SLUT: A PLAY | NYC Teens (Re)Claim Slut Title

Playwright Katie Cappiello and Meg McInerney wrote in Slut: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence, which was published by the Feminist Press at The City College of New York, that during the sessions to develop the play at The Arts Effect All-Girl Theater Company in New York City, the word slut kept coming out of the mouths of the twenty East Coast high school students. For example:

“I feel like a slut.”

“I was dressed all slutty.”

“Haha. Oh my [G]od, you’re a dirty little slut!”

Consequently, Cappiello and McInerney came to the conclusion that teens across the United States were reclaiming the title of slut, because being a slut meant that a girl is “fuckable”. Cappiello and McInerney wrote:

“There’s an attempt being made by girls and young women across the country to reclaim the word. Being a “slut” means you’re sexy, fun, experimental, willing, popular, wanted, “fuckable” [...]”

SLUT: A PLAY | PREGAMING

However, the play isn’t only about slut praising, it’s about slut shaming as well. As for slut praising, Jennifer Baumgardner described the PROLOGUE: PREGAMING of the play well:

The play opens with five girls [in spandex shorts and sports bras] dancing around in a locker room—teasing, frank, sweet, hilarious—and having fun as well as playing with their burgeoning sexuality.

Dancing is an understatement, because, in addition to twerking on stage, the teen girls were playing with their burgeoning sexuality by simulating girl-on-girl oral sex and all-girl threesome sex.

After Christina asked, “Okay, what’s everyone wearing to Connor’s?” Grace asked if she should wear tights. “The ones with the seam up the back so they still look really cute.” Natalie replied by sharing that Grace performed a teen “drunken striptease last weekend”; therefore, Natalie predicted that Grace would strip out of her tights at Connor’s party.

In a bit of “routine banter for these girls”, Grace went on to call Natalie the “biggest … dirtiest … sluttiest slut of, like, all time.”

JOEY (Winnifred Bonjean Alpart ). Okay, no way is she the biggest slut of the Slut Squad! I can slut it up with the sluttiest of y’all, thank you very much! Including Natalie.

CHRISTINA. Hey!

NATALIE. Ohhhh Chrissy! You know we respect your sexy slutness. (NATALIE digs though [sic] her makeup bag.)

CHRISTINA. You better. And don’t make me challenge you to a slut-off.

NATALIE. Yep. And you don’t mess with Slut Squad girls. Because we will take you down, motherfucker.

CHRISTINA. Awww, Slut Squad love!

GRACE. Slut Squad crazy love!

The Slut Squad of the Elliot Dance Team even had a chant slash team anthem.

S-L-U-T S-Q-U-A-D!

[...]

YES, THAT’S WHO WE BE.

AND, BITCHES, WE GO DOWN LIKE NO OTHER

GIRLS IN TOWN. AND WHEN WE STRUT

THROUGH THE SCHOOL

YOU KNOW WE MAKE THEM BOYS DROOL.

BECAUSE THEY ALL WANNA PIECE OF THIS.

AND YOU KNOW YOU CAN’T SLUT LIKE THIS.

[...]

In reference to the chant/anthem, the parenthetical states: ([...] It’s goofy and fun, but they kind of mean it …) Kind of?

Joey elaborated by relating that slut is a positive attribute, because, like boys, it should be “totally cool” for girls to be able to “hook up with whoever they want”. Joey said that the Slut Squad isn’t “afraid to be sexual”, and proclaimed that the Slut Squad members are confident and sexy.

JOEY. When I think of what our idea of “slut” [...] and I know it sounds stupid now but... it’s positive. We think it’s wrong that guys can hook up with whoever they want and that’s totally cool, but girls can’t. It’s an unfair double standard. So we're like, “Hey, if we act confident about sex and...”

NATALIE. (To DANIELLE.) We own our shit.

JOEY. And we aren’t afraid to be sexual. If all that makes us sluts, then I guess we’re sluts. So, Slut Squad just means we’re confident and, you know, sexy.

In addition to slut praising, there was slut shaming in the play as well. For example, after Anna was grounded for smashing her 11-year-old sister in the face, Anna referred to her sister as a “stupid little whore” whom was “becoming a real bitch, too.” However, Anna didn’t share what her little sister did to be referred to as a little whore.

Since Anna couldn’t attend the party with Joey at Connor’s, Anna decided to binge-watch Friday Night Lights starring Tim Riggins. Tim Riggins was played by Taylor Kitsch, who played Tim Riggins from the age of 25 to 30, which is why Anna referred to him as her “dream man” whom she, consequently, wanted to “do”.

JOEY. OOOOoooo. Tim Riggins!

ANNA. My dream man. I wanna do him.

