There is some fair criticism that using the word "slut" may be more harmful than helpful. Slut has been around too long as a terribly negative label, and we can't get rid of all that with a couple of marches. I don't necessarily agree with that. Maybe SlutWalk won't single-handedly make slut a term for a confident, sex-positive woman, but it's a start. However, that is the only criticism of SlutWalk that I think has any weight. There are the deniers, who say that victim-blaming never happens, the maintainers, who insists that yes, women who dress like sluts are going to (deserve to!) get raped. To take a charming quote from the blog I just linked to, "I don't shed any more tears over a slut getting raped than I do over a gambler winding up broke." There are also those who claim that SlutWalk is a white supremacist movement.
My intent with this post isn't really to counter the criticism being leveled at SlutWalk; there are much more capable people who are taking that on. I want to explain why I whole-heartedly support SlutWalk, and why I think you should, too. For one, I am ecstatic to see women come together for women's issues, especially in a generation in which people can be kind of funny about being feminists. I'm also happy to see the issue of not just rape, but the social implications of rape blame-shifting discussed openly. This is a conversation that has needed to happen for a long time now.
I could post news stories that illustrate the point that women get blamed for rape, but you can pull dozens of them up with a simple Google search. The base question here is, why does our society have so much trouble defining rape? Rape is a non-consensual sex act. If a person is clear that he or she does not want to engage in any sexual activity, but it is forced upon him or her, then it is rape. Rape need not include violence. There are all sorts of situations in which rape happens, but rape is rape and it is always wrong. No matter what. If someone gets drunk and steals an unlocked and unattended car with the keys in the ignition, that person is still a car thief the next morning when the alcohol wears off. If a drunk person forces sex upon a drunk girl in a short skirt, that person is a still rapist the next morning. So why is this issue constantly being revisited, redefined, and debated?
The answer, I think, is as simple as the definition of rape. This is one of the most atrocious and disgusting ways in which women suffer because of our sex. The majority of sexual assault victims are women, and up until very recently, it was common to turn a blind eye when a woman was raped. This "she was asking for it" justification has been around for centuries. In the Middle Ages, if a knight raped a peasant woman, action was almost never taken. She shouldn't have been so enticing, and she probably wanted it anyway. Even now, we are making slow progress. It often takes women years to come forward after she has been raped, because she is made to feel guilty about it. This is what SlutWalk is about.
SlutWalk is more aggressive than the kind of thing I normally get involved with, but victim-blaming is an issue that makes me furious. It's an issue that should make everyone furious. Saying that women shouldn't dress likes sluts in order to avoid being raped is not terribly that different from saying that women must wear burqas so as not to excite the passions of men who may see you. In places where women are required to wear burqas, rape still happens. Often. I'm not trying to make a slippery-slope argument and say that soon western women will have to wear burqas. I'm saying that victim-blaming puts us in the same category of people who make women wear burqas. Slut-shaming completely ignores the fact that most rape is committed by someone the victim knows. Why is more blame not being put on rapists? It is they who commit the crimes. Instead, we insist upon continuing in the archaic, misogynistic vein that makes women feel guilty for being assaulted.
I admit. I don't like the way some women dress. I think in some cases it is disrespectful, and that some manner of dress is inappropriate in certain instances. But I would never tell her that she can't dress that way for any reason, least of all because if she got raped, it would be her fault. No one tells a man who wears pants several sizes too big that if he gets assaulted, it's his fault because he looked like a gangster. Even if it were true that how a woman dresses affects her likelihood to get raped, it's irrelevant. We should be teaching men not to rape, not criticizing women for expressing themselves.
Slut-shaming is just a convenient excuse for peoples' insistence upon blaming women for rape, rather than putting the blame on the rapists, where it belongs. This is why I will walk in SlutWalk Chicago on June 4, 2011.
