Slut Walk and Porn Wars: What's Choice Got to Do With It?

  

Report from SlutWalk San Diego, posted on IndyBay by Zenger's Newsmagazine



Slut Walk has sparked some of the most vibrant political debates among feminists since Monica Lewinsky. For those who don’t know about it, Slut Walk is an international response to an incident in which young women at York University in Toronto were told by police that if they don’t want to be raped, they should not dress like sluts. Women have organized marches from Sydney to New York to London. San Francisco’s is tonight (August 6). The organizers urge women to come wearing whatever they want, to make the age-old point that no woman asks or deserves to be raped, regardless of what she wears. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has proclaimed this movement “the new feminism.”

Rebecca Traister wrote in the New York Times Magazine that she is ambivalent about the message of the walks, an ambivalence I think a lot of feminists share. Jessica Grose, writing on Slate.com, offered “kudos” for the piece, saying, “The tone of disagreements in the feminist blogosphere can be truly vicious—there can be a real tendency for other writers and commentators to pile on when you veer from the party line. … The push-back to Traister's piece has already begun…” Feministing.com hosted a thoughtful and spirited discussion among its bloggers, with Rebecca Traister joining.

Muslim women criticized the march for being uninclusive, and African American women pointed out that for years, they have been fighting for the right not to be called slut and ho.

This is familiar territory. How many rooms did I sit in through the eighties and nineties listening to feminists passionately arguing about whether sex work is liberatory or exploitative or whether it can possibly be both, whether we should embrace or deface pornography, or whether we could do both?

The transgressive nature of reclaiming pejorative identities is also something that resonates for me. In the early 1980s, groups I was part of were among the first to openly embrace the word “queer.” At antiwar demonstration, I was soberly lectured by any number of straight activists who didn’t understand why would want to be called by a word that was most often heard in the mouths of bashers. When our award-winning chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping,” was expropriated and changed to “We’re here, it’s clear, we’re not going shopping,” we almost came to blows with some of our favorite heterocommunists.
So my first reaction to Slut Walk was great, you go, girls. I looked at some of the pictures and video and they are moving.

Young women want to be attractive, and in our culture, attractive means sexy, and sexy generally means showing a lot of skin. That’s cool. They should do what makes them comfortable. The problem with that, just like the problem with trying to differentiate “sex work” from “exploitation” or “trafficking” is that we live in a misogynist culture, and in a misogynist culture, a cigar is never just a cigar.

Our culture is both hypersexualized and anti-sex. Even little girls are expected, almost required, to show that they’re sexually available and interested. Victoria’s Secret has a line called “Pink” which markets frilly halter tops and short shorts to nine-year-olds.

A friend of mine recently figured out that his 16-year-old daughter didn’t want to go to a party because she was being set up to have oral sex with some guy she didn’t even know.

I said, “Did you tell her she’d have plenty of opportunities for coercive sex soon enough?”

He said, “Actually, that’s exactly what I told her.”

At the same time, our social policy is more and more based on punishing women, especially young women and women of color, for having sex. Whether you’re talking about abstinence-only education, welfare cuts, restrictions on abortion and birth control, refusing to fund HPV vaccines or criminalization of addicted women who become pregnant, the message is clear: women who have sex for any reason other than reproduction in the context of white, heterosexual marriage are bad and should suffer.

In this environment, it’s very hard to be sex-positive. When t-shirts bearing slogans like “Yes but not w u” are aggressively marketed to 13-year-old girls, can anyone say that they are really choosing to be “sluts”? Of course, they should be free to walk around wearing anything they want and not be harassed or attacked.

The question some of us older feminists are asking though, is, are they really wearing what they want to wear, or what patriarchal society wants them to wear? Do they want to be sluts, or is that another box that they’re being shoved into and then condemned for occupying, like whore, femme fatale, bitch and superwoman?
How did we get from burning bras and corsets (which I’m told never actually happened) to marching for the right to spend lots of money on clothes that are for the most part highly uncomfortable?

Rebecca Traister asks why this is the issue that has galvanized the most feminist activism in recent years. I would add to that, why is it the issue which has galvanized the most interest in the feminist blogosphere?
It doesn’t surprise me that the mainstream media fixates on a movement of young, mostly white women dressed in not much. But does the feminist movement have to help them? On one hand, a lot of good pieces have been written, a lot of good interviews given that would never have seen the light of day if they hadn’t been on a “sexy” issue. I just wish feminist Twitter and YouTube could have helped the demand of over 250 women’s organizations not to balance the budget on the backs of women go viral, maybe the New York Times would have written one word about it. (Didn’t hear about that? Check it out.) Maybe next time, some young college women can paint their bare midriffs with the names of immigrant women being deported away from their U.S.-born children.