Changing Tides: Slutciety becomes The Fourth Wave

In the spirit of inclusion, Pitt’s leading feminist publication has dropped its original name, Slutciety, and has rebranded itself with its organization’s own wave of feminism. 

For its February issue, the group renamed the monthly publication The Fourth Wave, as the group is striving for more inclusive feminism, according to president Amanda Chan. Though the organization has adopted a new logo for its latest issues, The Fourth Wave continues to publish monthly. 

Chan, a sophomore Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Sociology and Global Studies triple major, started Slutciety with former Pitt student Jessica Zakis, who left Pitt after her freshman year in 2014. The publication’s former title embraced a term that demeans women with supposedly low sexual morals so others could not use it against them.

“But it’s not really inclusive,” she said. “Some people don’t want to identify as a slut because they take pride in their modesty.”

While the name Slutciety sought to empower women, it ignored sexual minorities, according to Chan. 

Some, like asexual students, don’t have sex at all, so the title Slutciety wouldn’t include them. The title also wasn’t adequately inclusive of transgender women, either, Chan said.

“[Trans women] are already overly sexualized, so it doesn’t help them to brand themselves as sluts,” Chan said.

A 2011 open letter on the Black Women’s Blueprint blog partly prompted the name change. The letter argued against the repurposing of the word slut, as it also holds historical and racial undertones.

“As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is,” the letter stated.

According to the letter, using the word excludes black women from modern feminism and the SlutWalk — a annual feminist rally that began in 2011 in Toronto, Canada — because of its historically offensive usage against black women.

Zoe Hannah, The Fourth Wave’s vice president, devised the new name after conducting research on the different waves of feminism for a nonfiction writing class.

Hannah, a sophomore English major, said Slutciety realized the word slut is a “trigger word for a lot of people.”

“We want to get a feminist viewpoint from a bunch of different races, class structures and areas,” she said. “By using the word slut, we are kind of othering a bunch of different groups of men and women who still need feminism but are being turned away by white feminism.” 

According to the Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics, the third wave feminist movement began in the late 1990s and was primarily the result of work by activists between the ages of 15 and 30. The goals of the movement included “challenging the very definitions of gender and sexuality” and “expanding the scope of feminism beyond Western ideals to include the global concerns of all people,” according to the Encyclopedia.

Chan said the goal of The Fourth Wave is to bring light to unsaid issues, like how racial minorities engage feminism, into the mainstream conversation.

For Chan, these issues are personal. Chan, a Chinese American, said Asians often get lost in the race conversation and grouped together, despite having different cultural experiences.

“People don’t get to learn about themselves or talk about their own personal experiences,” she said.

The Fourth Wave also includes and publishes male writers like Ken Ward, a senior communication major who identifies as a feminist.

The name change “fits the nature of the club,” Ward said, because it is more inclusive.

“When people ask ‘why are you into feminism?’ of course your first answer might be because you are looking out for the rights and freedoms of women,” he said. “But feminism means freedom for a lot of people, for people to start breaking gender norms and expectations.”

Feminism introduced Ward to circles where he can be himself, he said.

“It’s a huge source of positive energy to be a feminist on campus,” Ward said.

Hannah has measured The Fourth Wave’s success this year in “thank-yous” from fellow students while handing out copies of the publication.

“When we hand out publications, we get a lot of people who will say ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been waiting for something like this, we needed something like this, thank you so much,’” Hannah said.

Chan said while the group does not necessarily claim the fourth wave feminist movement, the new name for the publication is “a little bit individuality, a little bit inclusivity.”

“The idea is that we are starting our own thing,” Chan said. “It’s our own wave.”