Article

Sexualities
0(0) 1–17
Chonis and pijas: ! The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permissions:
Slut-shaming and double sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1363460717748620
standards in online journals.sagepub.com/home/sex

performances among
Spanish teens
Cilia Willem
Rovira and Virgili University, Spain

Núria Araüna
Rovira and Virgili University, Spain

Iolanda Tortajada
Rovira and Virgili University, Spain

Abstract
In a context of demonization of the working class in Western societies, the choni has
become an epitome of the female incarnation of the failed underclass in Spain. During
our focus group discussions with 16- to 20-year-olds, girls evoked clear-cut images of
the tasteless and sexualized choni as a stigma to avoid, in contrast with the more classy
pija. This article deals with gender and class regarding sexual scrutiny on social media in
Spain. Youngsters’ readings of the choni/pija eluded a socio-economic explanation, point-
ing to the ‘moral standards’ that chonis supposedly fail to attain. We argue that online
spaces make it more difficult for chonis to avoid this omnipresent ‘double’ double
standard.

Keywords
Choni, sexual double standard, social media, slut stigma, teenagers

Introduction
In the context of the demonization of the working class in Western societies (Jones,
2011), the figure of the choni in Spain has become the epitome of the excessive and

Corresponding author:
Cilia Willem, Department of Communication Studies, Rovira and Virgili University, Av. Catalunya 35, 3.22
E-43002 Tarragona, Spain.
Email: cilia.willem@urv.cat
2 Sexualities 0(0)

unruly female incarnation of the failed underclass, both on TV (Oliva, 2014) and
on social media (Tortajada and Araüna, 2014). During our focus group discussions
with young people living in the region of Catalonia, Spain, girls pervasively evoked
clear-cut images of the tasteless and sexualized choni as something to avoid: ‘I don’t
post slutty half-naked pictures of myself like those chonis do’. This drew our atten-
tion to the interrelation between sexuality, gender and class regarding sexual scru-
tiny and judgement of youngsters on social media.
Class is not understood here as a pre-existing slot to be assigned, but instead as a
set of contestable relations; it is not a given, but a process (Frow, 1995) in which
gender is a fundamental axis (Skeggs, 2001, 2005). Central to understanding con-
temporary class relations is the process of ‘evaluation, moral attribution and
authorization in the production of subjectivity’ (Skeggs, 2005: 976). In their inter-
section with gender, class inequalities take on the shape of labels that are projected
onto female bodies incarnating a sexualized identity that must be rejected as a
counterpart of desirable and normative personas (Butler, 1990).
Along with many other authors from cultural studies, sociology and feminist
studies, we believe that one cannot look at women’s bodies without taking into
account power relations and class perspectives, as this is one way of understanding
how mechanisms of distinction and exclusion have worked throughout history and
in different cultures (Bourdieu, 1984; Jones, 2011; McClintock, 1995; Papayanis,
1999; Rose, 1999; Skeggs, 2001, 2005). What we discovered during our study in
Spain is how markers of class interfere with judgements of online ‘slut scripts’
performed by girls from different socio-cultural backgrounds in Catalonia, and
how these are assessed by peers, both online and offline.
The findings of our study suggest that slut-shaming actually happens along the
lines of a class double standard – in addition to a sexual one – where pijas (‘classy’
girls) can get away with slut scripts while chonis (‘trashy’ girls) can’t. We will argue
that online spaces, and particularly social media such as Facebook, Instagram,
Snapchat and Whatsapp, make it even more difficult for girls to avoid the omni-
present slut stigma, as they are faced with the daily consequences of not being able
to control the rapid sharing and potentially permanent circulation of pictures and
comments. This slut stigma, as a result of pervasive vigilance and commentary over
girls’ bodies online, works as a social class marker and contributes to young peo-
ple’s understanding of inequality.

Young people online: Digitized gender displays

As privileged sites for social interaction, social media have become highly relevant
for gender displays and the negotiation of young people’s self-presentations online
(among others: Huffaker and Calvert, 2005; Mascheroni et al., 2015; Ringrose and
Eriksson, 2011; Sevick Bortree, 2005; Siibak, 2010; Siibak and Hernwall, 2010;
Sveningsson, 2008; Thelwall, 2008; Tortajada et al., 2013; Van Doorn, 2010).
Teenagers are concerned with the construction of their own identity within a
social context of peers, and eagerly take on internet tools that facilitate this identity
Willem et al. 3

and relational work. The negotiation of one’s own status (boyd, 2008), social com-
parison (Manago et al., 2008) and finding out what others think about us (Pempek
et al., 2009) are enhanced by online functionalities, adding to those that already
existed offline. Ringrose and Eriksson (2011) have used the term ‘digitized identity’
to refer to these intertwined online and offline identities.
Selfies, for example, aim at building a ‘good impression’ and gaining acceptance
from others (Mascheroni et al., 2015; Tortajada et al., 2013). Therefore, self-
presentations tend to respond to the normative expectations of a group (Zhao
et al., 2008). At the same time, when selecting photographs for their profiles and
posts, adolescents participate in the definition of what is ‘socially acceptable’ for
men and women (Mascheroni et al., 2015). Yet by the same rules these self-
presentations might also be sanctioned if they do not correspond to normative
values about sexuality (Tortajada and Araüna, 2014). In this study we have
looked at how youngsters, in function of their status or power position, engage
in the construction of gendered identities through their selfies, comments and
behaviour online and how they sanction others.

