Surely nothing I've done as a mother to date has mortified my 14- and 12-year-old daughters more than my enthusiasm for dressing like a flamboyant hooker and joining a SlutWalk.
SlutWalks, as you may have heard, protest the idea that how a woman dresses or looks can be used as an excuse for rape. A small march in Toronto has turned into an international movement involving tens of thousands of women and men in Canada, the United States, England, India, Australia, and Brazil.
Responses to the marches range from outrage to glee. For some, just the use of the word "slut" is horrifying -- connoting loose women flaunting their disregard for moral values. For others, any use of the word should be rejected, not appropriated, for being male defined and not reflective of women's empowerment.
Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum of response, two things are clear to me. One, SlutWalks, make people talk about sexism and two, unless forced by a provocative catalyst we generally don't talk about gender bias to our children.
SlutWalks are an opportunity to talk to teenage girls (and boys) about the treacherous and unfair line they're pressured to walk between being socially mandated sexy good girls and "promiscuous" teen harlots, subject to social opprobrium.
As a mother and feminist, I appreciate the irony of embracing the word slut to protest a symptom of systematized misogyny. However, we can ill afford to reject and criticize a grass-roots movement embraced by people all over the world to draw attention to inequality and violence against women.
This is not about teaching people about the insidious damage that pervasive gender bias, often internalized, causes every day. It isn't about the right to wear revealing clothes or have frequent orgiastic sex. SlutWalkers march for safe and equal access to the public sphere even if, god forbid, you're born with a vagina.
It is surprising and disappointing that we still need events like SlutWalks to address what are fairly basic civil rights that men take for granted. But, maybe my surprise is naïve given the long tail of a conservative movement described by Susan Faludi twenty years ago.
In her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Backlash, Faludi described the conservative response of a society reeling from changes brought on by feminism. A response that created the hyper-gendered reality of four billion dollar a year Disney princesses and their muscular Hollywood super heroes counterparts. A response that shaped a generation whose idea of women's liberation, inaccurately conflated with sexual liberation, is "girls gone wild." A generation, woefully uneducated, that's doesn't give feminism an overt second thought.
Any serious review of facts, however, shows that despite some gains, the work of feminism is still vital. Female pay equity at 78 cents to the male dollar and the percentage of women in Congress has dropped from a one time high of 21 percent to today's 17 percent. Women's representation in senior, management positions in every sector of our economy stagnates in the 7-16 percent range.
We rate 9th in the world for number of rapes per capita, and that with an antiquated definition of "forcible" assault. According to the 2010 World Economic Forum's Gender Index Report, which demonstrates the strong correlation between the status of women and a country's prosperity and competitiveness, the U.S. ranks 19th for overall equity, 40th for political empowerment.
Yet, our kids are essentially taught that women here have nothing to complain about. With the exception of the condescending lessons of "Women's History Month" that focuses on how women were "given the vote," they learn virtually nothing about women's substantive contributions to our culture.
Our historical heroes, public statuary, currency, visible power brokers and sports arenas are dominated by men. Despite the Women's World Cup (which we watch in reruns), the only industries where women are prominent are those requiring them to be beautiful, thin and frequently half-naked. The only sectors where they dominate in the workforce, the lowest paid. We do little as a society to educate our children in a way that offsets a culture in which women are allowed to be visible and powerful only when they are commoditized.
Imagine a world where children had no idea who Martin Luther King or Thomas Jefferson are. That's what's happened to the women who've fought for women's rights. Children learn about John Adams, but not about Abigail Adams' entreaties that he "remember the ladies" when considering voting rights.
They read a Letter from Birmingham Jail, but not Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, challenging Rousseau's ideas of female inferiority. They know what Malcolm X looks like, but wouldn't recognize Betty Friedan if she fell on them. Some kids might know who Shirley Chisolm was. God forbid Gloria Steinham or bell hooks come up in a class -- they have the audacity to still be alive.
As I approach 50, it occurred to me that 25 years is the average period constituting a generation. So, my lifespan roughly covers the two generations since birth control was approved by the FDA (1960), The Feminine Mystique (1963) was published and the Equal Pay Act (1963) was passed.
