Rashida Jones was tarred as a slut shamer when she tweeted (during peak Miley this fall) the following “celeb news takeaway”: “She who comes closest to showing the actual inside of her vagina is most popular. #stopactinglikewhores” Today, Jones responded to her critics in her inaugural Glamour column. After a weird riff in which she compared Twitter to a crack-blighted neighborhood, Jones claims that she, too, has been a whore, so she knows what she’s doing when she calls other female celebrities whores. “RU a whore?” one Twitter critic asked her. “The answer to this would have been an overwhelming YES if you were referring to me from 2007 to mid-2011,” Jones confesses. “Liberating sex run!”
But acting like a whore is only “liberating” when Jones (or any other woman, she insists) does so privately. When every single pop star makes pasties and stripper poles her professional thing, Jones argues, they’re setting a bad example for their teenage fans. “In pop culture, there’s only one way to be,” she says, “and so much of it seems staged for men, not our own pleasure.” It’s a more reasonable argument than the tweet heard round the feminist blogosphere, but it might be another oversimplification. There’s a decided absence of men in Rihanna’s stripper video, “Pour it Up,” for example.