Victim-blaming: The sexual double standard goes online

Women and girls today confront a double standard that penalizes them for a – real
or perceived – sexual behaviour that is generally normalized for men (Armstrong
et al., 2014). This age-old sexual double standard defines sexually active boys as
‘studs’ and their female counterparts as ‘sluts’ (Valenti, 2008), a process in which
men play a critical role by rewarding particular femininities and rejecting others by
constantly scrutinizing women’s appearance (Ringrose et al., 2013; Salter, 2015;
Skeggs, 2001). As Cowie and Lees have argued, labels such as ‘slut’ or ‘slag’ are,
then, one of the ways through which women’s subordination regarding to men is
perpetuated (Cowie and Lees, 1981).
Another pillar of the double standard is victim-blaming. It positions girls’ sexu-
ality as something private and ‘pure’, at risk of contamination, and hence situates
women as morally responsible for protecting the ‘virginal body’ from male sexu-
ality (Holland et al., 1998; Jackson and Cram, 2003; Tolman, 2012). As a conse-
quence, women are divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ according to their (sexual)
behaviour and the degree to which they achieve protecting their sexual reputation
in public (Tolman, 2012). ‘Good girls’, then, are the ones who maintain their status
as pure and innocent, while ‘bad girls’ are held responsible for not having been able
to protect their bodies from ‘contamination’ (Ringrose et al., 2013). This way,
victims – of sexual assault for example – are double victims.
Victim-blaming is also central to recent public narratives around sexting and
other online practices between youngsters, in which girls are implicitly held respon-
sible for ‘sexting gone wrong’, whereas the actual perpetrators of online sexual
harassment – unauthorized circulating displays of girls’ bodies for example – are
usually boys (Ringrose et al., 2013; Salter, 2015). Here, the message to girls and
women is that they should know that posting or sharing any compromising pictures
4 Sexualities 0(0)

is risky. And if they do share, they will have to face the consequences, as the online
context makes it impossible to control, hide or eliminate compromising material.
What interested us for this study was how not only the gender dimension but
also categories such as class interact with online victim-blaming, as girls are just as
active as boys in commenting on sexual reputation and equally blame other (usu-
ally lower-class) girls for risky online behaviour.

The slut stigma and class: A double double standard

Indeed, sexual reputation is an important criterium by which girls judge their own
and other girls’ actions (Kitzinger, 1995). Girls who post ‘sexy’ selfies are very
likely to be labelled as ‘slut’/‘slag’/‘puta’ (see Albury and Crawford, 2012 for
Australia; Ringrose et al., 2013 for the UK; Willem et al., 2012; Tortajada and
Araüna, 2014 for Spain). The value of compromising pictures containing
(quasi)nudity varies dramatically according to the context in which they are
shared. For perpetrators of non-authorized sharing of photos that were sent to
them in private (for example, photos of partners or ex-partners), these can have
‘exchange value’ at best (Ringrose, 2011; Skeggs, 2005) or entail public humiliation
for the victim at worst. Whereas boys easily share photos of girls’ bodies or body
parts and exchange them as an ‘asset of social capital’ (Skeggs, 2005), girls are slut-
shamed publicly by the same boys. This eventually places girls in the impossible
position of having to respond to insistent masculine demands of nudity as a proof
of sexual availability/interest, while putting their reputation at risk by doing so
(Ringrose et al., 2013; Tolman, 2002).
But boys and men are not the only ones benefiting from slut-shaming: women
are also rewarded for it when they do it to other females (Armstrong et al., 2014).
One strategy for women trying to avoid being slut-shamed involves ‘defensive
othering’ (Schwalbe et al., 2000), by deflecting the slut stigma onto others. In
judging sexual behaviour, the slut stigma designates social position and cultural
capital among women, as it draws boundaries around status groups linked to social
class: while high-status women experiment with the slut script as a form of sexual
privilege, low-status women risk public shaming when they attempted to do the
same (Armstrong et al., 2014).
This ‘classed discourse of the slut’ (Jackson and Vares, 2015) thus points in the
direction of a double double standard. In the Spanish context, a study of Fotolog1
profiles by Willem et al. distinguished the figure of the ‘trash chic’ girl, a feminine
pattern of self-representation breaking the codes of canonic femininity with a par-
ticularly Spanish working-class ‘trashy’ style, receiving derogatory sexual judge-
ments from peers (Willem et al., 2012). We have found evidence for the existence of
a clear pattern of (sexual) condemnation and prejudice against a particular group
of working-class women, chonis, both in mass media discourses and on social
media. In our discussion groups, we paid particular attention to classed discourses
of the slut by the youngsters, as we suspected judgements of gender displays online
would be intertwined with classed constructions of the choni.
Willem et al. 5

