This Poem Takes On Slut Shaming In The Best Way

Slut shaming is no joke, but this poem, “Bread Thread” by Emily Weitzman, manages condemn shamers in a deliciously hilarious way. Delivered at the 2016 Women of the World Poetry Slam in March, the spoken-word poem combines three of my very favorite things: Anti-slut-shaming feminist rants, bread, and puns. (GLORIOUS PUNS.)

At the beginning of her poem, Weitzman, 23, explains that when she was a freshman in college, she signed onto her school’s anonymous confession board one day to discover, floating across the top of the screen, a headline that said, “Emily Weitzman is a huge f*cking slut.” Her friends tried to defend her against the anonymous attack, but they found that commenting on the post only sent it to the top of the homepage. To get the offensive post to go away, a friend hatched a plan: She would push the slut shaming post down the page by starting a new forum “about something that all of humanity can agree on: Bread.”

Called “The Bread Thread,” the forum proved to be hugely popular (which is unsurprisingly, considering that bread is possibly the greatest gift humans have ever given themselves). Weitzman recalls,

The first post begins “I f*cking love bread.” Someone else adds, “I thought no one could relate to my obsession with bread!” Soon people were getting into friendly debates on what’s the best bread spread and playing games like f*ck, chuck, marry with different types of bread.

The Bread Thread succeeded in overshadowing the slut-shaming post, and Weitzman says it taught her an important lesson about how to deal with bullying: “Listen up, honeybun,” she proclaims. “My body is not your store-bought sour dough. And as for your slut-shaming I will have plain naan of it.”

She emphasizes that her sex life, and her decisions about her own body, are no one’s business but hers, saying,

Like my bread, I’ll take my sex however I like it. Some days I want to f*ck like a sweet muffin, other nights more like a twisted pretzel. But you should not be concerned with my preferences in bread. My body is not your ingredient.

Although the Bread Thread was born in 2011, Weitzman only wrote this poem last year. “It was really cathartic and empowering to perform this poem and reclaim power over my body and sexuality through humor and bread,” she told the Huffington post. “Plus I really do f*cking love bread!”

At the end of the poem, Weitzman decides to extend a little kindness toward her anonymous bully, and invites him or her to join her “sexy pizza party,” where “we could bake a baguette, butter it with your unkind words.”

“[We could] break bread together,” she offers, “and eat the slut shaming away.”

PREACH LADY.

Images: Rani Sr Prasiththi / EyeEm/EyeEm/Getty Images; YouTube (2); Giphy