(Note: The actresses who played Joey and Anna were teens. For example, Alpart was 16 when she played 16-year-old Joey. )

On the way to Connor’s party in a cab, after dancing in the back seat and making out with George, Joey was forcibly “fingered” by George and Luke, two schoolboys, as the cab sped from Columbus Circle to 78th and Lex .

JOEY. I just sort of slung my leg over George’s.

JOEY. We were kind of dancing in the back [of the cab], and George was sort of keeping the beat on my leg, you know [...] playing drums on my leg.

JOEY. And then George and I started to, like...make out [...] then he started to put his hand up my leg.

JOEY. [...] his hand actually went up my dress and sort of grazed my crotch. [...] So I said, “George, come on, stop. Just wait until we get to Connor’s.”

JOEY. So then, next thing I know, Luke is grabbing my other leg ... [...] so my, um, legs would be more open and George—[...] was on top of my leg, sort of pinning me down.

JOEY. Then George all of a sudden really aggressively pulls my underwear to the side and jammed two of his fingers inside me. (Beat.)

JOEY. I was crying at this point, but I didn’t scream.

JOEY. My vagina was pretty exposed, and I kept thinking if this guy [i.e., the cab driver] turns around [...] we’re going to get in an accident.

JOEY. George had his fingers in me... Two…[...] moving them in and out as hard as he could and as fast as he could. [...] And I’m crying. And the whole time Luke is making fun of George [...] because I’m not coming. Because I’m not having an orgasm. [...] he finally pulled his fingers out. Luke was laughing and he was bragging how he was going to show George how it was done. Then he put two of his fingers in his mouth.

JOEY. [...] then Luke laughs—and then he stuck his wet fingers in my vagina. [...] Then he did the same thing as George except he was trying to show off. I was hysterically crying, and he kept saying things like, “Come on JoJo—you know you wanna come—you know you’re wet now.” [...] And he and George laughed. Luke pulled his fingers out of me and wiped them on George’s shirt. And then they let go of me. (Beat.)

Almost everyone slut shamed Joey for being forcibly “fingered” by George and Luke whom convincingly told everyone that Joey “hooked up with all of them in the back of that cab.” Even Joey’s mother called her a “little slut”. Christina said that Joey “loses control sometimes” and that Joey had “done weird shit before”. Natalie said that Joey was “slutting herself out”. It didn’t help that there were pictures posted online of Joey tasting fruit-flavored condoms, which implied to some that Joey had planned to give George and Luke “blow jobs”. And Leila related that there were pictures from the cab that looked like Joey was giving George a lap dance.

In addition, Leila felt bad for George, because Joey’s accusations could have prevented him from getting into Harvard. Consequently, Leila referred to Joey as a slut and a liar.

LEILA. Because I feel bad for him. Are you kidding me? This whole thing is a real shit show. This type of shit can ruin someone’s whole life, and I feel bad for him. Because, you know, it’s been his dream to go to Harvard like his dad.

LEILA. Because I really like him and I know he didn’t mean anything by it. They were wasted. Whatever—it happened. She’s a slut, and she was all over his shit. Did you see those pictures? She was basically giving him a lap dance. What was he supposed to do?

LEILA. “She obviously regrets what she did Friday night, so she feels like she’s gotta make shit up.”

Interestingly, George was Joey’s first boyfriend, which was in the fourth-grade. Prior to the incident in the cab, after Leila shared with Joey that she and George had “hooked up a little bit”, Joey said, “I mean we all, like, whatever, with each other. It’s nothing. It’s just what you do.”

However, Joey wasn’t the first schoolgirl to accuse George of untoward behavior. For instance, Grace shared that, before she and George started dating, George forced her to give him a hand job in the bathroom.

GRACE. You know, George once followed me into the bathroom and locked the door and wouldn’t let me out until I gave him a hand job. True story. I didn’t tell anyone. We ended up going out for, like, five months...

In terms of the salacious behavior of (some) Manhattan’s privileged teens, the text of the guidebook is just as revealing as the text of the play. For example, Jennifer Baumgardner shared in “Why StopSlut?” that when she was in gym class, another 7th grader said, “Jenny, your sister’s a slut. She had sex at Bob’s party over the weekend.” The middle school slut shaming was in reference to Andrea, Jenny’s 14-year-old sister, because while Andrea was trying to “sober up” at Bob’s party, Andrea’s boyfriend’s best friend “decided to have sex with her.” Subsequently, schoolboys shockingly ran “their hands up her skirt as she passed by” and pulled “her into rooms at parties.” Baumgardner wrote that “literally dozens” of her friends had similar stories. (Interestingly, Jennifer wrote that it took her and Andrea “many years” to come to the conclusion that Andrea had been forced to have sex.)