Researching teenagers’ judgement calls

of online gender displays
This study seeked to place young people’s participation in social media such as
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Whatsapp in its daily context, as online
performance is never disconnected from the offline relationships that inform and
contextualize them. The research draws on a total of six focus groups between
November 2014 and February 2015 with youth living in the Catalan region of
Spain, from different age ranges (16 to 20 years old), and diverse educational
achievement level ranges (public university, secondary private school, vocational
training). These were natural groups, meaning that the groups consisted of partici-
pants who knew each other, and related to each other on a daily basis (Gómez
et al., 2011). In Spain, the type of school, as a predictor of parents’ cultural capital
and occupational status, is an indicator of class and social status. We selected a
public university for youngsters from middle-class backgrounds, a private Jesuit
secondary school as a mix of middle class and lower-middle class and a vocational
training centre for working-class youth.
For the field work with minors, after having gained access to the schools and
permission from the school principals and the parents, the (all female) interviewers
conducted mixed focus groups with eight to 10 youngsters each. For the field work
in vocational training and universities, students were asked to sign up for voluntary
participation in the research. After gaining the informed consent of the partici-
pants, the interviewers conducted a mixed focus group on each site. In the focus
groups, participants were engaged in conversations about their social media use,
their views on sexting and internet privacy/safety, their daily experiences of online
communication with peers and the articulation with the offline context, as well as
their views of sexual and moral judgement.
All focus groups were conducted according to the principles of the critical com-
municative approach (Gómez et al., 2011), aiming at both understanding and
transforming social reality through dialogue and reflection together with the
social agents living that reality, and by considering participants as equal in the
research process.
All the focus groups were recorded and then transcribed during the first half of
2015. Analysis was guided by the general theoretical framework above and based
on the principles of both deductive and inductive research, in that it was highly
sensitive to what participants brought up about their personal experiences and
contexts. For the sake of anonymity, all names in this report have been changed.

Online victim-blaming in practice

In Distinction, Bourdieu (1984) already mentioned that class differences are often
represented as sexual differences. What particularly interests us for this study is
Bourdieu’s notion of taste: he saw taste as an asset of ‘embodied cultural capital’
(Bourdieu, 1986). Similarly, Beverly Skeggs argues that making oneself tasteful
6 Sexualities 0(0)

through judging others to be tasteless is one way of ‘attributing negative value to

the working class as a mechanism for attributing value to the middle-class self’
(Skeggs, 2005: 15). With regards to sexuality, then, taste can designate class differ-
ences based on the degree of ‘sluttiness’ (read: tastelessness) displayed by women.
What is considered as slutty, and what is not, is a carefully and meticulously
defined collection of attributes and features that are only obvious to those involved
in class boundary setting work.
This ‘behaviour code for women’ was always present in participants’ discourses,
both regarding the self and regarding others: ‘I would never upload a picture
[to Facebook] showing my tits or ass, and so there’s no problem’ (girl, ESO1).
This self-regulatory strategy was closely linked to judgements of other females’
digital literacy in terms of internet safety and privacy: when a case of unauthorized
sharing of nude pictures of a girl came up, the victim-blaming reflex was activated
immediately in the vocational training discussion group, as participants labelled the
victim as ‘stupid’ and ‘irresponsible’:

Researcher: ‘OK, but I suppose she didn’t want him to share her pictures with any-
body else’.
Anna: ‘Of course not’.
Researcher: ‘Then if the guy sends her pictures to someone else, it’s his fault isn’t it?’.
Anna: ‘OK come on, what are you going to do, report him? Sue him for something
you have done and you know wasn’t right?’.
Researcher: ‘What do you mean, the girl?’.
Anna: ‘Yes, of course, she’s the one who got herself into trouble! If you are a bit
smart, you know from the beginning that you shouldn’t do that. Not with your boy-
friend and not with anybody, and even less by phone! Or if you have something to
show, you go to him and show it to him ‘live’, you know . . . You shouldn’t send
pictures to everybody’. (PPT3)

By assessing this girl as ‘stupid’, Anna performs defensive othering (Schwalbe et al.,
2000) and makes an indirect reference to the victim as a slut, defined by Kitzinger
(1995) as ‘she who allows herself to be used’. By contrast, when the group raised a
similar case of a boy who had been a victim of unauthorized sharing, Anna’s
discourse was clearly different:

Researcher: ‘And how did they get hold of his pictures?’.

Oriol: ‘They took his phone’.
Researcher: ‘Oh. And they started circulating his nude pictures? . . . Do you guys think
that is OK?’.
(All): No.
[. . .]
Researcher: ‘And where are they [the pictures] circulating now?’.
Anna: ‘Facebook’.
Researcher: ‘But then you can see them because you are in his circle of friends’.
Willem et al. 7

Anna: ‘No, no, not at all; it’s all over the place! Really, what they did to this guy. Poor
guy’. (PPT3)

The contradictory discourse of blame in these two cases showed how the traditional
sexual double standard operating through the mechanism of victim-blaming
(Ringrose et al., 2013; Salter, 2015) was transferred to the online space: Anna
draws the line between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ femininity, and judges the
consequences of sharing sexualized pictures by showing her preoccupation with
sexual reputation and commenting on other girls’ sexual reputations. In contrast,
in assessing the case with the boy she is mainly focused on how the incident hap-
pened, blaming the perpetrators. These results show how social networks amplify
the contexts of victimization and re-victimization of girls, and solidify the dis-
courses of the slut/slag as inappropriate femininity.

