This Saturday, scores of scantily clad women (and some men, though I’m not sure how they’ll be clad) are scheduled to march through the streets of Detroit. Since I’ll just to happen to be in Detroit this Saturday, I’m planning on heading over and cheering them on.
While I’m not usually a fan of scant dressing, I am fan of what these women are doing.
“SlutWalks” - the name for this sort of march - began this April in Toronto when, according to a NPR report, a “Toronto police officer suggested women should ‘avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimized.’” Apparently his comment to a small group of law students was all it took to light the fire under this new movement.
And I’m glad it did. Frankly, I’m shocked that anyone would still think - or suggest - that what a woman wears somehow makes her responsible for violent crimes committed against her. I thought there were laws against this sort of thing. I thought we worked through all this “she asked for it” nonsense back in the 1980s.
Apparently we didn’t.
While I’d like to give this police officer the benefit of the doubt - that what he meant to say is that women ought to be wise when it comes to safety - what he said was horrific. Something that should make Christians, especially, shudder and want to cheer on these SlutWalkers. Maybe even join them.
I realize my contention will bother the camp of Christians for whom “modesty” is seen as the solution to the world’s problems and as the best way to keep chaste and safe - not to mention honor Christ.
I agree that dressing in a way that intentionally titillates, tempts or scandalizes probably doesn’t honor our Heavenly Father. And I don’t believe women should dress in a way that turns our “Temples of God” into objects of lust. But - honestly - I don’t know how that can happen.
From what they tell me, men are allured by all manner of dress. I mean, our culture has turned Catholic school-girl uniforms slutty. Teachers - with prim skirts, buttoned-up blouses, tied back hair and glasses - slutty. At least, when men imagine her removing the glasses, shaking out her hair ... right?
And let’s go a bit global: Right now I’m in tan Bermuda shorts, a black t-shirt and flip-flops. Pretty standard “mom” fare on my block. Drop me in certain parts of Afghanistan? I’m dressed like a slut. One who “deserves” to be raped. Perhaps to be stoned to death.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter what a woman wears. Whether fig leaves or yards of fine linen and purple (both biblical). Whether loose fitting or tight all over. No woman or girl asks for or deserves violence against her body. No matter what.
As Christians who believe our bodies are beautiful gifts from the God - whose image we bear - we must demand an end to violence against women. And we must stand up against attempts to put the blame for this violence on women. The Bible may instruct us not to let our “rights” become stumbling blocks to the weak (1 Corinthians 8:9), but this doesn’t exactly green-light violence. The Scriptures still talk plenty about self-control - without qualifiers.
While we can debate the method of SlutWalks, Christians should agree on their purpose. Christians should be leading the marches against violence toward women. And turning the discussions of this violence clear away from what women should wear, to how men should behave.
(Photo of a June SlutWalk in Edmonton, Canada, courtesy of Hugh Lee/Wikimedia Commons.)
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http://deanroberts.net
I want to clarify one point about this movement, which I have found interesting. Not all the protesters dress "scantily." As you can see in the picture above some of the protestors are wearing typical day clothes, certainly something that would be ok at a casual church social. The point they are making is that no matter what a woman does, she can't prevent someone from believing she is "slutty" and that is no excuse for violence. This is an idea you get at in the article (one some commentators on this phenomenon seem to have missed) and I wanted to note that it's not lost on the organizers.
"If I go to the Bronx dressed as a member of the KKK, and some black people beat the crap out of me, who is to blame? Well, technically they are, but I'm also an idiot.
If you go out to venues where people are trolling for sex, and you dress like you're looking for sex, and some person with with no self-control rapes you, he is to blame. But you're also an idiot.We can assign blame where it belongs while still telling people to not act like idiots and take proper precautions in sketchy situations."------------------------------While I agree slutty clothes don't CAUSE rape (rapists cause rape), temptation is a very very powerful thing. Poor police office who just tried to say 'be careful girls'.
