Ever since I’ve been writing about slut-shaming, I’ve been called a slut and a whore.
In the 1990s, the age of doorstopper phone books (the kind with white pages and yellow pages), I received alarming letters delivered to my mailbox. In the early 2000s, the letters morphed into emails. And when I began posting on Instagram, the insults followed me there, too.
Over three decades, the insults were consistent: I was called various synonyms for prostitute and vagina, and an ugly pedophile for good measure. The hatred was misogyny—targeted, specific and designed to put me back in my place.
Then Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel retaliated in a devastating war in Gaza. The insults changed. I am no longer a regular slut and a whore; I am a “Jewish whore,” a “chosenite supporting the porn industry,” and a “whore” whom everyone could agree was bad apart from “tribes who hate Jesus.”
I call it "misogynam" (mih-SAH-jih-NAHM)—the intertwined violence of anti-Semitism and misogyny directed at Jewish women.
The post We Need a Word for What’s Happening to Jewish Women appeared first on Ms. Magazine.