In the chapter “Reality Check From Young Voices”, Sonia, a 15-year-old sophomore from a small town in Pennsylvania, shared that after she asked her boyfriend what he wanted for his 16th birthday, he replied that he wanted a “blow job”. Sonia:

We had been dating for a little over a month, when I asked him what he wanted for this sixteenth birthday. All he wanted from me was a blow job.

I’d say, “Hey, what do you want for your birthday?” and he’d say, “Head.”

Sonia typically preferred having teen sex; therefore, she reluctantly came to the conclusion: “Fine! I’ll give my boyfriend head because I’d rather that than him yell at me again [for not giving him a head].” To Sonia’s dismay, she performed oral sex for over a year, and when she was on her menses, her boyfriend dubbed it “blow job week”.

13-year-old Fred wrote that when he and Lenny were in the 6th grade, Lenny asked Fred, “You watch porn?” Lenny was on to something, because Fred started watching porn “halfway through fifth grade” (i.e., at 10 or 11-years-old). Fred wrote:

I started watching porn halfway through fifth grade. I had just begun middle school, and befriended a lot of kids in the seventh and eighth grade. Sometimes when I hung out with them they would make jokes about the porn they watched, referencing certain sites.

As for Lenny, an apparent middle-school cad, while visiting Lola, he: “took his penis and slapped it on her leg because he felt like it”.

(“In Porn Before Puberty?”, an ABC News feature, Winnifred Bonjean Alpart shared with a reporter that when she was in eighth grade: "[..] boys mostly, were watching porn during school [...] during independent reading, they would do that.")

And in “I’ve Slutted. Have You?”, 17-year-old Danielle related that she went to a Jewish summer camp in Pennsylvania where promiscuous teen behavior was encouraged and cultivated by campers and camp counselors. Consequently, during summer camp, there were “sexual firsts for everyone”. (Everyone?) Danielle wrote:

I go to this typical Jewish summer camp, where promiscuous behavior is practically encouraged and cultivated. Let’s be real, it’s literally eight weeks of teenagers breaking the counselors’ rules (who in turn egg us on!) in an isolated campsite in the middle of Milford, Pennsylvania—the middle of nowhere. In those two months, with no parental supervision, there are lots of sexual firsts for everyone.

The promiscuous behavior didn’t only happen at camp, it happened during the annual camp reunion night-before-reunion sleepover as well. For example, take Georgia, who Danielle described as “really petite and very pretty”, “the dream girl”, and who was “always hooking up with someone”. Unsurprisingly, Georgia was not a virgin. Danielle wrote:

The group of girls that I'm friendly with define themselves by their flirtatiousness and sexual interests. There is one girl in particular, Georgia, who is really petite and very pretty, and she doesn’t speak that much. She’s always hooking up with someone and she lost her virginity before many of the rest of us. She’s the dream girl for all the guys at my camp.

During the night-before-reunion sleepover, after “[e]very-one got very drunk” and while being filmed and encouraged by her best friends and fellow campers, Georgia performed oral sex on two boys in the back-yard. Danielle wrote:

[...] Every-one got very drunk. Josh and another boy coerced—basically forced—Georgia to give them blow jobs, while others filmed it on their phones. Watching the videos disgusted me. They were pressuring her to take off her clothes and give other guys in the crowd blow jobs—and all of this was going on in the back-yard of someone’s home! Initially Georgia resisted, very drunkenly, and repeatedly declined these boys’ demands. Then she ended up giving in. The scari-est part is that her best friends were doing nothing to stop it, but were laughing and encouraging the whole display.

Slut: A Play, which praised and shamed teen sluts, premiered at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in Manhattan (August 19, 2013). Cappiello and McInerney related that the play was: “[...] authentic, nuanced, and hard-hitting.” And that everything in this play was “inspired by real events,” which is revealing, because it appears that it’s not Dirty Old Men whom schoolgirls need to worry about, it's Dirty Young Boys.

Lastly, take Hunter Gaynes, who hooked up with 13-year-old Nadia “so cute” Boyd while she was on her menses. Consequently, Hunter “got everyone” to call Nadia “Bloody Beaver”, and Hunter, being “a little freshman douche”, even “put that shit all over Facebook.”

Famous Age-Gap Affair: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (70) and Olivia Nuzzi (30) | Age-Gap FaceTime Sex

Olivia Nuzzi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dylan Byers aggregated in the Puck post, “We Need to Talk About Olivia & Ryan” (September 20, 2024), that: “[...] Olivia Nuzzi [31], the magazine’s star political reporter, had been suspended from New York [Magazine] due to a “personal relationship” with her former profile subject Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [70] [...]”