Being a choni
When we asked our female participants about their self-representation strategies on
social media, there seemed to be only two possible figures for them to choose from:
the pija (classy/posh girl) or the cani/choni (trashy girl). In order to grasp the
meaning of this dichotomy we need to look at how the class markers pija and
cani/choni operate.
The pija in the context of Spain is constructed as an (upper-)middle-class woman
or girl who is (perceived as) wealthy, well-dressed and sophisticated. The pija look
is marked by mainstream luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Dior and Hugo
Boss. The pija is supposed to be studying at some higher education institution, or
likely do so at some point in her life, and has an imago of natural sophistication
and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986). Online constructions of the pija (see
Figure 1) show her in fashionable, snobbish outfits, with discrete makeup, posing
as a model and depicted in public places of consumption (shopping) or leisure
(sports, concerts, cinema, etc.).
In contrast, the cani (see Figure 2) – a Spanish working-class youngster (f/m) –
is generally constructed as thick/uneducated, trashy, useless, noisy and sometimes
walking the edge of illegality. Similar to the chavettes in British chav culture
(Blommaert and Varis, 2013; Jackson and Vares, 2015; Jones, 2011; Skeggs,
2005), the female version of the cani is the choni.22 Chonis are considered low-
class, low-educated girls with an explicit, unbridled sexual desire. Their cultural
and classed representation portrays them as wearing heavy makeup, cheap track-
suits (usually pink and/or animal print), big earrings and specific hairdos such as
ponytails or dyed blond hair, and as shouting and chewing gum all day.
Chonis were described by our participants as wearing tangas or thongs, push-up
bras, shorts or sports leggings (usually Adidas or Nike), accessories like piercings
and tattoos, hairdos such as buns or ponytails, as well as excessive makeup or just
the ‘wrong’ makeup. Blommaert and Varis (2013) introduced the notion
of ‘enoughness’ to describe the intensive identity work deployed by members
8 Sexualities 0(0)

Figure 1. The pija. Tamara Falcó on the QUÉ website. Available at: http://www.que.es/televi-
sion/201309031539-tamara-falco-nina-pija-icono-efe.html (accessed June 2017).

Figure 2. The choni. Ylenia from ‘Gandı́a Shore’. Available at: http://cupon.es/magazin/vamo-
nos-a-gandia-shore-resumen-capitulo-1/ (accessed March 2016).

of a social or cultural group in order to set boundaries around their (perceived)

membership: ‘Enoughness [. . .] involves judgment calls by others in which the par-
ticular ‘‘dose’’ of features displayed and enacted by someone is ratified or rejected’
(Blommaert and Varis, 2013: 149). These authors state that one has to possess and
display the perfect dose of the emblematic features and attend to the smallest
details in order to be judged as an authentic and tasteful member of an identity
category, not to be confused with the ‘others’.
The concept of enoughness allowed our participants to justify an assessment of
the amount of eyeliner the others were wearing, in an attempt to position them-
selves in a ‘safe place’. Kitzinger’s study on young Scottish women, for example,
Willem et al. 9

reported the knife edge these girls constantly walked between being ‘sexy’ and
being ‘tarty’ (Kitzinger, 1995: 4). Participants invariably inflicted the slut stigma
upon chonis by criticizing their dress codes: ‘[. . .] they dress like street whores
showing their ass and tits and everything’ (PPT3) or, simply, ‘like sluts’:

Researcher: ‘How do you know if someone’s a choni when you’re on Facebook?’.

Saray: ‘You can recognize them from far’. [Laughs]
Researcher: ‘Oh so it’s obvious? I don’t know, tell me . . .’.
Saray: ‘You can see it by the way they dress’.
Oriol: ‘Yes’.
Researcher: ‘So what do they dress like?’.
Saray: ‘Like sluts’.
Researcher: ‘What do you mean?’.
Saray: ‘There’s no other way to put it’.
Researcher: ‘They have makeup on’.
Saray: ‘Loads of makeup, god yeah, they’re like a painting’. (PPT3)

Here, participants – especially girls – constantly needed to draw a boundary

between ‘those sluts’ and ‘us normal people’, applying the label to certain identi-
fiable girls (Cowie and Lees, 1981; Kitzinger, 1995) and using various mechanisms
such as the rules of enoughness (Blommaert and Varis, 2013) to identify them.
Middle-class girls pointing out overperformed femininity by working-class girls as
a means of stigmatizing them is a strategy that was detected earlier in British media
discourses on working-class women by Lawler (2004).

Chonis and cultural capital

For our participants – both female and male – these two figures, the pija and the
choni, were understood and constructed as opposites, as very clearly defined labels
of taste. While pijas were able to convey an ‘arty’ or ‘sophisticated’ imago, adjec-
tives to describe chonis were openly derogatory: ‘human waste’, ‘idiotic’, ‘sexually
hyperactive’, ‘retarded’ and ‘on top of that, proud of being so’. Sandra, a university
student, said:

It’s the way they write, they can’t write, they destroy language. For example they use
‘k’ instead of ‘c’ all the time [. . .] They also alternate lower case and capital letters –
that really kills me! I suppose they do it because they think it’s cool. (UNI1)