Also, I am troubled by an analogy relating a woman dressed "sexy" or whatever, to a person dressed in a racially threatening manner. A person might be looking for sex, that doesn't mean she's looking to be raped. Sex and rape are not the same thing.
We can promote modesty as a virtue, but slutwalk is battling two related misconceptions: 1) a person can prevent rape by how she dresses 2) if a woman is marked as "slutty" because of her clothing or dating habits, then it's ok for her to be harassed or assaulted. As Caryn pointed out in her post, what counts as "slutty" is contextual and sometimes unpredictable, and it never excuses a rapist.
I remember reading in a bicycling magazine that women who are going on a long bike ride, say 50-60 miles should carry with them something to put over their very tight biking "uniform". Of course for cyclist, they wear these tight shorts and shorts to cut down the resistance from air friction. The writer suggested that if you have a bike malfunction that you never know where you might be or have to walk to get help so have something to put over you so that you don't "get yourself into trouble". When I read that I didn't think anything about it and now I think this police officer is saying the same thing.
So my question to you is, can a person decrease their chances of rape by dressing more modestly?
There are crazy people in this world and I for one don't want to be the victim of their chemical imbalances.
I don't think it's preposterous to protest in favor of a world where a woman can take a bike trip in an outfit appropriate to biking without fearing "trouble" of that kind, or walk home from a night out on the town. In countries where women are not allowed to show any skin or leave the house without a male relative, that is "for their safety" also.
Many fringe Muslim groups believe this. Just google "muslim rape victim punished" and see story after story of the victims being blamed.
Have there been studies to prove that a woman can lessen their chances of being raped by dressing a certain way? No. But plenty of crazy people over and over are demonstrating this is true.
I completely agree that "it is not preposterous to protest in favor of a world where a woman can take a bike trip in an outfit appropriate to biking without fearing "trouble" of that kind, or walk home from a night out on the town".
I'm in favor of these people protesting.
There is nothing that I hate more than the oppression of women since the world began and how women are treated by men now in the US and worldwide. It's sickening. Sometimes I wonder how God can let this type of treatment go on and even advocated it for so many years.
However, me pushing back on your statements was because I am concerned for my daughter's and sister's safety. I want them to stay on lit streets while walking, stay alert, carry mace, lock their windows and doors at night, etc. I wish we lived in a world were my wife and daughter didn't have to do these things but they do.
So what I push back on in regards to your statement is that because I've heard some crazy people tell other people that they raped because of the way that the woman was dressed and when my daughter goes out I think about this and believe that women need to have wisdom.
I don't want my sisters to get hurt in the process of exercising their rights to be able to dress any way they want. They do have that right and should be able to dress how they want but since there are so many crazy people out there are freedoms are being restricted.
For instance, the young man who targeted congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and killed many others earlier this year thought she should be victimized because women shouldn't hold positions of authority. Should the congresswoman have resigned to avoid being a victim of his chemical imbalance?
I think we basically agree, since I wholeheartedly endorse the statement "I don't want my sisters to get hurt in the process of exercising their
rights to be able to dress any way they want. They do have that right
and should be able to dress how they want but since there are so many
crazy people out there are freedoms are being restricted."
I think protests like Slutwalks are an attempt to change our culture so those crazy people are not encouraged or affirmed by cultural discourse of victim blaming. Focusing on what women should do to avoid rape tacitly suggests the crazies are right and they deserve what they get if they don't follow increasingly restrictive suggestions, and I think that's dangerous, and it sounds like you agree, we're just approaching from different levels.
And that isn't the problem, that we've apparently got a society where rapists think "they deserved it because of the way they were dressed"? They had to get that message from somewhere; it's not like they made it up whole-cloth. We need to work toward a society where we see justifying rape by the way a woman is dressed is seen as just as loathsome as we'd see someone justifying murder by the way the victim is dressed. "He was wearing a business suit, so he deserved to be shot."
Many fringe Muslim groups believe this. Just google "muslim rape victim punished" and see story after story of the victims being blamed.
