Scarlet Letter

The Urban Dictionary defines the word slut as “a woman with the morals of a man,” yet there is no male equivalent for the term. Boys will be boys but girls, apparently, can only be whores, a toxic double standard that is sadly enjoying a renaissance in a new age of cyber bullying. Scarlet letters are now branded with zeros and ones, and anyone looking to do a little slut-shaming has myriad online venues in which to do it, including female-initiated Twitter threads such as #stopactinglikewhores.

Given the rise of digital humiliation, any discussion of society’s skewed perceptions of male and female sexuality is timely, but Monda Halpern’s latest contribution to the discourse suggests it is also timeless. In Alice in Shandehland: Scandal and Scorn in the Edelson/Horwitz Murder Case, Halpern—a professor of women’s and Jewish history at Western University—uses a historic...