SlutWalking: a serious statement or a good day out?
As ‘SlutWalking’ arrives in the UK…..the SlutWalkers hit the streets of Cardiff last Saturday and will move to London next week ….it may be timely to review the various debates on rape currently occupying media space.
SlutWalking, it will be recalled, was provoked by hapless PC Michael Sanguinetti of Toronto who, conscious of being non-pc, tried to explain that girls who wore provocative clothes might be likely to provoke. PC Sanguinetti said “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this…however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”.
Since then women across Canada, and the United States have been taking to the streets on SlutWalks to protest against rape victims being held culpable by reason of their dress.
Do these women have a point? Clearly a high skirt or a low neckline should not make the wearer the guilty party to a rape.
On the other hand Presentation of Self including the way we dress is intended to communicate a message. Why else would male bureaucrats wear watches designed for deep-sea divers and polar explorers? And why else is there a waiting list for ludicrously expensive ‘It-bags’ covered in cutlery and the size of a house? Of course messages can easily be misunderstood by some of one’s audience. The UK’s Prince Harry found out to his cost that not everyone sees dressing as a Nazi officer as amusing or ironic.
One of the best comments on SlutWalking comes from a male twitterer reported in the Guardian who said that anyway on most British high streets it would be difficult to distinguish the dedicated SlutWalkers from the rest… which is somehow the point that the protesters themselves should also be making? It shouldn’t matter how you dress in terms of vulnerability to rape and culpability thereof. But this may be a difficult message to convey through this demonstration. SlutWalkers parade their sexuality to show that it doesn’t matter. What are they saying: 'We are dressed (up) as sluts (asking for it) but we're actually just feminists'?Will everyone get that point? History tells us that broader political and social change impacts upon women’s status directly or indirectly Are there any genuine, non-marching sluts who might find this charicature a bit unsisterly?
Anyway… no review of the current debate on rape would be complete without reference to DSK of the IMF…… Dominique Strauss Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund… accused of attempted rape and imprisonment of a maid at the Sofitel in Manhattan, and last seen doing (not the SlutWalk) but ‘the perp(etrator’s) walk’ in a New York court. We do not of course know yet whether he is indeed the perp nor what his defense will be ; hardly along the lines of ‘Her skirt was too short,your Honour’ one imagines. He is not however being helped by his defenders back in France, though 57% of the French population thinks he was framed and a series of conspiracy scenarios have been proposed.
Bernard Henri-Levy, the French philosopher made a thoughtful contribution by reminding us that cleaners in five-star hotels only work in teams (brigades de ménage composées de deux personnes) and therefore the woman’s entry into the suite on her own was a priori suspect. Furthermore, the number of the suite (2806) cannot coincidentally match the date of the beginning of election campaigning for the French Socialist party (28/06). A clear case of entrapment then.
Class has inevitably reared its head with one journalist ,Jean-Francois Kahn, dismissing the problem as mere ‘troussage de domestique’ …or only sexual relations with servants. He has since resigned.
And where conspiracy theory rages can the CIA be left out? Another Paris- based theory relates the ‘entrapment’ to the Agency’s need to get DSK removed from the IMF as being too left-wing and pro-Euro.
Where are you Marianne? Embodied perhaps as Christine Largarde?
Another story and back to London now concerns the kerfuffle caused by the Minister of Justice, Ken Clarke, who just wanted to make the tiny point that some rapes were more serious than others and that perpetrators who confessed their guilt should be treated with more leniency. Whilst some of his defenders tried to point out that semantics were at work here and that good old Ken… normally a paragon of eloquence… was actually referring to the fact the under English Law consensual sex where one of the parties is a minor, i.e. under 16 years of age, is also termed ‘rape’, Ken himself did not see fit to grasp this straw very firmly and just blundered on until more interesting items knocked him off the front pages, despite or because of the Opposition’s calling for his immediate resignation.
Much of the current public debate on rape whilst very welcome takes on a rather simplistic men vs. women angle (man=perpetrator; woman=victim) whilst as we all know rape is no respecter of gender, age, ethnicity or any of the other grounds for discrimination between people and is perhaps best seen as one variety of criminal expression of unequal power.
Men are also subject to rape in war and in peace; and women can also be rapists. Any reader of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is unlikely to forget the revenge rape by the heroine Lisbeth Salander of her male guardian, a fifty-five year-old lawyer.
Anyway gendercentric wishes future SlutWalkers a fine day for their events, especially in consideration of their light attire, but we can’t help feeling that as demonstrations go this is a mite old-fashioned, and that the SlutWalkers are not quite ‘getting it’.
In short more of a good day out (& why not?) than a serious statement.