Laura Steven - A Girl Called Shameless

Ajita shakes her head. “A group chat. They added everyone from school.” Sure enough, one glance at my phone shows a bunch of new notifications from a group chat entitled “Hazel ‘Pompom’ Parker.” After the original video, which I blur my eyes in order not to look at, there are a few dozen comments – mainly from guys, because guys – about the nude. Critiques of her body, her technique, and, inevitably, the eggplant emoji followed by the water squirt emoji. Her friends from the cheer squad have posted angry messages demanding that the chat is deleted or they’ll go to the police, but that just makes me feel even more sick. There’s nothing the police can do when revenge porn is legal.

Oh God. Hazel made some shitty comments online when my garden-bench picture was leaked. Something about how shameless I am, about how dirty my behavior was. And now the same thing is happening to her.

A dark, spiteful part of me feels an iota of satisfaction at the way the world has dealt her revenge, but the bigger, overwhelming part just feels terrible for her. No matter how shitty a person she is, she doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does. Sympathy crests in my chest.

What’s Hazel doing now? Has she seen it yet? Or is she enjoying her last moments of blissful ignorance before her world is turned upside down?

I remember the way I felt when the nudes first dropped. Disbelief, along with roiling nausea and a desperate desire to wake up and find this is all just a bad dream. And the paranoia, sharp and immediate. The feeling that every single person I made eye contact with had now seen me naked, from the principal of Edgewood to the homeless man who sleeps rough on our housing estate. My skin crawls at the memory, as vivid as the day it happened.

No. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.

“Are you okay?” Ajita asks. Her teeth work away at her inner lip. Meg’s eyes are wide and sympathetic. Their pity makes me feel two inches tall.

“Yeah, fine,” I lie. Then, despite my best efforts to bury it deep down in my chest, emotion explodes through me in savage waves, so intense it leaves me gasping for breath.

Anger. White hot, furious. Pure, unfiltered rage, so potent and visceral it makes me feel more wild animal than teenage girl.

Nothing is ever going to change. No matter how well our sex-doll sketches go down, no matter how many chords we strike with the BBB fanbase, this shit will continue to happen to girl after girl after girl.

I grip the table, knuckles whitening like the flames inside me. I want to smash something, want to feel something shatter in my fist. I eye the glass pepper shaker longingly.

“This is going to keep happening as long as it’s legal,” I spit out. “Teenage girls are going to keep having their lives ruined, and if they’re over eighteen, the douchebags who leak their nudes are totally off the hook. It makes me sick that you can ruin someone’s life and face no consequences.”

“Maybe if we keep going with Bitches Bite Back, we’ll make guys see that –”

“No, we won’t,” I burst out, interrupting an alarmed Meg. I pound my fist on the Formica table, cutlery rattling in its jar. “We won’t make guys see anything. We don’t have the scope.”

Ajita and Meg exchange a worried glance. I don’t think either of them have ever seen me like this. Honestly, before the scandal, I wasn’t an angry person. Self-absorbed and immature, maybe, but I’ve never felt this way before. So easily irritated, so quick to erupt. It’s like my blood has been replaced by molten lava, scorching me from the inside out.

The noise in the diner is dimmed by my rage. My heartbeat pounds in my ears as I try to sharpen the anger into a point, try to focus my blistering energy into action.

How can Bitches Bite Back stop this? Writing blog posts and launching forums isn’t enough. We need to take real action. But how? We’re just teenagers. We have no power.

But that isn’t true. I think of the marches organized by victims of school shootings, kids like me who wanted to channel their pain and grief into change. Could we organize a protest maybe? Our town is small, but if enough women and non-awful guys got behind it . . .

No. It’s not enough. Those victims had a clear goal: stricter gun control. Our message would just be: hey, maybe stop being such unbelievable cretins toward young women?

So . . . we should do the same. We should demand comprehensive revenge porn legislation. It’s the only thing that would provide an adequate deterrent for guys seeking to destroy a woman’s reputation. These laws already exist to varying degrees in other states, but the South in general is yet to follow suit. And with far-right senators like Ted Vaughan in office, change is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Yet a plan is formulating in my mind. I’m aware I’ve been sat in silence for several minutes, and things round the table have gotten a little awkward, so I lay my palms flat on the sugar-dusted table, fingers splayed, and say, “I have an idea.”

“Always dangerous,” Ajita says. “Go on.”

“I think we need to arrange a meeting with Ted Vaughan.”

Meg blinks twice in quick succession, pushing her glasses up her nose. “The senator?”

“The father of the dude you banged on a garden bench?” Ajita adds.

I nod once, solemn as a nun. “The one and only.”

Nothing is ever going to change. Not unless we force it to.

7.45 a.m.

Despite last night’s wild sequence of events – namely landing a job and experiencing severe second-hand pain on Hazel’s behalf – I leave the diner and walk home in good snuff. [For the uninitiated, this is entertaining old slang for “in a good mood”. I am not sure if you can culturally appropriate Middle Ages England, but if you can, please send the Tudors my apologies.]

We spend the rest of the BBB meeting drafting an email to Ted Vaughan’s office, requesting a meeting to discuss the state’s condemnable lack of revenge porn legislation. We even use words like “legislation”, to give off the illusion of savvy. The BBB email account pings immediately with an auto response: someone will get back to us in three–five business days. The impatient imp who nests inside my skull wants to march down to the office right now and demand they see us this very instant, but I beat down the imp ulse [geddit?] for once. We all know I’m not fantastic at will power, or generally behaving like an adult in any way, shape or form. So we must consider this show of spectacular restraint a win.

Having a plan makes me feel fierce and determined, rather than angry and helpless. I cling to it like a life raft.

Hazel’s sex tape is the talk of the town. The guy who leaked it – a former jock nicknamed Bakehead on account of his well-documented pot habit – is apparently her ex-boyfriend. He cheated on her, she wouldn’t take him back, so he sent their sex tape to everyone he knew. She filmed it in trust, and that trust was shattered.

Lots of girls have left the group chat in a show of solidarity, but plenty haven’t. The follow-up messages are now into the hundreds. The majority are lewd, crude and skin-crawlingly vulgar, although there are a handful of brave souls who’ve chimed in and called out the guy who started the group chat, labeling him a pitiful bully and a pathetic, immature dick. But those are few and far between. It’s mainly water-squirt emojis.

Carson, God bless his soul, commented saying, “Hey, man, this is uncool. Delete it, right now.” It remains undeleted, but I appreciate his sticking up for Hazel nonetheless – because as soon as he does a few of his teammates follow his lead. It’s nice seeing guys actually call each other on their bullshit, and even nicer when it’s your boyfriend leading the rally cry.