What Gail Dines Doesn’t Get About SlutWalk
What Gail Dines Doesn’t Get About SlutWalk
Lindsay Beyerstein: What Gail Dines Doesn’t Get About SlutWalk
The nascent SlutWalk movement was galvanized by a Toronto police officer who warned women not to ?dress like sluts? if they didn?t want to get raped.
The inaugural SlutWalk took place outside the main police station in Toronto on April 3. Since then, satellite SlutWalks have been held across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
In a widely cited op-ed in the Guardian, anti-porn feminist Gail Dines and her co-author accused the nascent SlutWalk movement of effectively wallowing in the patriarchal mud and calling it liberation:
The organisers claim that celebrating the word “slut”, and promoting sluttishness in general, will help women achieve full autonomy over their sexuality. But the focus on “reclaiming” the word slut fails to address the real issue. The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.
Dines shares more common ground with SlutWalk than she realizes. The organizers are not celebrating the word ?slut? or ?promoting sluttishness in general.? The SlutWalkers are marching in solidarity with all women who have been dismissed, degraded, or hurt by the label. They are marching against sexual violence and the ugly stereotypes that help to perpetuate it.
SlutWalk is not an attempt at liberation through a narrow kind of sexualized self-expression. Its proponents do not promise that showing more skin is, in itself, a path to political or personal liberation. Marchers are not exhorted to act or dress any differently; nor are they encouraged to refer to themselves as sluts in their day-to-day lives. ?We are all Sparatacus? doesn?t mean we?re all Thracian gladiators.
SlutWalk has been crystal clear on this point: women?s sexuality is never the problem, no matter how bold or muted its expression; rapists are the problem. The activists marched in Toronoto to remind the Toronto PD of its duty to protect the entire community.
The organizers of the original Toronto SlutWalk encouraged marchers to wear whatever they wanted, anticipating that marchers would show up a diverse array of outfits. Sure enough, marchers turned out sporting everything from parkas and toques to miniskirts.
For all of these women marching together under the banner of SlutWalk, from the outwardly chaste to the flamboyantly carnal, the message was, We are all sluts. Or none of us are sluts. And who cares anyway? That?s a direct challenge to the madonna/whore dichotomy that Dines deplores.
As I?ve argued elsewhere, the concept of ?slut? is so nebulous that it can be hurled at any woman, regardless of her appearance or sexual history. The slut concept is doubly infuriating because women are expected to invest a great deal of time and energy policing their own behavior in the hopes of avoiding the label that Dines calls a form of ?social death.? The slut concept is dangerous because it is a lazy shorthand way to separate the women who ?count? from the women who don?t.
