Once a Slag

A TikTok soundbite, “Once a slag, always a slag,” blares from my daughter’s phone as she shows me a video of herself and a friend performing for the camera. I watch, caught between curiosity and discomfort. Are they mocking the phrase? Reclaiming it? Being shaped by it?

This project is a portrait of my teenage daughter and her friends growing up in a Western society still shaped by misogyny, both online and off. The photographs capture their intimate friendships, interrupted by handwritten statements about sexual harassment.

These statements echo testimonies shared on Everyone’s Invited, a website that prompted the UK government to commission Ofsted’s rapid review into sexual abuse in schools and colleges.

Since making this work, the conversation around gender and technology has only intensified, from the influence of figures such as Andrew Tate to Laura Bates’s The New Age of Sexism, which argues that emerging technologies are opening new routes for misogyny.

Once a Slag sits on the edge of childhood and womanhood, looking at how girls find connection and strength while growing up in a digital culture that still measures them by desirability.