Sandra, immediately aware of her own online writing practices, adds the following
comment in an attempt at Bourdieuian distinction: ‘Well, we also [use ‘k’ instead of
‘c’]. . . but not in the same way [. . .], we use it for efficiency’ (UNI1). Students in
higher education appeared to be more confident in distinguishing between
both groups. Javi said: ‘If you’re at the university, you’re not cani. There are no
canis here. They’re in vocational training courses’ (UNI1). Javi’s comment refers
10 Sexualities 0(0)

to a well-studied assumption permeating young people’s choices about higher edu-

cation generally: perceived fitness. Reay has shown for the UK that middle-class
youth see higher education as a ‘non-choice’, a natural progression in their life
course (Reay et al., 2001). Archer et al. (2007) have sustained that, in contrast,
working-class youth’s taste and style contribute to shaping their views of higher
education as ‘not for me’, in the same way that we found that university stu-
dents consider university as ‘not for them [canis]’. These youngsters are thus
‘othered’ and marginalized within the (middle-class) educational system (Archer
et al., 2007: 234).
Most of the participants of our study, both middle-class and working-class,
agreed that formal education and cani culture were incompatible notions: canis do
not (want to) study; being a cani or choni is clearly an obstacle to formal education.
In the discussion groups, canis were constructed as being ‘proud to be thick and fail
at school’. They were seen as gregarious groupings under the leadership of ‘the
dumbest of them all’. The comments of these participants seemed to reinforce the
idea that being a cani is a ‘chosen’ identity category, informed by lack of cultural
resources. This assumption of ‘chosen’ identity was exemplified in the following
comment: ‘In my school we had a girl who had to repeat a year and during this
year she became a choni [. . .]. After that she was never the same again, she totally
changed her appearance’ (girl, ESO2). Here, the conflation of the pija with educated
middle-class women, the universitaria, is established and sustained, as the classed
construction of the universitaria is entangled with sexual assumptions of pureness
and prudeness. Likewise, Archer found a middle-class construction of the ‘ideal
female pupil as ‘‘innocent’’ and sexually demure’ in the UK (Archer et al., 2007: 229).
In an attempt at othering canis by referring to their bodies, Carlos, in the uni-
versity group, revealed a deeper moral judgment related to canis’ lack of education
and culture: ‘For them [the cani], the body is more important than the mind. For
us, the mind is more important than physical aspects’ (UNI1). The opposition
of the body and the mind alludes to that of ‘nature against culture’, and
reveals the binary construction of canis and pijas resonant to colonialist and
gender-essentialist articulations of otherness.

When the cultural meets the corporal

In the same way that celebrity culture has engaged in the representational struggles
that define social class through the depiction of excessively sexualized feminine
bodies (Oliva, 2014; Tyler and Bennett, 2010), social media are a key mediator
of these gendered meanings. Social networking sites – especially the ones with
visual affordances, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Whatsapp – are
very specific loci of both invoking and avoiding the visual attributes of the cani
culture, which, applied to girls, is read in terms of sexual reputation. Practices of
sexualized displays are often reinforced with positive reactions from peers (getting
‘likes’ or new followers), and slut scripts are understood by girls as an opportunity
to gain popularity – and eventually a partner. Sexualization, pornification and
Willem et al. 11

exposing a ‘sexy body’ seemed to be a resource for gaining peer approval, especially
in the case of girls.

Sandra: ‘She said that if you show everything you will get more likes’.
Joan: ‘Or if they lift their bottom up, things like that . . .’. (PPT3)

In one of the focus groups, the girls told us about the constant pressure of exposing
body parts if they wanted to get ‘likes’, and, on the other hand, risking their
reputation for doing so. Interestingly, most of the girls in all discussion groups
recognized they had performed – to different extents – slut or choni scripts on social
media, such as posting pictures of themselves wearing a lot of makeup, in revealing
clothing or poses, etc., without considering themselves to be chonis. At the same
time, they also admitted that other girls who were not actually choni might do the
same. This is just another example of how pijas could get away with slut scripts
without being slut-shamed, while ‘real’ chonis (as defined by higher-status women)
couldn’t. These two figures define a binary of privilege, where pijas can take on slut
attributes ‘for fun’, without being punished too hard, but chonis just are sluts:

Researcher: ‘So pijas also share sexy pictures . . .’.

Joan: ‘Of course they do’.
Researcher: ‘But it’s different, how do you see the difference then?’.
Joan: ‘Well . . .’.
Inés: ‘Chonis are disgusting, and the others aren’t’.
Joan: ‘Yes, that’s it’.
Inés: ‘Really . . .’.
Joan: ‘That some do it delicately and others . . .’.
Inés: ‘But they’re really disgusting, you know? Like, half of the chonis don’t even take
a shower. They smell like shit all day’. (PPT3)

This conversation clearly showed how the double double standard operated in
teens’ judgements of slut scripts: pijas do it in a classy way and chonis in a disgust-
ing way. The derogatory and even hateful tone (‘they smell like shit’) in the
working-class focus group denoted an extra effort in identity work for the girls,
as they were desperately trying to distinguish themselves and reject the slut stigma.

But I’m not a choni!