Such thinking leads to adopting said groups' viewpoint, and suggesting that the only way a woman might be blameless when a rapist rapes her is if she's wearing a burqa.
Have there been studies to prove that a woman can lessen their chances of being raped by dressing a certain way? No. But plenty of crazy people over and over are demonstrating this is true.
Except that there are also plenty of rapists (and let's not get them off the hook by calling them "crazy people," as if they're controlled by a pathology and don't have a choice) who rape women who aren't dressed in anything revealing, and plenty of other people who encounter women dressed in revealing clothing and don't see that as an invitation to rape them. So obviously there's something else at work here.
As for the rest of your post, I really do understand it. It's clear that you hate our culture's pandemic of sexual violence against women, and that you really don't intend to blame the victims of the crime.
But as I state in brief above, I think you do the discussion a disservice by calling rapists "crazy people." In part, I think that's a reflection of a heart that's in the right place, and that's an impulse I agree with—the idea of raping someone, of having sex with them when they don't or can't consent, seems crazy to you, like something you can't imagine a person in their right mind doing. I share that impulse. That, I think, is a very good impulse and comes from a good place.
But I think that in doing so, you also make rapists into a sort of "force of nature," people who have no control over their actions and no choice in the matter. That, I think, is a false portrayal.
I don't disagree that there certainly are pathological rapists out there who are under the control of psychological sicknesses they can't control—and for them, I'd suggest, institutionalization is probably the best option if they really can't control that urge.
But I'd suggest that the vast majority of rapists aren't crazy—that they're people who have a choice, who choose to act in a selfish, controlling, dehumanizing, violating way, who choose to see the woman they rape not as a human being but as an object, who choose to ignore the shouting of their consciences. And I'd suggest furthermore that such people are encouraged by our culture to rape, encouraged by our culture to see women as objects, encouraged by our social expectations of masculinity to think that "you're not a man if she won't sleep with you" or "her no really means she wants it and can't admit it" or "if she's drunk/asleep/'dressed like a slut' she really wants it."
And we need to figure out, as a society, if these things are acceptable to us, if it's acceptable that our sisters, wives, mothers, and female friends are afraid every time they walk home from the bus stop at night, or afraid to wear something that shows some skin because they'll get catcalls.
Because if they aren't acceptable to us, we've got work to do. We've got to put better law enforcement protocols in place that take rape survivors' story seriously, that don't diminish or belittle or victim-blame them, so that more will come forward and press charges and more rapists will be punished. We've got to put better educational programs in place that tell guys in high school and college that "yes means yes," that anything but enthusiastic consent is a "stop" sign, that going forward when she doesn't consent is rape, plain and simple. We've got to start getting men involved in putting social pressure on one another to stop rape-culture thinking in its tracks, to tell their fraternity brother "no" when he's about to take an incoherently-drunk girl upstairs to his room, to not patronize movies or TV shows or websites that objectify women and lead to rape.
But the first step, I think, is taking rape seriously as a choice that rapists make—not seeing rapists as a force of nature that needs to be prepared for, like carrying an umbrella on a rainy day, but rather as people who make evil choices because they either don't know or don't care about making good choices. Rape exists because rapists rape; thus, we need to reduce the number of rapists, not accept a society in which the ever-present danger of rape is a fact of life for half of the human race.
DNA/rape kits were integrated into the investigation process,convictions skyrocketed and the numbers of rapes decreases.
Another avenue that should be addressed here is the mega buck buisness of pornography.(I can hear it already). How is it that one group of women are out on the streets screaming and yelling on a "slut march." On the other side picking up large sums of money to pose nude in magazines.