Per New York: “Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy was “a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures”.

What standards were violated? Corbin Bolies posted on The Daily Beast that “Married RFK Jr., 70, Bragged He Had ‘Intimate’ Photos of Reporter Olivia Nuzzi, 31” (09.21.24) That’s correct. Nuzzi sexted RFK Jr..

And The Daily Beast and Oli Coleman posted that: “RFK Jr. and star journalist Olivia Nuzzi had 'incredible' FaceTime sex, said they loved each other [...]” (Page Six | September 27, 2024)

In the post, Coleman related that 30-year-old Nuzzi quickly fell madly in love with the married 70-year-old RFK Jr.! Subsequently, the age-gap couple sexted and had “incredible” FaceTime sex - for almost a year. Nuzzi even shared with friends that 70-year-old RFK Jr had “impressive [virtual] sexual stamina”.

[...] Page Six has learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and New York Magazine scribe Olivia Nuzzi had “incredible” FaceTime sex.

But — after they began talking over text — he “love bombed” her, and she quickly fell so madly in love with him that she lived a double life for nearly a year, sharing long calls, endless texts and virtual sex with the former presidential candidate, all while engaged to her partner of almost a decade.

They had “incredible” sex over FaceTime, according to another source, with Nuzzi noting to pals that the 70-year-old had impressive sexual stamina.

Surprisingly, RFK Jr. remains married to Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame, but, unsurprisingly, Nuzzi is no longer engaged to Ryan Lizza - Politico’s chief Washington correspondent. 

SNL's "Weekend Update" and Bumble: “Gen-Blend”/Age-Gap Relationships Are Rising

On Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" (s49e05), Michael Che reported, "The dating app Bumble says that next year, they expect to see a surge in relationships where one person dates someone considerably older." Then Che joked, "Because those student loans ain't gonna to pay for themselves."

Alexandra Klausner and Tracy Swartz elaborated on Che's reporting in their New York Post piece "Leo was right all along? Age-gap relationships to surge in 2024, Bumble says" (Nov. 16, 2023). Klausner and Swartz wrote that 63% of Bumble's 26,800 users shared that "age isn’t a defining factor in dating", and 35% confessed that they don't look down upon age-gap relationships. 

Cross-generational relationships — also known as “gen-blend” relationships — are expected to surge next year, Bumble reports as part of its annual dating trends forecast.

63% say age isn’t a defining factor in dating [...] according to a global survey of over 26,800 Bumble app members conducted in September.

35% of women confess they are less judgmental about age-gap relationships. 

Source: New York Post

The Mirror's Gemma Strong reported in the piece "Age-gap relationships are set to boom in 2024 - dating expert explains" (16 NOV 2023) that Toby Ingham, the psychotherapist and author, posited to there is no perfect relationship age-gap range.

"There used to be an idea that, as a rule of thumb, half your age plus seven was the guide to the younger age a partner should be," he said. "That may now be outdated [...] Now, the [societal] accent being on inclusivity and normalising difference might eradicate such ideas."

Lastly, Klausner and Swartz went on to write that "[a]ge-gap relationships aren’t new, of course." And they referenced "Leonardo DiCaprio, 49, and Vittoria Ceretti, 25"; thus, providing more evidence that it appears that DiCaprio does have an ideal age-gap range, which, is his case, is 25-years-old or less. 

[TEEN] FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS: The Rise of Teen Oral Sex, Thongs & Girl-on-Girl?

Ariel Levy wrote in Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of [Teen] Raunch Culture that she first started to notice a rise in teen raunch culture around 2002 when she started seeing, among other raunchy concerns, teens: [...] wearing jeans cut so low they exposed what came to be known as butt cleavage paired with miniature tops [...] and pierced navels alike.”

Levy defined Male Chauvinist Pigs as “men who regarded women as pieces of meat”, while she defined Female Chauvinist Pigs as “women who make sex objects of other women and of themselves” (i.e., self-sexualization). 

In addition to Female Chauvinist Pigs, Levy coined the phrase “raunch feminism”, which is where “stripping is a valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education” and where “[t]he basic requirements are hot girls and small garments.”

Levy related that Jenna Jameson, “the world’s highest grossing porn star”, wrote the best seller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star that was published by Judith Regan. Interestingly, Regan opined on CBS, “I believe that there is a porno-ization of the culture [...]” 

Levy gave an example of the “porno-ization of the culture” when she wrote about “Cardio Striptease” classes that were offered at Crunch gyms in big cities like New York, LA, and Chicago where students were encouraged “to attend their workout sessions in bras and thongs”. Provocatively, for her “sweet sixteen celebration”, a California nymphet and eight of her friends participated in a Cardio Striptease class. (Levy did not disclose if the nymphets wore bras and thongs.) 

