The rigid and often merciless high-school caste system can be hard on adolescents: In many high schools, physical abuse, sexual harassment, and misunderstanding are the stuff of everyday life. Girls who are labeled as sluts—those who define the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior by crossing it—are frequently on the receiving end of such abuse. Emily White's Fast Girls takes a decidedly non-sensational look at that sensational topic. White explores the significance of the slut stereotype, using it as a skeleton key to open up the messy, complicated emotional life of high school and adolescence while employing psychology, philosophy, feminism, and sociology to ascertain why it holds such power among high-schoolers. To aid her in her quest, White solicited stories from women who were branded as sluts in high school, and among their painful tales of isolation and debasement, she finds a series of common threads. Most suffered sexual abuse at a young age, developed early, were extroverted, and lived in whitebread suburbs where difficult-to-refute rumors spread quickly. Written in the digression-filled style of a term paper by a gifted but unfocused grad student, Fast Girls makes salient points about the stereotype's role in adolescent socialization, but White has a hard time developing her thoughts into a cohesive whole. Moreover, there's a strange sort of dissonance between the harsh, primal emotions and activities under discussion and White's relatively dry, academic prose. At its worst, Fast Girls connects Jung's concept of stereotypes to the Pandora's-box windows of hardcore Internet porn sites. But while White's occasionally hackneyed fusion of high and low culture can be distracting, Fast Girls nevertheless serves an important function. The destructive elements of the slut designation flourish in darkness and isolation, and by bringing it into the light, Fast Girls helps defuse its considerable symbolic power.