Video: Franchesca Ramsey’s Powerful ‘How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming’

By Arturo R. García

Screenshot from Franchesca Ramsey’s video “How Slut Shaming Becomes Victim Blaming.”

Late last week, Franchesca Ramsey shared her immensely intimate and painful story regarding sexual assault as part of a critique of a video by comedian Jenna Marbles. The video and a transcript are under the cut, but be advised that it carries a heavy TRIGGER WARNING due to the subject matter.

Franchesca Ramsey: I had intended on making a hilarious video with wigs and green screens and costumes and characters. I changed my mind and instead decided to make a response video to Jenna Marbles’ “Things I Don’t Understand About Women: Sluts Edition.”

Clip of Jenna Marbles: The first thing I don’t understand about sluts is a one-night stand. A true one-night stand: when you meet someone, you’re out somewhere, and then you go home somewhere just to have sex with them. This concept is like [makes "mind-blowing" motion] to me. Maybe I’m at his house and, you know, he’s got big plans of chopping me up in little pieces and keeping me in his freezer for awhile. Maybe he’s got, like, 10 roommates in the other room that are all just waiting to close in and gang-bang you for the night. Help the sluts of the world make less bad slutty decisions.

FR: Two really amazing YouTubers have already done responses that I completely co-sign and think that they did a great job of explaining slut-shaming and why it is bad and how it lead to a really slippery slope, so make sure to check out videos by Laci Green and Hayley G. Hoover. I will link them in the video description box.

Laci did a really great job–and so did Hayley–of just kind of adding a disclaimer that this is not an attack on Jenna Marbles. This is really about a larger problem, and she’s just kind of opened the door to the conversation. I’ve decided to chime in here because I actually have personal experience with this. Awesome! Of all the things I never thought I’d be sharing on the internet, this is definitely one of them.

When I was 18, just past my 18th birthday, I was date-raped. That is how I lost my virginity. That’s my beautiful story about how I was deflowered.

For my 18th birthday, one of the girls that I worked with took me to a concert. She bought me concert tickets, and we went with her boyfriend and his roommate. Somewhere through the course of drinking all day and not really eating very much and kind of feeling pressured to drink because I was not really a drinker, when it was time to leave the concert, I was, like, beyond inebriated. Like, stumbling and slurring my words and having a hard time–and so clearly, I could not drive home. And, in retrospect, I don’t know if there was something in my drink because I’ve never, ever gotten like that post-the situation. I blacked out–like, donezo. Like, no recollection, was not conscious.

It wasn’t until the morning that I even realized that I had sex and I was like, “Wait a second, what, what happened? This doesn’t feel right.” And I asked my girlfriend and she was like, “Yeah, you totally had sex with him, you were like, so bad.”

I remember feeling mortified. Just thinking “Oh my God, why did this happen to me?” I mean, just all of those horrible thoughts going through my head, blaming myself. I told her, I begged her, “Please don’t say anything about this at work.” She told my co-workers. She told my manager, and they said horrible things about me. They called me a slut, and I was the running joke. I was the running joke at work. And because of that, I didn’t say anything.

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