Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail doesn't think Slutwalk is necessary. She really needs to get out more.
Margaret Wente’s upper-middle-age-centric Globe and Mail columns often give the impression that she hasn’t stepped off her porch since the ’90s, and so her latest, a round condemnation of Slutwalk, shouldn’t be surprising. She didn’t walk in the first Toronto march last month, and that’s fine. She is free to opine on its stated ideals, and she’s not wrong to point out that its founders and participants are educated, privileged women who are safer than most. But she also doesn’t seem to walk… anywhere, and that’s not fine. She just doesn’t know—perhaps, has forgotten—what streets feel like for a girl.
It is a fact of my life, as a 25-year-old female who dresses like it (meaning: I perform my gender traditionally, with the odd twist), that I cannot go outside in fine weather without having my appearance, or attire, commented on by males. You might not believe me if I told you how many times I’ve ignored a guy, or replied “leave me alone,” or—if he persists—said “fuck off,” and been consequently called “cunt,” “bitch” and “whore.” I can’t tell you anyway, cause I’ve lost count. I can tell you I didn’t once deserve it.
It’s also a fact that, were I to appear in court as the victim of a rape or sexual assault, I would be asked what I’d been wearing on the “night in question” (it’s usually a night), as though that should have any bearing on the case. It should not. Rape is never, ever the victim’s fault; this truth should be held to be self-evident, not least because rape’s legal definition comprises words like “forcible,” i.e. against one’s will. To suggest that a woman can start a rape while being unable to stop it is grossly unfair and forever wrong.
“Slutwalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do,” writes Wente in the most fist-curling paragraph of her piece. She goes on to suggest victim-blaming has “largely (though not entirely) disappeared from mainstream society,” by which I think she means white, middle-class, North American society. She supports this cute theory by citing the universal ridicule of a Manitoba judge who blamed a victim for “leading on” her attacker. She ignores the small point that a systemically educated, trained and appointed judge said this in the first place; why should that only be ridiculed? Why should it not be protested and thus, maybe, prevented? Furthermore, if Wente can use just one example, I’ll use just one to counter: the case of a Texas high-school cheerleader who, after being raped by a football player after a game, refused to clap for him at a subsequent one. Her superintendent told her to cheer or go home. When she sued the school, she lost, and then, to heap insult upon injustice, was ordered to pay $45,000 for her “frivolous” lawsuit. Christ. It’s expensive getting raped these days!
Wente makes a little more sense when she tries out intersectionality, pointing out examples of violence against women in, for example, South Asian communities. But it’s wrong-minded to suggest that racialized violence exists in a ghetto apart from safe, clean, white Toronto. For one thing, there were women (and men) of myriad skin tones at Slutwalk.
Of course I do think, and know, that the streets I walk on everyday are relatively safe. I know I’m lucky, and privileged. But for Wente to say that my privilege invalidates my protest indicates she can’t see the bigger picture. Yes, the Slutwalks have so far spread to other urban, white-majority places, like Boston, Sydney and London, England. But today a Newstime columnist in South Africa argued for Slutwalk there, too, lamenting in particular “the barbaric practice of corrective rape of lesbians.” According to a recent Guardian story, more than 10 lesbians are raped or gang-raped in Cape Town each week. By proclaiming their sexuality, they’re seen to be “asking for it.” Ditto the woman who was gang-raped in San Francisco in 2009, identified by her four attackers as a lesbian because she put a rainbow sticker on her car. Imagine a cop saying, “women should avoid dressing like lesbians in order not to be victimized.” Now swap “lesbians” for “sluts.” Yeah, that’s what the cop really did say at York University this year, and that sexist, piggish attitude is why we not only have Slutwalk, but need to have it. It’s not about a woman’s right to look “slutty.” It’s about her right to look (and act, and be) however she damn well chooses—without being attacked for it, then blamed for being attacked.
I don’t care for the word “slut,” and I don’t care to get into it. The “slut” in “Slutwalk” is an easy way for the protest to get (necessary) press, and an easier way for members of the press—Wente included—to entirely miss the point. To me, the message from Slutwalk to females everywhere is quite simply this: your clothes, just like your body, are your business. Your outsides are as much yours as your insides. There is one thing you’re asking for and that is some fucking respect. And until every woman gets it, and until every victim knows it wasn’t her fault, it’s something worth walking for.