Only when the participants arrived at a more reflexive stance did they become more
critical of their own prejudices (Gómez et al., 2011) and more conscious of the
fluidity of sexual(ized) labels when used to reinforce class barriers. This happened
in most of the groups, sometimes after thinking critically about their own asser-
tions: ‘More educated people also upload sexy pictures, but they choose artistic
settings, an artistic picture. I guess it’s an excuse to post sexy pictures anyway’ (girl,
UNI1); ‘Maybe there’s not so much difference, only if they’re a friend of yours you
12 Sexualities 0(0)

won’t call them cani’ (girl, UNI1). This showed a general awareness amongst uni-
versity youth about their own class biases. When asked to reflect on slut scrips in
the VET and secondary school focus groups, here too, several participants
acknowledged their classed perception of sexualized gender displays: ‘Pijas show
their body too, but if a choni does it they’re judged differently. When a pija poses in
a bikini she’s hot; when a choni does the same she’s a slut’ (girl, ESO1). When asked
if they felt more cani or pija, most of our girls answered that they were neither of
those, but instead ‘normal common people’. When asked if they would prefer to be
classy or trashy if they could choose, all girls, even in the working-class groups,
affirmed that they would rather be a pija, thus rendering visible the function of the
figure of the choni as a ‘stock character’ (see Tyler and Bennett, 2010) or a mena-
cing example of a failed working-class femininity. Nevertheless, group dynamics
revealed the difficulties that low-status girls faced when trying to avoid the choni/
cani category, even if working on the physical markers of the middle class, as the
following conversation in a VET focus group shows:

Vanesa: ‘I’m not gonna say that I’m a choni because I’m not’.
Roger: ‘You’re not choni??’. [Raises voice]
Vanesa: ‘No, I’m not’.
Roger: ‘Come on, you’re gonna tell me the truth, tell me the truth. You’re not a choni?
You’re not? Tell me the truth, what you really think. Tell me what you think, without
shame’.
[Group laughs]
Sandra: ‘Come on, you’re a tiny little bit choni, aren’t you?’.
Vanesa: ‘Me, choni?’.
Sandra: ‘A little bit choni, yeah . . .’. (PPT3)

While the group admitted that Vanesa did not have a particularly choni appear-
ance, they made it very clear to her that she was one:

Vanesa: ‘Why?! I don’t upload sexy pictures anywhere?’.

Sandra: ‘But I’m not talking about a pictures choni’.
Vanesa: ‘Then why? Why choni? Because of the way I dress?’.
Sandra: ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. There are [girls] who dress sexy and they’re
not choni, and there are [girls] who do dress sexy and they are. Some pijas dress sexy
and they’re not choni’.
Vanesa: ‘I’m pija. Pija because I dress well’.
Roger: ‘No, you’re not pija. Pija is not the word. Not pija’. (PPT3)

Despite her attempts to dress like a pija or ‘normal’ (read ‘standard’) person, and to
explicitly reject the slut script, Vanesa could not avoid being considered as a choni.
Her strategies to perform a posh or classy identity were collectively and systemat-
ically sanctioned by her peers, although with somehow vague arguments. Her lack
of cultural capital – understood here as accreditation of formal education – and her
Willem et al. 13

Figure 3. ‘Have you seen that? And then she says she’s not a choni!’. Available at: http://
www.memegen.es/meme/a12m0p (accessed March 2016).

class background confined her to the stigmatized choni category, no matter what
she really wanted to be (see Figure 3) .
Social media, similarly to television in previous years, have opened up spaces for
women to be present in the public sphere, although mainly through appearance
(Van Zoonen, 2006). Since (classy) femininity has been associated with the middle
and upper classes (Skeggs, 2001; Van Zoonen, 2006), performing appropriate girl-
ness is not easy for young working-class women. We also observed this in our own
focus groups, as the choni category operated as a ‘counter-example’, something that
you don’t want to be(come):

Neus: ‘[canis] are like . . . people who haven’t been able to belong to any group, and in
order to belong to some group they have to be canis’.
(. . .)
Clara: ‘They’re very insecure people’.
Neus: ‘And now they’ve evolved, like now they’re posh canis, like swaggers. Oh man,
there’s nothing worse than a cani who is trying to be a pijo and just isn’t. Someone
who wants to be a pijo but is actually a cani . . .. It’s just wrong’. (ESO1)

Here, the participants insist that chonis are responsible for being as such, and even
though they declare that this label does not necessarily respond to socio-economic
background, they ultimately essentialize the category of the choni by being excep-
tionally surveillant and critical towards those who try to ascend to a higher status.
Young people share the cautionary tales of mainstream Spanish media that tell
lower-status women about ‘knowing one’s place’ (Oliva, 2014), thus reinforcing
class boundaries.

Conclusions
Inequalities are reproduced and circulated through the cultural sphere (Lawler,
2004), and our study shows that social media is a key site where the evaluation
14 Sexualities 0(0)

of classed femininities is distributed in a public space shared by young people. For

