their own stigmatization. “Slut-bashing” eventually morphed into the more recognizable “slut-shaming,” and in 2015,