Yet, at the rate we're going it will be more than 100 years before pay equity is accomplished, we still cling to the myth that educated women "opt-out" of working by choice and reproductive rights continue to be under assault. SlutWalks are simply the most glaring and attention-grabbing symptom of the underlying causes of these inequities -- inequities that affect women of all colors, socio-economic classes and education levels. Talking about it to kids openly however is just so... unbecoming.
So, my conclusion is simple: if this is what it takes to expose my children to women and men who are thinking about double standards and marching for equality, then I'll go on a SlutWalk in six-inch heels.
WATCH: Mom's Feminist Discourse On Why Her Daughter Should Not Wear Slutty Clothes
Follow Soraya Chemaly on Twitter: www.twitter.com/schemaly
Rachel Ryan: Are Women to Blame For Immature Men?
Cop's rape comment sparks wave of 'SlutWalks' - US news - Life ...
'Slut Walk': feminist folly - NYPOST.com
SlutWalk Toronto | BECAUSE WE'VE HAD ENOUGH
SlutWalks and the future of feminism - The Washington Post
These 'slut walk' women are simply fighting for their right to be dirty ...
Bollywood stars to join DJ Jenny D in Slut Walk - The Times of India
There's your problem. There's a LOT of the world's problems all rolled into one sentence... parents don't want to talk with their children. They want the TV to talk to their children. They want the government to talk to their children. They want to join weird "activist" parades and have the "meaning" and "symbolism" of those parades "talk" to their children... but they don't want to talk to their children.
Talk to your children. Don't participate in a "SlutWalk". And in case I seem against the idea of SlutWalks, don't participate in a "PrudeWalk", either. Just... talk to people. Especially your children. Direct verbal communication is ALWAYS going to trump this kind of "activist" stuff, because people can take whatever meaning they want from a SlutWalk - not necessarily the meaning YOU want them to - but direct and straightforward words can't be taken any other way.
Talk to your children. It's not "unbecoming"... *it's what parents are supposed to do.*
I don't see how this educates...MovingOn...^_^
1. The vast majority of cases of rape and sexual assault occur between people who know each other.
2. Rapists have been around since the dawn of human civilization. If prostitution is the oldest profession, then rape is the oldest crime.
3. Even in the days when women wore clothes that concealed them from head to toe, they were STILL raped. It has absolutely nothing to do with what you wear, and it isn't about sex for most of them. Rapists want to exercise power over their victims.
4. Until very recently, the vast majority of rape cases were dealt with by telling the victims to keep quiet about it. It isn't just the rapists who are at fault, it's the enablers of rapists who tell women they were 'asking for it'. It's a society that makes a joke out of men grabbing and/or harassing women. And any woman who isn't okay with this is obviously a tease or a prude or 'no fun'. It's a pervasive cultural issue that enables rapists and makes it harder for their victims to make legitimate cases against them, socially and legally.
The SlutWalk is more of an anti-rape campaign than a feminist event. The purpose of the campaign is to tell the world that no matter what you wear, no matter what you've drunk or what your reputation is, the blame with sexual assault lies completely with the assaulter.
a person should not rape even if the victim is half naked, just as much as
a person should not kill even if the victim is walking at midnight in a park.
But, if you are saying that rapist rape because they have allegedly internalized social condonation that it is okay for them to rape women in revealing dresses, I cannot agree with you. The society is giving them a clear message that they will be in prison if they rape a person, well-covered or not, male or female. If that punishment cannot deter rapists, then educating and enlightening them they shouldn't rape half-naked women, would not work.
As far as violence against women is concerned, it rarely has anything to do with sexy - or unsexy - clothing. It is about violence and power and women are the victims because, on average, they can be hurt, dominated and terrorized more easily than men - on average - and thus give a power rush to the kind of personality that desires it. If theae individuals are not deterred by prison sentences and public opprobrium, they are not going to be deterred by kooky marches.
As far as pay equality is concerned, women, fortunately or unfortunately, have sole possession of reproductive organs and thus may be expected to leave the work force to reproduce. However that, again on average, makes them less productive and therefore less valuable employees. The employer is NOT responsible for his employees' children.
As a sub-point, women still also do most of the child-rearing which means that they are less available to the employer than their male counterparts. The solution here is a more equitable division of child rearing duties between men and women. However, again, this is not obtained by kooky marches but by agreement between marriage partners.
Her conclusion is stupid. There are a lot of other ways to do it without dressing up and making a fool of yourself.