Slutwalk Chicago 2012 (photo by John Robb)
Post by Natalie Solidarity (originally printed in the Slutwalk 2012 compilation zine available via Portland Button Works)
SlutWalk centers on empowerment of women to own their sexuality, to reconstruct or destroy traditional gender roles in which women who enjoy sex are criminalized as “sluts” and even worse, asking for rape.
“We are tired of being oppressed by slut-shaming; of being judged by our sexuality and feeling unsafe as a result. Being in charge of our sexual lives should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of violence, regardless if we participate in sex for pleasure or work. No one should equate enjoying sex with attracting sexual assault [as Toronto Police have in 2011],” (via SlutWalk Toronto)
SlutWalk stomps past raising awareness to cast off the shackles of accepted misogyny, normalized patriarchy and rape culture. Feminists (whose ranks include men, too!) are joining forces to deny their consent to this domination and seek to build a world without sexual double standards and victim blaming.
At its core, SlutWalk is a feminist awakening, seeking to undo decades of damage from cultural and societal pressures which have caused us women (and men) to believe that because we enjoy sex, there is something wrong with us. One of my favorite quotes on feminism is by Cheris Kramarae: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.”
And guess what?
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE SEX
As soon as we as a society start looking at women as beings instead of pretty, empty objects to be controlled, marginalized, and dominated.
SlutWalk is forcing us, as activists to educate and empower the public across the world what it means to be human and how to treat our fellow humans as equals. Men and women have fought to tear down gender walls in:
Slutwalk Chicago 2012 (photo by John Robb)
Sackville, ON Canada, Ottawa, CN, Vancouver, CN, Waterloo, CN, Saskatoon as part of Consentfest, Montreal, Hamilton, Halifax Orlando, FL, Asheville, NC, Tempe, AZ (Arizona State University), Dallas, TX, Hartford, CT, Boston, MA, Rochester, NY, Santa Cruz, CA, San Luis Obispo, CA, Riverside, CA, Portland, ME, Chicago, IL, Los Angeles, CA, Portland, OR, Savannah, GA, San Diego, CA, Austin, TX, Philadelphia, PA, Spokane, WA, Seattle, WA Detroit, MI, Grand Rapids, MI, Denver, CO, Houston, TX, Indianapolis, IN Baltimore, MD, D.C. NYC, Olympia/Tumwater, WA Olympia, WA, SF Bay, CA, New Brunswick, NJ (Rutgers Campus) St. Louis, MO, Greensboro, NC Reno, NV, Fort Lauderdale, FL Albuquerque, NM, Miami, FL, Milwaukee, WI, Sacramento, CA, Salt Lake City, UT, Tucson, AZ, Tampa, FL, San Jose, CA, Minneapolis, MN, Edinburgh, Scotland, Brisbane, Australia, Amsterdam, NED, Adelaide, Australia, London, UK, Sydney, Australia, Wellington, New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand, Birmingham, UK, Stockholm, SW, Buenos Aires, ARG, Cardiff, UK, Dublin, IRL, Johannesburg, SA, Cape Town, SA, Newcastle, UK, Bishkek, KYRG, Melbourne, Australia, Bristol, UK.
Furthermore, SlutWalk is about reconstructing consent. In the context of sex, consent is not the absence of no. Consent is:
Fuck YES! I want to explore YOUR body and my SEXUALITY and our mutual ATTRACTION until we both feel AMAZING together!
or something like that. That, or something like that, is my declaration of sexual consent. Sometimes I’ve said with my eyes, most times I say it with big, loud tomboy mouth. And I’ve had some great sex because I know when I really want my partner to put his/her hands on me. Because I’ve defined what consent means, I can continue enjoying the electricity of physical human contact on the terms that function best for me. If that makes me a slutty feminist, I own it.
Consent is NOT:
-if you want to
-okay, because you bought xxxxxxxxxxxx
-sure, because it will shut you up
-I guess, because i’m obligated to, because of our monogamy
Yes, FUCK YES! I’ve had that kind of sex, too. It was not nearly as satisfying, electrifying and enjoyable as the sex I’ve had where I actually and wholly consented to.
