Slutwalk, Porn, and the Future of Feminism

 Listen to the interview with the F Word Media Collective's Meghan Murphy here.

 Slutwalk started in Toronto in response to a cop saying that women should avoid dressing like sluts to not get raped.  Of course this sparked outrage among the entire female community in the city, and slutwalk was the formalized reaction to the statement.  The original point was to challenge the culture of victim-blaming which is still incredibly, shockingly prevalent, and I guess the idea was to highlight the fact that no matter how a woman dresses, she never deserves to be raped or assaulted.  The call was for women to come out dressed however they like and show the Toronto police and the rapists of the world that any woman, dressed in any manner, could be called a slut, in an attempt to remove the power of the word.  So very quickly, right from the beginning, this was as much about the reclamation of the word itself as it was about addressing the notion that a woman could be asking for it.  As the founders have said “we called it something controversial.  Did it get attention? Damn right it did!” And maybe that’s a valid point, as there have been more conversations about this than any other motion the women’s movement has ever made.  But I’m not sure that any publicity is good publicity, particularly in this case.

Jessica Valenti, the editor of Feministing, recently appeared on this talk show in the states defending Slutwalk.  They asked her why, if the word was going to be so divisive, they didn’t call it “empowerment walk” or something, to which she replied “do you think I’d be sitting here if we’d called it empowerment walk?”  This is problematic for two reasons. First, it indicates that the media really got behind Slutwalk primarily for the sluts, not to take a stand against victim-blaming or because they believe that women are people too. But it’s no surprise, is it, that the media would get a kick out of sexy ladies dressed a certain way and fail to acknowledge the deeper issue.  But the real problem is that it points to the organizers’ fear that women and girls are so uneducated about feminism and their rights as women that something called “empowerment walk” wouldn’t have had nearly the turnout as it has had, that t wouldn’t have spread to other cities and eventually other countries, and that we wouldn’t be talking about it right now.  And they may have been right.

A pretty horrifying statistic has been chucked around a bunch in the critiques of Slutwalk: only 35% of women identify as feminists, and only 17% would want their daughters to identify as feminists.  This is the direct result of a lack of positive education and the parodies of feminism that have been presented as fact for years: that feminists are a bunch of frigid, over-sensitive, man-haters with no sense of humour.  Now let’s just take a second and reflect on who might have had some stake in undermining the credibility of a movement designed to challenge the dominant power.  In fact, though it contains multitudes, broadly feminism is the radical belief that women are human beings, deserving of equal treatment.  It is not about feminine superiority.  So contra to the spectrum model whereby misogynist is at one end, humanism is in the middle, and feminism is at the other end, the binary is feminist or sexist. Feminism is the opposite of sexism. But feminism has been so derided, and so degraded, that women are unwilling to label themselves in that way.  Slutwalk was successful in a way that an overtly feminist march would have been because “it is sexy in a way that community activism isn’t, usually”.  That’s a quote.  And it’s telling: this walk makes feminism sexy.  Things must be sexy for us to pay attention.  Sexiness makes it palatable, it makes it appealing, which makes it not challenge anything.

So women come out to these walks, and yes, there are greater numbers of women marching than ever before, it’s been largely grassroots and independently organized, and it has sparked a conversation which has been stifled for years.  Women are angry, and women should be angry.  It’s not that I’m not all over the idea, and I’m glad that people are paying attention; I just don’t think we’re all paying attention to the right things.  Gail Dines writes a lot about pornography’s effect on male sexuality, and she says that “protesters celebrating the word slut and dressing in risque clothing are embracing a pornified consumer sexuality”, which I agree with.  Subjective arguments about whether or not we could reclaim slut aside, I don’t think this was the way to do it.  Dressing like what men think of when they think “slut” and then calling yourself a slut does not, to me, do anything towards reclaiming the word or removing its power.  It would have made more sense for women to be in sweatpants and muumuus and things, to indicate the unimportance of dress in matters of rape and assault.  If anything , far from reclaiming the word, we have essentially created a space where it is supportive and progressive for men to call women sluts.  This is the biggest problem for me, personally: photos of men with “free hugs for sluts” written on their chests, taking pictures from the sidelines, holding posters that say “we love sluts” - this is not a victory, and it is not a challenge to the status quo in any way. 