Relatedly, Anne, a student at Head-Royce, a private school in the wealthy section of Oakland, shared: “[...] like my friend is having her eighteenth birthday party and she wants to have strippers there.”

The chapter most relevant to this blog is intriguingly titled “Pigs in Training”, which is in reference to teen Female Chauvinist Pigs (i.e., self-sexualized nymphets). 

[Note: As I’ve previously detailed what Levy wrote on Swiffer Girl, (i.e., Danielle Miller, a Horace Mann prep middle school student, who produced three (3) self-shot teen masturbating videos that prominently displayed a Swiffer broom.), I’ll avoid her here.]

Levy began the chapter with several examples of teen oral sex - including middle school school bus oral sex:

There’s a rumor going around that “rainbow parties” are the latest teen rage. Rainbow parties are good old-fashioned slumber parties, with a distinctly contemporary twist: All the girls in attendance put on a different color of lipstick, invite over one lucky boy, and then one by one they treat him to oral sex until voilà! His penis is a spectral color chart.

(This reminded me of a previous post where we related that Laura Sessions Stepp wrote in the article "Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex" (July 8, 1999) for the Washington Post that nymphets at Williamsburg Middle School, "a mostly upper-income community" in Arlington, Virginia, were performing oral sex at house parties and in parks.) 

In December 2002, a middle-school girl performed fellatio on the high school boy sitting next to her on the school bus in Kingston, Massachusetts, while their classmates watched. 

The same thing had happened with a pair of seventh-graders on a school bus back in 1999 in Talbot County, Maryland, where an eighth-grade girl also fellated her neighbor during a crowded study hall. 

These incidents may have inspired two thirteen-year-olds in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, who were suspended for engaging in a round of oral sex (her on him) in the back of a school bus during a spring field trip in 2004.