However, rape kits are still a limited tool, for two reasons. First, their primary function is to establish the identity of the person who engaged in sexual contact with the woman, and possibly establish forensically that the sexual act involved violence. They don't really help in situations in which it's established and acknowledged by both parties that there was sexual contact, but the dispute is over whether there was consent. The frat boy who takes the drunk girl up to his room isn't going to say he didn't have sex with her, but rather that she consented to it; the rape kit doesn't help us much there. Since a significant proportion of rapes are "date rapes" (and I'm not a fan of that term, since I think it suggests a mitigating circumstance for rape when such a thing isn't possible, but it's unfortunately the term we've got) in which sexual contact is acknowledged but consent is in dispute, and since a vast majority of rapes are committed by rapists who are known to their victims, the rape kit, while an excellent and essential tool for a criminal conviction in some cases, remains limited.
Second, the rape kit still only works after a rapist has raped someone. The woman who the rapist raped still has to deal with the psychological (and often physical) aftermath of what was done to her. Yes, more rape convictions will have a deterrent effect, but I'd suggest that even if rape kits successfully resulted in a conviction in 100% of cases where the evidence they gathered was applicable, there would still be enough rapists out there that women would still feel afraid to walk alone at night, and still be told not to wear something too revealing to that party because some guy might think she's "asking for it." Some kind of proactive solution—in which we stop people from becoming rapists in the first place—is necessary.
As to your second point, is pornography a part of the problem? I could absolutely see how pornography that involves blatant misogyny or insults, verbal abuse, or violence against women could reinforce rape culture. But I'd be willing to wager that it's only a small factor in the equation even if we're looking at media; the much bigger factor would be our cultural image of masculinity and the portrayals of women and attitudes toward women that are broadcast to the country on network TV, MTV, Bravo, E!, and a hundred other channels, or that are widely released to the local multiplex, or that are broadcast for everyone to hear on "shock jock" and right-wing talk radio shows. I'd suggest that no matter what action you think we should take to stop the media's promotion of rape culture—whether that's censorship (which I strongly oppose) or social pressure or protests—if you're going in order of effectiveness, porn might be among the last things you touch.
Outside the media, there's peer pressure (particularly, again, with masculinity), there are the silent "codes" among people, there are jackwagons like the "don't dress like a slut" cop who was the original spark for the SlutWalks, and there are the things we just accept as "normal" like catcalls and lingering stares. But the best ally rape culture has, I think, is the assumption that rapists are like the weather, forces of nature that just have to be prepared for rather than human beings who make the choice to rape. Once we as a culture start getting serious about rape as an act committed by rapists—once we get into the active voice and start saying "a rapist raped her" instead of "she was raped"—the other things will be much less difficult to change.
As for "date rape',one post here raised the point of bullying.Using drugs and alchohol to sedate the victim surely points to that type of person.
Another more recient posting wondered why pornography has not been talked about.We really should have some discussion on that.Apparently,it is a multi-billion dollar buisness.Somebody is out there spending alot of money here.
For months after I read that article I avoided meeting the eyes of anyone on the street -- because you never know who's a threat.
Eventually I realized that while meeting someone's eyes might increase my risk of being assaulted, *not* meeting people's eyes was harming me and them both *right now, and for sure.* I was treating everyone as though they might be evil; and that's not good for me, or for the world around me.
So the argument that someone having said that they committed a sexual assault "because of" anything in particular means one should in wisdom avoid doing that thing is, I think, profoundly wrong.
I dress in ways that are comfortable for me in a given physical, social, and cultural environment; if someone around me judges me for that, that's unfortunate. If someone feels that that justifies sexual assault, they're wrong. I will always do the best I can reasonably do to ensure my safety, but this argument ends with me locking myself in an apartment by myself and never interacting with anyone at all.
(After all, the vast majority of rapes are committed by people the victim had thought of as friends or family.)
For the billionth time, RAPE IS ABOUT VIOLENCE, NOT SEX.
Modest dress apparantly INCREASES risk of rape, and it doesn't matter anyway because deflecting rape onto another victim does NOTHING to stop rape.
Men are visual and if you are "saying" I'm easy, then it is all too easy for a man to expect something. As for violence, as one post put it... its about control/anger not sex.
I'm the femi-nazis are foaming at the mouth over this.