Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the most odious misogynist bullshit I have seen thus far on the topic of the Slutwalks: a post on The Third Edge of the Sword, a blog that seems to go out of its way to be offensive and “edgy,” that takes victim blaming to a whole new level. Here’s the basic, er, argument of the post, which the author has put in giant pink letters so we won’t miss it:
Every woman marching in the Edmonton Slut Walk is publicly declaring herself a slut. This means every woman there desires sex with any and all partners. Any sexual activity you initiate with them comes with implied consent. They cannot say no, and if they do understand all their ‘no’s mean yes. They are all asking for it. They want it bad. Now. From you. Go get ’em!
Some other highlights:
[I]f you … dress slutty, men are going to stare at you. We’re going to catcall. We are going to tell you all sorts of sexual things we want to do to your body. And if you dress slutty and wave your ass in our face, we will do them. The organizers of this event are not oblivious to this point: what they want is a fake sexual revolution. They want to be able to impersonate sluts without actually being sluts, and that’s unacceptable. If you don’t want to be treated as a piece of meat, don’t marinate and grill yourself and sit perched on a piece of garlic toast. You dress slutty, you show off the goods, you try to get a reaction, you will get one. Hint: it’s not always going to be the one you want. …
The “reaction” he has in mind is rape. By calling rape a “reaction” instead of what it is — a criminal assault on someone, an act of sexual violence, a violation — he of course is attempting to switch the blame to the victim. He spells out his “logic” in more detail:
[W]hen you impersonate a slut we don’t fine you, and we don’t throw you in jail. There’s really only one punishment for dressing like a streetwalker when you aren’t one: you do have to endure the occasional rape. You should really suffer it in silence. Accept the character flaw within you that caused this, and move on. Police and court resources are already busy enough with real criminals: like actual rapists who do nasty things to their niece or the homeless native chick passed out under the bridge, or a conservatively dressed urban professional walking to her car, or a girl out jogging in a track suit. To equate the act of actually violating and raping one of these people with having sex with a girl who’s every square millimetre of public persona screams anybody who wants to can screw me right now is ridiculous.
Once again, this brand of misogyny leads to some conclusions that are pretty misandrist – namely, the notion that men are at heart rapists who can’t control their violent urges:
If you go out on the street in an outfit that would make Britney Spears feel uncomfortable, you do so knowing that your ultimate aim is to make men want you. Well, they want you now. Congrats. Oh, wait, you mean you didn’t understand what that implied? That in the great Bell curve of sexual congress you’ve just pushed everybody on the right-hand side of the -2 std devs line past that imaginary barrier that says “there is no power in the universe powerful enough to stop me from sliding my finger inside your panties”? I call bullshit. You do know. But you want to be a virginal slut, to dress in ways that makes men helpless to their urges but still leaves you fully in restrictive control.
The blogger concludes by arguing that the Slutwalkers are all “lying bitches” because they dress like they wasn’t to be raped, but do not actually want to be raped. Then he makes this lovely suggestion:
If your wife is one of them, I’m very very sorry. Maybe a good rape might make her a little more manageable around the house.
Now this post is an atmittedly extreme example of a misogynistic response to the Slutwalks. But the basic “logic” of this blogger’s would-be argument is essentially identical to that of many MRA and other “manosphere” pieces I’ve seen on the subject, the main difference between them being that this guy embraces the logical conclusion of his argument — that Slutwalkers deserve to be raped — while the MRAs who make essentially the same argument (and fling the same sorts of insults at the Slutwalkers) make a show of saying that they don’t really think the Slutwalkers “deserve” it. And maybe they’ve convinced themselves that this caveat means something . But in that case the extreme reaction that manosphere misogynists have had to the Slutwalks – the insults thrown at the Slutwalkers, the “jokey” references to rape, the prurient sneering – makes little sense. If you argue that women are “asking for it” when they dress like “sluts,” you’re essentially saying they deserve it. You’re making the same argument this guy is making, but pretending you aren’t.
NOTE: The graphic above is taken from the official web site for the Edmonton SlutWalk 2011, which took place a week ago. Here are some pictures of the march.
Answer my question, damn it!
Spearedhafoc I find you quite tedious. Stick with your official postion as grammar monitor and the occasional rothchild not to be confused with rothschild schtick.
Should anyone have something stolen, be mugged, murdered, embezzled? Should there be war? How about poverty? Maybe car accidents, (drunk drivers)? Maybe fighting?
O this is rich.
So it is the fault of people being mugged that they got mugged.
It is the fault of murder victims that they got murdered.
It is the fault of war casualties that they were killed while a war went by.
The other ones are kind of stupid. Car accidents? how someone drives does contribute to car accidents, but sometimes not. A drunk driver doesn’t always hit another drunk driver, so the other one is at fault because what, she made the poor choice of not avoiding driving while the drunk driver was out?
Yes, bad things happen you toad. Rape is a bad thing, and happens when a BAD PERSON, the rapist, finds a victim and an opportunity and NONE of that has anything to do with whether the victim is a slut, or dressed provocatively or is a feminist.
Howzabout we agree on this? Rape is a crime, the person who commits it is a criminal.
Spearedhafoc I find you quite tedious.
I confess this made me chuckle. “Tedious”, indeed.
Are exotic dancers routinely raped on the stages of the clubs in which they dance?
I don’t hate you Sarah and I wish you no ill will.
