From the critics:
Ann Powers: “Calling a young woman a slut may be a way of shutting her down, but Emily White opens up the term until it turns into a magical hall of mirrors, revealing all the ways in which fear of female power still shapes our culture. Ranking with the groundbreaking work of the Second Wave, much fiercer than most of what passes for feminist writing now, Fast Girls takes the discussion of the politics of sex to the next level.”
Gary Indiana: “Emily White’s marvelous investigation of the ‘myth of the slut’ brings high school back in livid color and shows how its tribal outcasts get scarred for life bu the cruelty of the mob.”
[...] I’m not going to let him off the hook with the “in my day” business, because he and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in Alaska — which in the pre-internet days of my youth had to be one of the most culturally isolated places in America — and I vividly remember when one of my sixth-grade classmates became the school slut. A tall, black girl, she got breasts first and from then on was the butt of every slut joke. The label dogged her all the way to high school. And people where very cruel. I always thought that she, like Olive, was a virgin throughout that experience, since I never heard of anyone actually dating her or having any kind of sexual experience with her. It was just a “known” thing. (A subject explored in great depth — more than I can do justice to here — in Emily White’s book Fast Girls>.) [...]
[...] from my feminist bookcase. She chose Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut by Emily White. Set squarely in a high school setting, it’s not surprising that my 17-year-old intern [...]