Tag: slut shaming

Posted on

More Slut Shaming

A judge said a 14 year old girl who consented to sex with a 49 year old man who was also her teacher was “older than her chronological years” and “as much in control” as the man was.

The man has to serve 30 days.

The girl took her own life. According to her mother, she committed suicide largely because of this relationship.

Moveon.org has a petition that calls for the judge to resign for his poor judgement, victim blaming, and slut shaming.

Which reminds me to define slut shaming: slut shaming is a cultural practice whereby people think a woman “deserves” whatever negative thing happens to her because she has a sexuality or even just a body that she dresses in a way that seems – to someone – as “asking for it”. Slut shaming is when a girl is raped at a party by four boys and the photo of her being raped is passed around and no one reports the boys. Slut shaming is when a journalist reports the slut shaming being done by others of a 12 year told girl who was raped by multiple men. Slut shaming is when a woman who agrees to sex with a guy at a party is mocked and made fun of and nothing happens to the guy. Slut shaming is when a girl who gives a guy a blowjob at a concert and is called a slut while the guy is applauded. Slut shaming is when a woman is considered dangerous or suspect purely because she has an apparent sexuality and is/has been known to have sex with men (or women) she is not married or committed to. Slut shaming is what bisexuals get a lot because they’re assumed to sleep with anyone, anywhere, any time.

Slut shaming is what makes that judge’s ruling possible; it plays into the myths that women are always temptresses, femme fatales, or lolitas, that their expression of their sexuality is always a conscious choice and that any disregard for traditional social morays and expectations will and should be punished.

The word “slut” doesn’t have to be used for slut shaming to occur, and a woman does not have to have had sex with a lot of men in order to be accused of being a slut. That is, slut shaming is a cultural phenomenon that attempts to define and control women’s sexualities and punish anyone whose appearance or practices are not in line with that culture’s standards.

Posted on

Slutwalk: Appleton

Today, for my 43rd birthday, and on Mother’s Day to boot, I’ll be speaking at Appleton’s first Slutwalk. Here’s a preview of what I’m planning on saying:

Thank you so much, VDAY, for having the ovarios to put on this event here in Appleton.

For those of you who don’t know, Slutwalk began only last year in April, in Toronto, when a police officer  admitted that he was told he wasn’t supposed to say that women shouldn’t dress like sluts so as not to be victimized. And by that, he meant they should dress in ways that hid their bodies in ways our misogynist, sex-obsessed culture would find acceptable. Aside from the impossibility of being able to decide what “dressing like a slut” means in any culture, he put together the idea that somehow women’s bodies are at fault for the violence and slut shaming perpetrated against them.

They are not.

Women’s bodies are beautiful and should be seen, and in a culture that had its act together – on both violence and sexuality – police officers wouldn’t say such stupid things. Mind you: he wasn’t trying to be hateful. His words, no doubt, came out of something like compassion for the women who he had seen victimized while doing his job. He wanted – like so many of us do – to keep women safe from sexual assault, from trauma, from fear.

But what many men don’t know is that it’s not what kind of clothing a woman’s body wears that has anything to do with it. It’s what a woman’s body IS that causes us all these troubles: bodies full of desire, desiring, desired; bodies of curves and straight lines and freckles and hair. Bodies of skin and fat and muscle and bone; bodies of organs, of hearts and brains and cervixes.

What I love is that every day of my life I can wake up & say that I was born with the one body part whose only use is pleasure. But if you think about it, which parts of us aren’t? Brains, hair, hands, hearts, breasts, legs, feet and elbows – the skin itself is about pleasure. Freud had this theory that we were all polymorphously perverse – meaning that when we’re born, we’re so awash in the pleasure of having a body that every touch, ever breeze, brings us rolling waves of pleasure and that the process of getting older is learning to move some of that sensitivity to a few precious locations – mostly so, as he figured it, we were going to get anything done at all. And so our nerves, so adept at finding pleasure, became located in our nipples and tongues, our fingers and toes, the backs of knees and the backs of our necks, our lips – both sets of lips –  and of course in our genitals too. And somehow we managed to stop touching our selves long enough to write books and build buildings.

But women are a kind of warm, breathing repository of all of that pleasure, and it’s hard not to see, especially not in spring. Our sexual selves come out of hiding in the spring, and so our clothes come off – even here in Wisconsin, where “spring” and “warm” are not always the same thing – because we feel the joy of having bodies, of desiring and being desired. Continue reading “Slutwalk: Appleton”