If you hate me but by some freaky chance you decide not to get drunk in a bad neighborhood late at night, thinking back to something I said about dressing and acting slutty and something bad doesn’t happen to you. Well I hope you live a long and safe life hating me.
I don’t hate you Sarah and I wish you no ill will.
unless, of course, you dress in a way that Slaver finds unchaste.
So NWO, I guess you have no more objections to the study, apart from the fact that you think anything written by a feminist is inevitably bunk. I guess this means that you won’t be saying that what a woman wears will help her prevent rape, right?
I love the fact that we have designated roles now. Its like we’re all characters passing before his eyes, each with some 2D schtick and designated purpose. We couldn’t possibly be actual human beings on the other side of his monitor, could we?
Yes you do, chuckles. The policies you support are ones that would make her life objectively worse than it is.
So he’s back after avoiding ALL the questions and refutations last night and pretending it didn’t exist, as usual xD And now we start anew… XD Given that he’s the one making an affirmative statement, and claim of fact, shouldn’t it be on him to prove it? Otherwise this is like “prove there aliens didn’t land on Earth” or the “prove you never took steroids” pre-testing witchhunt in MLB… or other “prove a negative”… I mean, every anecdotal evidence will be an exception, or that if we had dressed differently we’d be raped MORE, and every survivor who DID dress what somebody considers “slutty” could have “avoided” it otherwise, and etc etc etc…
there’s proof that motorcycle helmets mitigate head injuries (but do not prevent crashes)
Shouldn’t we see definitive proof that how you’re dressed prevent rapes? o_O;; Then we can discuss that proof.
Otherwise, it’s like trying to prove that Jews don’t rule the world, or that I’m not an Angel. xD (why do I feel like we’re about to get a rly bad attempt at swiping at the rodeo cat? XD )
Anyway, NWO, I forgot to add this.
You don’t accept my claim that clothing affects rape. Alright, fine, I don’t require you to believe me. But you are also making a claim, that says it does. So, what evidence do you have that finds that clothing is correlated with rape, hmm? No, common sense doesn’t count, because of what I’ve said before and the fact that you seem to recognize that what a person simply asserts isn’t necessarily true.
And Ami ninja’d me like a pro. Congrats! 😀
NWO: “by some freaky chance you decide not to get drunk in a bad neighborhood late at night, thinking back to something I said about dressing and acting slutty and something bad doesn’t happen to you.”
The majority of rapes occur in the home of the victim or perpetrator.
Kirbywarp, lets just say feminist stats have proven to be very, very skewed to say the least.
Shouldn’t we see definitive proof that how you’re dressed prevent rapes?
What, Ami, you’re not willing to accept Slaver’s repeated assertions based solely on his own rationales adequate as a proof?
chuckle chuckle.
Ymata, certainly not violent rapes which is what I’m talking about.
what a person simply asserts isn’t necessarily true.
But what if a MAN asserts it? I mean a REAL man, not a feminist one or a mangina or a broterus or anything.
@Nobinayamu or women at beaches… or at nude beaches… or at comic conventions xD Also again, apparently we need to be mind readers to decide we know what men find attractive (I guess I should shed my skin in case somebody has an Asian fetish) … I still need to propose to our feminist overlords that eyebeams and telepathy come standard on all women starting next year xD Thanks to the massive conspiracy alliance we have (feminists, gay, Jewish, bankers, Illuminati, I feel like I’m forgetting one), we can easily fund it… >:3
NWO:
Alrighty, time for another addition of “How the world works.”
You see, I’ve dealt with religious claims about God and evolution and what not. A group called Intelligent Design believes that there is proof that everything was created, and they’ve offered papers to prove that. Now here’s the rub, scientists (not always, but most of the time) don’t discount these papers because they were proposed by IDers. Instead, they look at the paper, criticize the methodology, and actually give reasons for dissent. These are inevitably present, and some scientists don’t even bother (after having slogged through mountains of crap studies), but it is bad form to dismiss data you don’t like because its being presented by people you don’t like.
I won’t ask what about the study is flawed again, because you don’t seem to care. But I will second Ami’s question: do you have evidence for your claim?
Ymata, certainly not violent rapes which is what I’m talking about.
DAMMIT SLAVER, TELL ME WHEN YOU’RE GOING TO BE MOVING THE GOALPOSTS LIKE THAT!! That nearly hit me in the head.
more rueful chuckling at the idea that rapes in the home are never violent.
I don’t get you people, violent rapists are sick fucking people who will prey on drunk women staggering out of a bar at 2 in the morning. So if I say don’t do that, I don’t hate you.
@zombie I think he’s substituting “violent” for “stuff by strangers in random parks like I see on TV” given that being inside or raped by somebody you know can absolutely be violent… incl mine (and a lot of survivors I know) : He’s basically defining “violent rape” as “rape by a stranger who was mindread to be attracted by your clothes in the dark at night when you were alone” -_- Goalpost moving AND proof by changing the definition xD It’s like saying “all cats are black and white” and then saying “by cat i meant cats that are black and white” xD
And violent rapists, such as, say, Johnny Frank Garrett, will break into convents in the middle of the night, raping, beating and stabbing some elderly nun before strangling her to death. Guess nobody warned her about the dangers of becoming a nun……. or, perhaps, she was staggering around the convent in her slutty slut slut wear.