Consent is because YOU want to. Consent is yours to hold on to, to give away, to change your mind about. Consenting to sex, or deciding not to, does not label anyone anything. Learning to see one another as complex individual human beings with desires and emotions is only the beginning to treating one another as equals. We do that first by burning the labels that enslave our sexuality. As soon as we internalize this concept of consent, we begin to purge patriarchy with its damages of slut-shame and marginalized sexuality. We begin to enjoy our lives, each other, our sexuality and our experiences reshaping and rebuilding our world.
The Reds, unable to distort the traditional definition of consent in contract law, shifted to warping the definition of consent in the law of rape. They hope a few generations born into this distorted meaning of consent will help them achieve their one world communism.
I would love the know the statistics of rapes that occur when a woman explicitly says NO or actual use of violence to manufacture consent or forcible rapes (in the common law sense of the world) and those where woman abdicate the responsibility to say NO.
You cannot have No mean No and Yes mean No as well. The feminist view of rape has devolved into hypocrisy with demands to shift the entire responsibility of consent on the male (yes, rape is traditionally defined a male-female crime, non-consensual sex between males or females is sodomy).
Now before you attack me with some bullshit about women “asking for it”. No woman should be sexually assaulted for how she dresses or acts or speaks nor should a woman suffer violence or explicit threats of violence to manufacture consent. But, short of forcible rape or stranger groping, any woman who does not want sexual contact has a duty to say NO and every man has a duty to honor such NO.
Oh good grief.
If you insist on REdefining what the word “consent” means, you must apply it across the board.
So if, as Miss/Ms Solidarity states, Consent is NOT:
-if you want to
-okay, because you bought xxxxxxxxxxxx
-sure, because it will shut you up
-I guess, because i’m obligated to, because of our monogamy
Then I guess that means my girlfriend actually kidnapped me when I reluctantly agreed to go see some movie that I had no real interest in seeing but felt obligated to go.
The cop who searched my car is guilty of trespassing because I didn’t really say “FUCK YES! I’ve been dying to have some strange guy in a blue Nazi uniform rummage through my stuff. What took you so long to ask?” I really just wanted to shut him up so I could be on my way.
Whether the Slutwalkers like it or not, “If you want to,” “okay,” “sure,” and “I guess,” ARE consent unless it is a situation of “I guess, because I don’t want to lose my job,” or “okay, if it will prevent you from plunging that knife into my throat.”
The anecdote for the starter of SlutWalk was a police officer offered his opinion that a girl change her dress because it might attract sexual predators. Logical.
The “I can dress how I want, and I shouldn’t be bothered” argument is wrong simply because of animal instinct – Female animals all have ways of non-verbal communication of sexual availability. Dressing in a provocative manner is simply a woman sending out a verbal signal, which (in the case of the woman being really dumb) might not be suggesting sexual availability, yet I doubt it. If you are saying “sexually unavailable” learn about non-verbal communication – Most communication is non verbal.
Hey Steve, what about the women who get raped in turtlenecks and pants?
Victim blaming is disgusting. I have an idea. How about men don’t rape? It’s absolute bullshit to say that a woman is sending out nonverbal cues and somehow that makes her deserving of rape.
I’m sad that you’re obviously a rapist who can’t control his “animal instincts.”
See what I did there?
Of all the allegedly-leftist ideas I have soapboxed over the years, none has received more resistance amongst my friends than SlutWalk. None. It even gets more resistance than socialism. To think that people consider the elimination of victim-blaming more absurd than the elimination of capitalism…
But I’ve been told before that if no one’s hating then you’re doing something wrong. Based on this, I’d say SlutWalk is 100% the way to go! SW2012 WAS AWESOME!
S L U T
e i l e
x b t r
u e i r
a r m i
l a a f
l t t i
y e e c
d l !
y !
!
Supposed to say “Sexually Liberated, Ultimately Terrific”…Bad formatting