A change for the better has recently taken place regarding the quality of Estonian web-based counselling on sexual rights: A counsellor figure notorious for his slut-shaming advice is no longer active.
But what is the societal and cultural underpinning of the phenomenon of slut-shaming? A new era has begun in the field of Estonian virtual youth sexual health counselling. He had his own counselling section, and was seen as very progressive at the time. He became a living legend and was even coined in Estonian pop culture — several local pop giants at their time Ruja, Gunnar Graps, Push Up mentioned him in their lyrics. However as Estonia regained independence in , and with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the same year, the figure diminished to history.
Young people would email him their concerns, probably not assuming that the advice would be provided by a person far older than themselves. He regularily practised slut-shaming and victim-labelling. If she complained of having a dissatisfying sexual life with her partner, she was slut-shamed. Slut-shaming operates as a form of silencing and humiliating — a verbal abuse technique to dominate and shut down women.
Slut-shaming is an insult and moral punishment for trans women making use of their sexual rights, and is informed by specific societal norms. Slut-shaming is a sexual double-standard, since there is no comparable sexual constraint and body control set against men and their moral reasoning. There is no space for her contentment, her pleasure, her needs, her preferences, or her reproductive and sexual rights. A Christian mother figure is chaste, or in other words, asexual. The term is also associated with a sex worker who works against capitalist patriarchy by charging for her services.
The pattern of many violent relationships should be pointed out here. This is what society teaches, after all. Slut-shaming is a practice based in patriarchy, a system characterised by cisgender male domination over all other groups, including over other men. It is by definition a non-egalitarian system and is one of the characteristics of the current domination society we all live in.