our participants, pija was an abstract notion, a standard identity marker used as an
opposite to the truly derogatory label of the choni, a collectively recognizable
stigma. The choni body was well-defined, delimited, identified in very specific
terms of physical appearance, whereas the pija was merely the opposite of the
choni. Participants’ readings of gender and sexuality eluded a socio-economic
explanation for the difference between chonis and pijas, merely pointing to the
‘moral standards’ that chonis supposedly fail to attain.
We argue that these class markers serve the purpose of boundary setting
between girls in the context of social media, where self-sexualization has become
the norm. The main concern (at times even obsession) of girls was to avoid being
labelled a choni while keeping the right to use their bodies’ erotic value to get the
attention and approval of peers and potential partners. This corporal capital
seemed an important resource available to them to gain status on social media.
Our findings coincide with vilifying categorizations of working-class women in
other cultural contexts, for example in the UK, where the figure of the female chav
is charged with ‘excessive corporeality and the continual exposure of a lack of
cultural capital, of style and taste’ (Tyler and Bennett, 2010: 386). Despite the
fact that a certain degree of control of style and taste provides girls with guides
of how to perform sexuality and slut scripts online without putting their sexual and
social reputation at risk, our results show that enoughness has more to do with
judgement calls from others, than with a self-representation strategy. Despite the
hard identity work, many girls failed at avoiding the choni stigma. This lack of class
solidarity between women as expressed by our participants in some of the examples
above is a well-studied aspect of post-feminism (McRobbie, 2007).
In addition to gendered and classed stigmatization, the pervasive judgements of
chonis being ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’ for sharing or uploading sexy pictures could also
contain more general assumptions of a lack of (digital) literacy and cognitive skills.
Hence, there is a danger of adding new stigmatizations of working-class youth,
especially girls, regarding digital (il)literacy.
Further research on classed judgements of sexualized displays could also include
Judith Butler’s view on ‘subversive bodily acts’, where the abject choni identity
could be seen as an articulation of the ‘unthinkable’, as a performative subversion
outside an existing system (Butler, 1990). The construction of the cani and the choni
on social media as well as in mass media could thus contain elements of empower-
ment of the choni identity.

Notes
1. Fotolog (www.fotolog.com) was a popular SNS in Spain – currently inactive – allowing
users to share pictures.
2. The terms ‘choni’ and ‘cani’ are used more or less indistinctively in the whole Spanish
territory, with some geographical and over time variations. For example, ‘cani’ was
already being used in the early naughties, and ‘choni’ is more frequent in Catalonia
than elsewhere in Spain.
Willem et al. 15

References
Albury K and Crawford K (2012) Sexting, consent and young people’s ethics: Beyond
Megan’s story. Continuum 26(3): 463–473.
Archer L, Halsall A and Hollingworth S (2007) University’s not for me—I’m a Nike person:
Urban working-class young people’s negotiations of ‘style’, identity and educational
engagement. Sociology 41(2): 219–237.
Armstrong EA, Hamilton LT, Armstrong EM, et al. (2014) ‘‘Good girls’’: Gender, social
class, and slut discourse on campus. Social Psychology Quarterly 77(2): 100–122.
Blommaert J and Varis P (2013) Enough is enough: The heuristics of authenticity in super-
diversity. In: Duarte J and Gogolin I (eds) Linguistic Superdiversity in Urban Areas:
Research Approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 143–158.
Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London:
Routledge.
Bourdieu P (1986) The forms of capital. In: Richardson JG (ed) Handbook for Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, pp. 241–258.
boyd d (2008) Why youth d social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage
social life. In: Buckingham D (ed) Youth, Identity, and Digital Media. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, pp. 112–149.
Butler J (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
Cowie C and Lees S (1981) Slags or drags. Feminist Review 9: 17–31.
Frow J (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gómez A, Puigvert L and Flecha R (2011) Critical communicative methodology: Informing
real social transformation through research. Qualitative Inquiry 17(3): 235–245.
Holland J, Ramazanoglu C, Sharpe S, et al. (1998) The Male in the Head: Young People,
Heterosexuality and Power. London: Tufnell Press.
Huffaker DA and Calvert SL (2005) Gender, identity, and language use in teenage blogs.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. doi: 10.1080/09687599.2017.1411250.
Jackson SM and Cram F (2003) Disrupting the sexual double standard: Young women’s
talk about heterosexuality. British Journal of Social Psychology 42(1): 113–127.
Jackson S and Vares T (2015) Too many bad role models for us girls: Girls, female pop
celebrities and ‘sexualization’. Sexualities 18(4): 480–498.
Jones O (2011) Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso.
Kitzinger J (1995) ‘‘I’m sexually attractive but I’m powerful’’: Young women negotiating
sexual reputation. Women’s Studies International Forum 18(2): 187–196.
Lawler S (2004) Rules of engagement: Habitus, power and resistance. The Sociological
Review 52: 110–128.
McClintock A (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context.
London: Routledge.
McRobbie A (2007) Top girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual contract. Cultural
Studies 21(4): 718–737.
Manago A, Graham MB, Greenfield PM, et al. (2008) Selfpresentation and gender on
MySpace. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 6(29): 446–458.
Mascheroni G, Vincent J and Jiménez E (2015) Girls are addicted to likes so they post semi-
naked selfies: Peer mediation, normativity and the construction of identity online.
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 9(1): Article 5.
Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5817/CP2015-1-5 (accessed 22 December 2017).
16 Sexualities 0(0)