These examples hit home, because I know of a Manhattan public school teacher whom had a scandal in his freshman year science class. It happened the day after his students returned from a field trip when a schoolgirl learned that her boyfriend received oral sex from their classmate - on the school bus. 

~~~~~

In the novel Hummingbirds, Mr. Landry, the headmistress of Carmine-Casey - a Manhattan prep school, shared with Binhammer, an English teacher, that she: “[...] got a call from a parent just two weeks ago giving her ninth-grade daughter permission to leave school when her boyfriend, who is a freshman in college, came to pick her up in his car.”

And in an example of art imitating life, Alexa, who, at the time, was a junior at Oyster Bay High, shared with Levy that 7th graders were “hooking up or having sex” with high school seniors:

“In my school, what was very popular was seventh- or eighth- or ninth-grade girls hooking up or having sex, whatever, with junior and senior guys,” she said. “Parents kept calling the school, like, why is this senior at my house when my daughter is a freshman? They dressed so provocatively, the guys couldn’t really tell how old the girls were…all they see is a hot girl.”

Thus, it appears that those Oyster Bay High nymphets were practicing what Levy termed “raunch feminism” where : “The basic requirements are hot [teen] girls and small garments.”

Degrassi | Middle School Thong

Unsurprisingly, Levy wrote that “everybody” at Oyster Bay High shared with her that they wore teen thongs. And Levy related a story about a middle-school nymphet (“who was 12 or 13”) at Head-Royce whom: “[...] pulled up her shirt, pulled out the strap of her thong from under the side of her skirt, and snapped it [...]”!

In addition to performing oral sex (on school buses) and wearing thongs under small garments, it’s not unusual for nymphets to participate in lipstick lesbianism or what the previous owner of my copy of Female Chauvinist Pigs annotated as “bisexual appropriation”. 

Therefore, it’s not unanticipated that Levy described “girl-on-girl action at school dances”. For example, David and Anne, classmates at Head-Royce, shared with Levy that schoolgirls do live girl-on-girl scenes to “appeal to the guys” (i.e., for “a lot of attention…definitely”) :

An example, he said, would be all the lap dancing and girl-on-girl action at school dances. “There’s this whole stereotype, and it’s probably largely true, that guys kind of like two girls kissing each other. So you’ll see a guy sitting on a chair—at, you know, a high school dance—and two girls will just go up and give him this huge lap dance and start making out. [...] just doing it to appeal to the “guys…always trying to find this new way in to appeal to the guys.

One of David’s best female friends, Anne, agreed. “Definitely girls hook up with other girls because they know the guys will like it,” she said. “They think, Then the guys are going to want to hook up with me and give me a lot of attention…definitely. If they think a guy’s going to like it, they’ll do it.

But it appears that (some) teachers and schools, like at Dalton in Manhattan, may condone schoolgirl (oral) sex and even teen masturbation. For example, Peggy Cowan, the president of the New Jersey Physicians Group, related to Levy: “I heard of one woman teacher who tells kids how to masturbate. Explaining it! About fantasizing when you shower!” 

And we shared that Tamar Lewin posted in "Teen-Agers Alter Sexual Practices, Thinking Risks Will Be Avoided" (April 5, 1997) for the New York Times that at Hunter, a top high school on Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, provides "mint-flavored condoms with no spermicide, labeled ''ONLY for oral sex'' for the Hunter High nymphets.

In the end, Levy related that the behavior of teen Female Chauvinist Pigs is not always about getting attention. In some cases, nymphets are expressing their sexuality. Connectedly, Levy shared an anecdote about Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, which Levy referred to as a “groundbreaking collection of women’s sexual fantasies”. In terms of teens expressing their sexuality, here are three examples from My Secret Garden:

Clarissa shared that she remembers when she and her friend were caught masturbating with candles when they were 12.

Theda's first sexual fantasy started after she gazed upon her teacher's "rotund posterior" when she was about 7 or 8.  She wrote that she had "an infantile urge” to slide her hand “[…] down his bum cheeks and round to 'the front' [...]".

Alexandra fantasized about having an affair with her high school teacher. She stated emphatically, "[...] I'm sure it would not be a fantasy if I gave him a little encouragement."

Levy even shared that some of the same sexual fantasies she had when she was “very young” currently run through her bed: 

“Likewise, certain themes have run through my sexual fantasies since I was very young, just as they now run through my bed. Nobody had to teach me how to want these things, or how to get them.”

And the author shared that when she was a 17-year-old high school student, she visited Wesleyan, where, as part of her college tour, she was taken to a “Naked Party” that was decorated with a crepe paper penis and vagina. And Levy learned that at Wesleyan: “Group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was *de rigueur.” Needless to say, Levy is an alumna of Wesleyan. But doesn’t Levy’s anecdote contradict her subtitle? Maybe there hasn’t been a [sharp] rise in teen raunch culture but rather a gradual continuation. 

*de ri·gueur | adjective: required by etiquette or current fashion. (Oxford Languages) [Emphasis added]

[Update 10/25/22] "Swiffergate": "Swiffer Girl" The Prep Schoolgirl Teen Porn Star

Gossip Girl (s01e12)

On episode 11 and 12 of the 2021 Gossip Girl reboot, viewers get a glimpse at the types of tips that Gossip Girl receives about the raunchy teen behavior of (some of) the Manhattan prep school students. For example, in episode 12, we learned that a Constance Billard student had an age-gap sexual affair and "slept" with The Help. And to get more followers on social media, two prep school twins unabashedly engaged in incentious lipstick lesbian girl-on-girl kissing:

Mom: You made out with each other to get followers?

Twin #1 (Auvray Stephenson): And it worked!

Twin #2 (Evershea Stephenson): Prude!

Interestingly, it turns out that while (some) Manhattan prep school nymphets embrace the words teen slut, it's "prude" that one does not want to be called. Consequently, a nubile teen may be prone to prove she's not prude.

For example, Zachary Kussin's New York Post post about Danielle Miller reminded us about 2004's Horace Mann middle school “Swiffer Girl” whom produced three (3) self-shot teen videos masturbating with and simulating fellatio on a Swiffer broom.

Miller [...] the Horace Mann alumna who became known as “Swiffer Girl” in 2004. A boy had dared the then-eighth grader online to prove she wasn’t a “prude,” prompting Miller to record and send him three sexually explicit videos featuring the household sweeper.

Gabrielle Bluestone elaborated on "Swiffergate" and Miller whom grew up 'a block from Central Park, in an apartment building neighboring the New York Athletic Club and the Ritz-Carlton". In her New York magazine piece, "What Danielle Miller learned at Horace Mann and Rikers", Bluestone related that after Miller's crush shared the teen masturbation videos, unsurprisingly the videos went viral "among New York’s private-school students" and on the Internet:

Up and down the Upper East Side, wealthy teens flashed their thongs in Juicy sweat suits and low-rise Hudson jeans. Girls lined up for Brazilian waxes at J Sisters after it was prominently featured in the Gossip Girl books.

 

Horace Mann Yearbook Photo: Danielle "Swiffer Girl" Miller
(Source: The Age of Influence [ABCNews\Hulu[) 

In 2004, when Miller was in eighth grade, a boy she had a crush on dared her in an AIM message to prove she wasn’t a “prude.” She grabbed the new Sony VAIO laptop her father had given her for Christmas and propped it on the ledge of her shower stall. She disrobed, picked up the handle of a Swiffer mop, and pressed record. She made three sexual videos in all and emailed them to the boy.

The boy forwarded the clips to Miller’s best friend, who in turn sent them to two people, and soon it had reached everyone that they knew. It spread rapidly from there. 

The videos hadn’t circulated just among New York’s private-school students and their friends, though Miller still remembers the name of every classmate who mocked her on a page dedicated to the scandal on the now-defunct social-media site Friendster. The videos also ended up on the file-sharing programs LimeWire and Kazaa. 

Swiffer

Initially, Miller was distraught, but by 9th grade, she embraced the attention, and due to "Swiffergate", "Swiffer Girl" became a much sought after "It Girl":

By the next year, in ninth grade, Miller had decided to abandon what was left of her identity as a nice, quiet girl. “I became a different person,” she says. She got her first fake ID and doubled down on the scandal, becoming “that girl,” as the former classmate describes her, the one you’d call “if you wanted to do something bad or go out on a Wednesday night and get drunk in ninth grade.”

“I lived in a never-ending Gossip Girl episode,” Miller wrote while she was incarcerated. “Everyone wanted to be friends with Swiffer Girl. Everyone wanted Swiffer Girl at their parties. Everyone wanted pictures with Swiffer Girl. Everyone wanted Swiffer Girl’s autograph. Everyone wanted to smoke hookah with Swiffer Girl. Everyone’s parents didn’t want their kids around Swiffer Girl. Everyone wanted to try drugs with Swiffer Girl. Everyone wanted to pregame with Swiffer Girl. Everyone wanted to fuck Swiffer Girl.”

In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy elaborated on Miller's embraced fame as a prep school porn star, which included signing autographs:

As for the eighth-grader, like Paris Hilton before her, the dissemination of her amateur porn swiftly resulted in a major uptick in her level of popularity and celebrity. “People said they saw her walking down the hallway giving autographs,” said a seventeen-year-old senior at Manhattan’s Trinity School named Talia.

The Swiffer sucker and her compatriots at Fieldston and Oyster Bay High weren’t so much experimenting with sex as experimenting with celebrity [...] 

As one hipster from the senior class at the progressive, elite Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights said, “There’s something so Girls Gone Wild about this. Like videotaping yourself giving a blow job to a Swiffer? [...] ”

Lastly and surprisingly, Kussin, Bluestone, and Levy failed to mention that Miller's middle school masturbation videos were, even to the most liberal atheist, illegal. But it's not surprising that Miller's crush wasn't accused of grooming. Even though, he had power over her (i.e., The Crush), for some reason, the fact that he was ≈ 13 and not ≈ 31 saved Miller from being victimized. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Update 10/25/22

On the “Danielle Miller, the Horace Mann Swiffer Girl” (April 1, 2022) episode of the Forbidden Fruits (FF) podcast, Danielle Miller shared with Julia Fox, a former teen sex worker, and Niki Takesh that she actually made seven teen masturbation videos. And that she’s actually surprised that no one ever mentioned the other four videos:

Miller: “Had a crush on this kid [...] I sent him a video ‘cause he called me a prude [GG] [...] and I had a crush on him [...]  I didn’t want him to judge me. I didn’t want him to think I was too sexually conservative. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t any fun [...] So, I made these videos for him [...] There are actually seven (7) of them.”

FF: “Oh my God.” [Laughs]

Miller: “Yeah.” [Laughs]

FF: “There were seven?!”

Miller: “Yeah. And, like, no one [has] ever talked about that ever; so, that’s like exclusive information.”

FF: “Wow!"