The use of “slut” and the fact that women are dressing in what our mothers would have called “symbols of female oppression” only draws more attention to women as sexual beings, in fact makes this about feminine sexuality, when rape is not about sexuality at all.  It is about power and dominance, not sexual arousal, the fact of which has been subsumed in the slut effort.  The media focus on girls in the march dressed in this one particular way, even though there certainly are women in those marches wearing jeans and t shirts and anything else, only serves to underscore the meaning and solidify it in a popular context.  Broken Arted has a great quote: “Slutwalk is a post-feminist event.  It assumes that there is no patriarchal context that slutwalk exists within”.  And that’s exactly what’s happened: just saying we reclaim it, even if everyone was on board, which they aren’t, no allowances were made for the fact that we do not exist in a vaccuum, but in a larger society that has its own ideas about the word and what it means.

I do think the organizers were well-meaning, and I do think that they didn’t expect this kind of backlash or for the walk to spread so rapidly.  I also think that they designed the march without really thinking about it and then when it got big they were forced to defend something they themselves are not convinced is defensible.  Here’s why I think that:  I’ve been following this pretty closely, and I’ve been listening to interviews and watching the agenda and things like that, and what I’ve noticed more than anything else is the removal of emphasis from female solidarity to personal empowerment.  “I find it empowering to reclaim slut, I find it empowering to walk down the street dressed however I like”, and indeed you should find that empowering.  I would never be one to tell another woman how she should feel about her body or her clothes or the words that are used to describe her.  But what that doesn’t address is the wider cultural and social aspects in which those personal choices are made – because one thing empowers one woman, that does not mean that it addresses the dominant mode of thought or challenges the status quo, which is, ostensibly, what we’re trying to do here.  It is also spoken from a position of rarified privilege; the women saying this have been, almost entirely, white, middle class, conventionally attractive, cis-gendered and able-bodied, well-educated, with lots of choice and opportunity spread out before them.  The problem is that the majority of women do not have choices like these, that they do not have the luxury of deciding what empowers them, and that regardless of what we as individuals might find empowering, we must be working towards a more inclusive emancipation of women in general.

This is called a talking point.  The response to the critiques has been very defensive, very solid:  there is no give and take, no discussion, on the part of the organizers and supporters of slutwalk.  When valid points are made, they are unacknowledged or struck down with the same basic talking points that answered any other question: it’s my personal choice, we’re taking the word back, you're policing my body, and so on.  Or else they are made to appear ridiculous, for example in this response to concerns that perhaps we shouldn’t be dressing in this particular way, under this particular heading, in order to gain some ground for women: “It’s not like these girls are going from this march to “girls gone wild” or anything”.  As though simply because this is probably true, no critiques of the nature of the walk are justified.  It’s very much, I’m sorry to say, like watching a republican presidential candidate on the campaign trail: freedom, liberty, Americans want a strong economy, blah blah blah.  The reason those lines are continually returned to is that they are very often defending indefensible positions, and so there cannot be honest debate.  This is a way to keep the conversation at arm’s length, and it makes me not trust them.  I wish we were just talking, because there is no right answer, there is only a continual conversation, and this event and the way it has been handled have ground the conversation to a halt.  

I’ll leave you with one final thought experiment, for me the strongest argument against the way Slutwalk addresses feminist concerns: Lots and lots of photos were taken at those Slutwalks, and while of course not all women were dressed minimally, lots were, and there are therefore lots of photos of probably hot girls wearing very little and carrying signs announcing themselves as sluts.  So how many men do you think have masturbated to photos from Slutwalk marches?  Hmm? Innumerable boners have been popped over those images.  Now ask yourself, is that empowerment?


Listen to the interview with Meghan Murphy of the F Word Media Collective: http://r1.co.nz/podcasts.php