HOUSTON, TX – Something ugly has reared its head in our schools: slut shaming. Not familiar with the term? It’s the act of insulting a girl or woman because she expresses her sexuality in a way you don’t approve of — anything from having multiple sex partners to something as simple as the way she dresses.
“Whenever we abuse or humiliate or degrade a girl for behavior that if a boy or a man had done it, would either be ignored or even praised,” explains Jennifer Mathieu, teacher at a Houston private school and author of “The Truth About Alice,” a new YA (young adult) fiction novel centered around slut shaming.
“It is about a girl named Alice Franklin who, the summer before her junior year, allegedly sleeps with two boys in the same night at a party and is later accused to be responsible for the death of one of those boys,” says Mathieu, “when she sends him some inappropriate texts” and he ends up crashing his car while looking at them.
First-time authors like Jennifer are known to write about their own experiences. So we wondered, was she Alice? “It’s not autobiographical, although, of course, my own memories of high school and working in a high school, that obviously plays into how I create the characters.”
She insists none of the characters are based on any of her students, but it ‘was’ written for them, “Teenagers are hungry for real stories. They’re lives are complicated. They have fears and concerns, and they have opinions, and they take things to heart, and they wanna talk about these things.”
For more about Jennifer Mathieu and her new book, pick up a copy of this month’s Houstonia.