When asked, “Why are we not calling this guy out?” Miller replied that it wasn’t the boy’s fault. “He was in the wrong but he was also 13 too. And everyone makes mistakes [...] It wasn’t his fault.” 

It appears that the boy wasn’t in the wrong because, in an effort to have more middle school sex tapes made, he only shared the videos with Miller’s best friend whom, as far as we know didn’t make a teen sex tape, but she did share the videos with “whole eighth grade”.

Interestingly, the videos were made when Miller was 13, but they didn’t go viral until she was 14 (2004), which was one year before she lost her virginity. 

Consequently, one of the FF hosts volunteered: “And also I remember, like, being that age and being so hypersexual all the time.” 

Initially, Miller said that she didn’t sign any autographs:

“I heard, like, crazy rumors like, “Oh there were Swiffers brought into the Horace Mann for her to sign.” And like that never happened [...] Or that I, like, signed autographs and stuff - that never happened.”

However, she did admit to signing a New York magazine piece “The Paris Hilton Effect - Teens Making Sex Videos”:

“I literally signed one thing ever [...] it was “The Paris Hilton Effect”. The first article that came out by Daphne Merkin [....] who wrote an article for New York mag basically bashing me. And when it happened kids were bringing it to school and passing it around and stuff.”

After mentioning that Paris Hilton was “over age” (i.e., 18) when she made her sex tape, Miller proclaimed that she has been cemented as an influential pop culture producer of child porn to which a FF host suggested that Miller own it, capitalize off it, and trademark Swiffer Girl.

“[...] I think you’ve been running from it. And I think it’s like time that you just face it and own it and, like, capitalize off it. You know. Like trademark that shit.”

“Trending for the next two decades. I’d be, like, forever, like, cemented as this, like, influential pop culture producer of, like, our generation of child porn.”

Lastly for this update, the Bradenton Herald reported that “NYC social media influencer [Danielle Miller] gets [five year] prison sentence in Sarasota bank fraud attempt” (Oct 25, 2022)

Celebrity Age-Gap Couple: Casey Affleck (46) & Caylee Cowan (23)

Jessica Bennett posted on Page Six (November 27, 2021) that "Casey Affleck, 46, goes Instagram-official with actress Caylee Cowan, 23". Of the celebrity age-gap couple, Bennett wrote:

Days after Page Six published first photos of Casey Affleck, 46, making out with actress Caylee Cowan, 23, the Oscar-winner has gone public with their relationship.

Affleck confirmed his romance with the young star (e.g., Willy Wonderland (2021)) in an Instagram post encouraging followers to donate blood to The Red Cross, referring to the beauty as “my love.”

“she is MY [young] Love, and she ALWAYS shows up when it counts…,” Affleck declared, while explaining Cowan’s own hesitation when it came to donating blood.

In addition, Bennett shared that Affleck's previous (longtime) girlfriend was 40-year-old actress Floriana Lima:

This latest post also officially confirms Affleck’s split from longtime girlfriend, actress Floriana Lima, 40. During their time together, the couple avoided the spotlight and rarely posted pics of each other to their respective social media pages.

But Claire Carusillo warned on Gawker "Watch Out Casey Affleck, Here Comes the Age Gap Police: The #MeToo survivor’s new girlfriend was born a year after his supporting turn in ‘Good Will Hunting’". (Nov 29, 2021) But Carusillo referred to the age-gap couple's love as "regular and true" and wished the famous age-gap couple all the best:

I think their love is regular and true, and if any jealous hag prudes come out decrying their age gap, I want you to know that I did graduate with a women’s studies degree from a mid-ranked liberal arts college in 2013, and I think this May-December romance is a total boon [...] I wish these two a normal relationship.

Piper Rockelle & Coco Quinn: Self-Sexualized or Sexualized Bikini Teens?

Chelsea Hirsch posted on Page Six "14-year-old YouTuber responds to Pink’s criticism of her bikini photos" (September 1, 2021). In the post, Hirsch related the Pink opined that Piper Rockelle, a 14-year-old bikini clad influencer, is being exploited by her parents:

“How many kids like Piper Rockelle are being exploited by their parents? And at what point do the rest of us say … ‘this isn’t okay for a 13 yr old to be posing in a bikini whilst her MOTHER takes the photo?!?!'” 

14-Year-Old Piper Rockelle

However, Piper responded by sharing that she is living her nymphet bikini clad dream:

“The first thing I want everyone to know is that my mom doesn’t make me do anything. Quite the opposite,” Rockelle told TMZ Tuesday. “I’m a kid who had a dream, and my mom is amazing enough to help me live it out.

“I don’t think Pink has ever seen one of my YouTube videos because if she did, she’d see it’s just my friends and me having fun and acting like ourselves,” she added. “The content we make is the kind of stuff anyone can watch.”

But Fully Vaxxed Girl agreed with Pink and posted on Twitter that Piper is being sexualized:

“OMG! Had to google her, the sexualized pictures of her in Google are horrifying! I did a double take of her age 13???And her mother takes these pictures of her?? 

13-Year-Old Coco Quinn

And @CherylNapoli asked on Twitter: "And have you seen [13-year-old] Coco Quinn?!?! Equally as appalling."

However, @MaestraObrien agreed with Piper by posting that taking a picture of a child in a bikini is appropriate: “I haven’t seen anything inappropriate. Is taking a picture of your child in a bikini inappropriate?!?”

In the end, the most controversial issue raised by Piper is that she's of the (controversial) opinion that a nymphet (twerking) in a bikini is not sexual - unless you view her sexually:

“Why do we shame people for that? Pictures of teenagers in bikinis having fun are not sexual. They’re only sexual if you view us that way.”