When I broke up with my high school boyfriend at age 16, he joined a group of boys in calling me a name I’d never expected people would ever think to call me. Once he learned that I’d fallen in love with my best friend, though, shots were fired; an ego likely diminished. During a group beach day in July, I was caught off guard by words that cut deep, like cross-stitch scissors snipping into the seams of the leopard bikini I was wearing. As I got up from my towel to approach a friend, I turned around to find him and a few other guys from my class snickering. “Look at her with her tatas hanging out,” one boy mocked. “Slut!” they said while laughing.

I turned around, half-expecting there to be another girl standing there. My face grew hot, and embarrassment permeated my body, a body that I was told long ago to keep sacred. Because I came from a tight-knit religious community, my reputation, above anything else, meant everything. Before I started high school, my mother sat me down and told me that my name should never be passed from the lips of gossipers and my body shouldn’t be passed around in the hands of teenage boys. After hearing the word I was called on the beach that day, I felt cheated because I thought I’d played by the rules my mother laid out. Still, I shoved that leopard bathing suit to the back of my drawer.

Not long after, those boys doubled down: They took to Twitter to declare their opinion of me with a derogative hashtag coined on my behalf. When our senior year began, they gathered like sheep in the hallways.

Because I was lucky enough to have female friends and even some strangers in my corner at the time—some tried clearing my name on Twitter and sent me private messages condemning the injustices of slut shaming—I felt confident enough to continue wearing what I wanted. It also helped tremendously having a boyfriend who stood up for me when trolls tried tearing me down.

I tried a tough-girl approach when I faced the boys in the hallway by flipping my middle finger here and there, but sometimes I couldn’t even make it into a bathroom stall before the tears came. One time a teacher checked in while in the elevator because he said he kept hearing my name whispered in one of his classrooms. I even went to great lengths to apologize to my ex because I thought the way in which he was handling our breakup and my new relationship was my fault.

A part of me thought I deserved to be called names; I deserved to feel guilty for moving on so quickly with someone I’d known almost all my life—especially given the backlash pop culture bestows upon women who move frequently from one relationship to the next (see: Taylor Swift).

But another part of me felt that the only reason they thought it was OK to belittle me was because I was wearing a leopard bikini. That somehow a stereotypically “slutty” item gave them permission. Although it’s come full circle and is often used in even modest clothing, leopard or cheetah print, historically, tends to carry a stigma that casts women wearing it in a promiscuous light, much like the color red or fishnet tights. Not that its definition is particularly scholarly, but even Urban Dictionary—in 2019!—describes cheetah print as what’s “most often worn by women who provide certain services to a man for pay.” (The “dictionary” entry only gets more offensive from there, FYI.)

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