When Emily White was editor of this paper, she placed a notice in Savage Love that read: "Are you or were you the slut of your high school? Whether you earned the reputation or not, I would like to talk to you for an article I am writing. Confidentiality is guaranteed."

More than 150 responses--and several years of research and interviews--later, White has produced Fast Girls, an examination of the psychological means by which teenagers zero in on certain girls for collective stigmatization, resulting in "the myth of the slut." In mining this fertile territory, White has discovered many alarming across- the-board consistencies in her subjects' "basement history": the middle-class surroundings, the early onset of puberty, the near-invariability of certain rumors (such as the train job), and so forth. Most alarming, however, is the degree to which the brand of the high-school slut remains prominent--or significantly buried--in the lives of the girls as they become women. Far from being standard teenage anxiety outgrown as one moves beyond the confines of adolescence, the slut brand is like a mark of Cain that colors everything that follows it--if only because so much of the woman's life is spent trying to build an identity apart from it.

What should come as no surprise to readers familiar with White's work in these pages and others (The New York Times Magazine, LA Weekly, etc.), Fast Girls is full of energetic, resolute prose whose rhetorical beauty never overshadows the empathetic insights that hold the book together. White's tone is colloquial, but she writes with a fierce moral intelligence that allows her to draw meaningful conclusions from what are essentially unquantifiable, counterscientific data. The challenge of the enterprise lay first in drawing the women out, then in tracing the lines between their stories.

What she found is that those lines bisect the culture as soundly as those of race and class; they are universal stories, united by their dubious relationship with truth and by their power to ruin people's lives. Despite the fact that many of the girls live up to the title--often because they find they can't live it down--"myth" is precisely the right word for the slut archetype, because it deals with cultural ideals, and the inarticulate will of certain social groups to avenge the appearance of individuality.

(An interesting corollary to this notion arises from the review of Fast Girls that recently appeared in the Seattle Weekly. Erica C. Barnett trashed White's "florid and overwrought" theorizing, essentially dismissing the book as "recycled pseudo-psychological schlock" [the best Barnett can muster is to say that's not all the book is]. Most interesting about this ad hoc condemnation is the way it echoes White's subject matter: Barnett's review--particularly its "this isn't real feminism" slant--reads like a rumor about a school slut [published author] started by a "nice girl" who can't get a date [book deal].)

"When the command is uttered, 'Pass it on,' it's assumed the person receiving the command will cooperate--there is an implicit faith that the kid who hears it next will understand the significance of the rumor and understand why it should not be questioned or stopped. Taking part in these whispering campaigns, kids feel like they belong. They're swept along by the crowd, and the crowd moves them out of the isolation of the self." (p. 57)

What White absolutely nails here, and in other passages throughout the book, is the insidious way rumors take hold and become true, even when false, via mass credulity, presumption, and the unstoppable momentum of directional hostility. She's writing about the invention of truth related not to fact but to will, to desire, and how that truth renders powerlessness and misery. She's also writing, both generally and specifically, about actual people, which is why the book is frustrating but always fascinating.

White invites the whole idea of slut--from nasty epithet to reclaimed signifier scrawled across Kathleen Hanna's belly--to the table, enlisting anecdotes, pop culture, feminist texts, and religious tracts in an effort to make us wrestle with the slut's mythic stature.