Your UnSlut Project

Submitted by @AdelineFletcher

The sexual bullying started when I was 15. I was in year 9 of high school (I am an Australian). I used to think it was my fault, that I had brought it all upon myself. It wasn't until recently that I realized that this is not the case.

I wasn't particularly cool, I had a few friends who I hung out with at lunch and during some classes, but that was it. I did have one friend who I was very close with, his name was Dillon and he was basically my other half. We told each other pretty much everything, our ideas, opinions and secrets.

It started one night when we were sharing secrets. Dillon told me how he watched porn and masturbated and how he once had a dream of us having sex on the playground at our local McDonalds. I didn't really care about him masturbating and stuff, after all it's a completely natural thing and I wasn't going to knock him for it. I couldn't however, not feel a little bit weird about the McDonalds part. Dillon asked me if he made me uncomfortable with what he said, and even though he did, I told him he didn't. I didn't want him to think I was frigid, it was only a dream after all.

Unfortunately Dillon took this as permission to make me do stuff with him. He would hassle me about letting him get to 2nd and 3rd to the point where I just gave up trying to fight it. It made me feel gross and dirty, and I would end up having 2 or 3 showers after each sexual encounter with Dillon. A few months later at a party, Dillon hassled me into 3rd base once again. We were in a room and one of the girls in my history class who hated me walked in. She took out her phone and took a photo, and before I could even comprehend it, the photo was sent to everybody.

I quickly went from having no reputation to having a really bad one. I was labelled as the school slut. The girls would spread rumors about me, like how I gave a blow job to a 50 year old man behind the KFC dumpster, and they would call me every name imaginable, slut, whore, skitch, skank.

The boys would offer to pay me money for hand jobs and other sexual favors, and they would slap my ass as I walked past. Even the teachers thought I was a whore. Dillon stopped talking to me, and joined in on the bullying and name calling. There were Facebook pages named after me like "Adeline Fletcher is a Dirty Whore."

It got so bad that I started cutting my thighs and thinking about committing suicide. It was bad, but it got better when I became friends with this guy Andrew. Andrew came from an abusive home, and when I met him he was smoking pot and living on the streets. I helped him get a place to live and to get off the drugs. He was really sympathetic and compassionate about what happened, and he helped me realize that what happened wasn't my fault, that I wasn't asking for it. He stood up for me against the kids at school, and he was the one who really taught me to love myself.

I'm 19 now and most of the rumors and bullying have stopped, except for the occasional comment here and there, but they don't bother me as much as they used to. I have Andrew to thank for that and also the amazing UnSlut Project community. I think it is so important to have stuff like this, so young girls who have suffered similar things that I went through realize that they're not alone and it's never their fault. Nobody deserves to be called a slut or a whore ever, and the sooner society starts to realize this, the better.