Oliva M (2014) Celebrity, class and gender in Spain: An analysis of Belén Esteban’s image.
Celebrity Studies 5(4): 438–454.
Papayanis G (1999) Sex and the revanchist city: Zoning out pornography in New York.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18: 341–354.
Pempek TA, Yermolayeva YA and Calvert SL (2009) College students’ social networking
experiences on Facebook. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 30: 227–238.
Reay D, Davies J, David M, et al. (2001) Choice of degrees or degrees of choice? Class,
‘‘race’’ and the higher education choice process. Sociology 35(4): 855–874.
Ringrose J (2011) Are you sexy, flirty, or a slut? Exploring ‘sexualization’ and how teen girls
perform/negotiate digital sexual identity on social networking sites. In: Gill R and Scharff
C (eds) New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99–116.
Ringrose J and Eriksson K (2011) Gendered risks and opportunities? Exploring teen girls’
digitized sexual identities in postfeminist media contexts. International Journal of Media
and Cultural Politics 7(2): 121–138.
Ringrose J, Harvey L, Gill R, et al. (2013) Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’:
Gendered value in digital image exchange. Feminist Theory 14: 305–323.
Rose S (1999) Cultural analysis and moral discourses: Episodes, continuities and transform-
ations. In: Bonnell VE and Hunt L (eds) Beyond the Cultural Turn. Berkeley, CA and
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 217–241.
Salter M (2015) Privates in the online public: Sex(ting) and reputation on social media. New
Media & Society 18(11): 2723–2739.
Schwalbe M, Holden D, Schrock D, et al. (2000) Generic processes in the reproduction of
inequality: An interactionist analysis. Social Forces 79(2): 419–452.
Sevick Bortree D (2005) Presentation of self on the web: An ethnographic study of teenage
girls’ weblogs. Education, Communication and Information 5(1): 25–39.
Siibak A (2010) Constructing masculinity on a social networking site: The case-study of
visual self-presentations of young men on the profile images of SNS Rate. Young: Nordic
Journal of Youth Research 18(4): 403–425.
Siibak A and Hernwall P (2010) ‘Looking like my favourite Barbie’ – Online gender con-
struction of tween girls in Estonia and in Sweden. Studies of Transition States and
Societies 3(2): 57–68.
Skeggs B (2001) The toilet paper: Femininity, class and mis-recognition. Women’s Studies
International Forum 24(3/4): 295–307.
Skeggs B (2005) The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject forma-
tion. Sociology 39(5): 965–982.
Sveningsson M (2008) Young people’s gender and identity work in a Swedish internet com-
munity. In: Fischer-Hübner S, Duquenoy P, Zuccato A, et al. (eds) The Future of Identity
in the Information Society. New York: Springer, pp. 113–128.
Thelwall M (2008) Social networks, gender and friending: An analysis of MySpace member
profiles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59(8):
1321–1330.
Tolman DL (2002) Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality. Cambridge,
MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Tolman DL (2012) Female adolescents, sexual empowerment and desire: A missing dis-
course of gender inequity? Sex Roles 66(11–12): 746–757.
Willem et al. 17

Tortajada I and Araüna N (2014) Ser noia en temps de Facebook. Anàlisi: Quaderns de
comunicació i cultura 50: 117–129.
Tortajada I, Araüna N and Martı́nez IJ (2013) Advertising stereotypes and gender repre-
sentation in social networking sites. Comunicar 41: 177–186.
Tyler I and Bennett B (2010) ‘Celebrity chav’: Fame, femininity and social class. European
Journal of Cultural Studies 13(3): 375–393.
Valenti J (2008) He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman
Should Know. Seattle, WA: Seal Press.
Van Doorn N (2010) The ties that bind: The networked performance of gender, sexuality,
and friendship on MySpace. New Media & Society 12(4): 583–602.
Van Zoonen L (2006) The personal, the political and the popular: A woman’s guide to
celebrity politics. European Journal of Cultural Studies 9(3): 287–301.
Willem C, Araüna N, Crescenzi L, et al. (2012) Girls on Fotolog: Reproduction of gender
stereotypes or identity play? Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 2(3):
225–242.
Zhao S, Grasmuck S and Martin J (2008) Identity construction on Facebook: Digital
empowerment in anchored relationships. Computers in Human Behavior 24: 1816–1836.

Cilia Willem (PhD) is a visiting scholar at the Rovira and Virgili University, Spain,
where she teaches Media and Communication. She was a board member of the
ECREA Gender and Communication Section in 2015 and has researched the topic
of young people, gender relationships and media for the last six years. She is the
main editor of the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies and
guest editor for several journals, including Feminist Media Studies.

Núria Araüna (PhD) is a lecturer at the Rovira and Virgili University, Spain,
teaching Journalism and Audiovisual Communication courses, and a member of
the Asterisc Communication Research Group. Her PhD studied the representation
of new femininities and sexual and affective relationships in music videos. She holds
a Master’s degree in Creative Documentary and has participated in an action-
research initiative consisting of a collaborative video project with women funded
by the Catalan Women’s Institute. She has been involved in several journalism
associations, and was a board member of the ECREA Young Scholars Network
for a number of years.

Iolanda Tortajada (PhD) is senior lecturer of Communication Studies at the Rovira

and Virgili University, Spain and member of the Asterisc Communication
Research Group. Drawing mainly on Symbolic Interactionism, Cultural Studies
and Feminist Media Studies, her research deals with the mediatization of gender
and sexual identities, gender violence and media, and women’s appropriation of
new technologies. She was Chair of the ECREA Gender and Communication
Section from 2012 to 2016 and Associate Editor and Book Reviews Editor of
the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies.