Happy Halloween! The LA Times has decided to celebrate the unholiest of holidays with a convoluted op-ed from conservative ideologue Charlotte Allen using Halloween as an excuse to bash both sluts and slutwalks. Because, you know, if you dress like a slut – whether to protest rape or to go to a Halloween party – it’s like you’re begging to be raped. Bad feminists! Bad Halloween revelers dressed as sexy nurses!
Here are a few of the more coherent passages from the piece:
[T]he SlutWalk feminists are in denial of a reality that is perfectly obvious to both the women who favor “sexy” for Halloween parties and (although perhaps not consciously) the SlutWalkers themselves. The reality is that men’s sexual responses are highly susceptible to visual stimuli, and women, who are also sexual beings, like to generate those stimuli by displaying as much of their attractive selves as social mores or their own personal moral codes permit. … It’s no wonder that SlutWalks have quickly outstripped (as it were) Take Back the Night as anti-rape protest. Women get another chance besides Halloween to dress up like prostitutes!
Just watch out, ladies, because dressing sexy is like waving a red flag in front of a bull, with your wallet hanging out!
[T]he vast majority of rape victims are under age 30 — that is, when women are at their peak of desirability. …
[T]he fact that rapists tend to target young women rather than grandmotherly types suggests that in the real rape culture (in contrast to the imaginary rape culture of some feminist ideology), the faux-hos of Halloween and their SlutWalker counterparts marching in their underwear — like a man walking at night with a bulging wallet — should be careful about where they flash their treasure.
So thank you, Charlotte Allen, for once again showing just why the Slutwalks are necessary in the first place.
Jill at Feministe has an excellent response to Allen’s nonsense, which points out that while, yes, younger women are more likely to be victims of rape,
Younger people are also the most likely group to be the victims of aggravated, non-sexual assault. … In fact, younger people are victimized by violent crime more often than older folks as a general rule. A person between the ages of 12 and 24 is six times more likely to be the victim of a robbery than a person over the age of 50; about half of people who report being the victims of aggravated assault are under the age of 25. Men are much more likely than women to be the victims of violent crime. In every age group, black people are the most likely to be the victims of violent crime.
So yes, it is true that younger women are more likely to be targeted for sexual assault than older women. But it’s not because of The Sexy — unless hormones and hard-ons are what are causing criminals to choose their (mostly male) targets for robbery and assault also.
So, really, the only really safe costuming strategy for young people on Halloween, regardless of gender, is to dress up like an old white lady. Might I suggest Dame Judi Dench?
Well, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man referred to as a “cunt” by an American — even if it still is sexist in the UK (calling someone a vagina, basically, right?) it doesn’t seem like it’s reserved only for use against women there like it is in the US. The first time I’d ever heard of the word was in a self-defense book where the writers mentioned that it was a popular thing for male attackers to call their female victims… it was the worst thing many women had ever been called, apparently, so the readers were being warned not to be shocked. :p
Joanna, plenty of people in the US use “gay” and “retarded” all the time as insults (the latter isn’t used as anything but an insult) and don’t care that they are hugely offensive, but most everyone who’s not a total asshole tries not to, and there are campaigns to educate people not to use those slurs. To some extent I think it’s not a cultural thing so much as a “decent person” thing. Even in an adorb European/UK accent the intent is still pretty nasty, even if the word itself remains socially acceptable.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VKEKkTQU-k&version=3&hl=en_US%5D
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VKEKkTQU-k?rel=0&w=420&h=315%5D
FFFFFFFFFFFFFffffff…OK, so no embeds.
But really, people should just take to responding to NWO with that link until he finally deigns tell us What Women Should Wear.
It’s used in the UK to refer to men partly because it’s the most demeaning thing people can think of to call anyone, though. There’s something very wrong with a linguistic culture where the worst possible insult to call anyone is a word that means “vagina”.
The UK and the US are sexist in slightly different ways, but I wouldn’t say one is more sexist than the other.
Addendum – I think the fact that people use it quite often is just an indication that, hey, British people swear a LOT. I’m still sometimes surprised by how little profanity people here use compared to the UK in general, or even more so Scotland in particular.
Sure, but that sounds more like “pussy” in the US; super sexist yet applied more casually (and to guys primarily, here.) But hey, I can’t be rational about this — anytime someone swears in a British accent we Americans just want to discard context entirely, say omgsocuuute and nom them right up! ;D
@OHSIII: sometimes it’ll embed if you just paste in the URL with no HTML at all. ‘Cause WordPress hates order and reason. :p
Nah, it definitely has a nastier feel to it than “pussy”, and different implications. Calling someone a cunt isn’t calling them weak, unmanly etc so much as it is like calling them an asshole or a jerk times a billion. It has a contemptuous tone to it, but not in the same way “pussy” does.
To be honest I find this discussion really interesting. I never knew there where such differences in the usage of slurs in English speaking countries alone.
I also remember being surprised when I saw/heard the word “bimbo” in movies or books from English speaking countries until I found out that it referred to conventionally attractive women who aren’t very bright (which is still kinda meh).
You see, in Germany the word bimbo is a slur against black people on par with the N-word, so it was a bit weird.
Re: the “my gay/black/etc. friend doesn’t mind” argument: I think it’s always better to err on the side of caution. While there are people from marginalized groups who don’t mind slurs, it can also happen that they say that to not hurt the feelings of the person who used the slur, for the fear of losing an ally if they don’t act perfectly nice all the time.
Unfortunately, there ARE people who tell them that, if only they weren’t so ~angry~ and ~opinionated~ all the time, people wouldn’t hate them so much and wouldn’t refuse to give them the same basic human rights.
I don’t think there are many marginalized people who would feel hurt if you DIDN’T use slurs against them, so I think it would be best not to use them until they tell you it’s okay (which still means it’s only okay in that one individual case – minorities are not a hive mind 😉 ).
Ack, sorry for the derail. I will stop right away! Promise!
To try and awkwardly mesh the derail with the actual original topic: apparently there are some cultural differences with the usage of “slut” within America? I keep hearing references to how it’s not the same in the black community/for women of color, but I’ve not been able to track down an actual explanation besides “because slut is a bad word” and that’s not different at all :p — does anyone have a handy link or explanation lying around they could point me at?
I try to avoid anything that could read as a slur that might be hurtful to some people in general. I mean, I’m fine with being really mean to people who I think are being jerks, obviously, but not by deploying racist/sexist/homophobic/etc dogwhistles.
English is a strange language in terms of just how much regional variation there is. Even within the UK the slang is very different from one region to another, and the UK is tiny. Of course some Scottish slang is actually Gaelic, ie the words make no sense to non-Scots because they aren’t English words at all.
Does German vary in the same way regionally? You’d think it would, given the history.
Most users of the ellipsis use it for long blocks of irrelevant text. David Futrelle apparently uses it to remove a single sentence.
Changes the meaning a bit, doesn’t it?
Why even resort to such tactics when you quote such a reasonable argument against that point?
Moreover, I don’t think this isn’t Charlotte Allen’s core message. Even if this point falls, it’s still rather hypercritical to say encourage folks to dress in a titillating manner for the SlutWalks, but then turn around and and discourage the same dress for Halloween. At best, they are being a slave to non-conformity. At worst, they are saying that social pressure to dress sexy is a bad thing, unless they are the ones doing it.
Hum.. Oddly enough, I think I’ve had something that meet nearly all of these criteria happen to me while I was cycling through my town’s downtown. A young woman leaned out the window of a passing SUV yelled “I want to touch your ass!”.
-I’d say that’s extremely specific and sexual.
-She and her friends were definitely in it for the lulz.
-I doubt I’d get a good reaction by flipping her off…
-In fact, you might say that 6000 lbs of SUV versus 40 lbs of bike wouldn’t end well at all.
-No, this isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. Although, I will freely admit this doesn’t happen all the time.
-And, No, I wasn’t dressed like a potential cad… For goodness sake, I was wearing a reflective safety vest!
I was mildly flattered… I was also mildly annoyed. Think of this as sexual market place version of spam. Instead of using some bot to spam everyone, someone thought I was important enough to write an individual message. Whohooo, I’m important enough that someone is trying to rip me off! That doesn’t make me any more interested in buying their fine Canadian Pharmaceuticals or sending $1,000,000 to a Nigerian Princess.
And like spam, it’s rather easy to deal with.
I suppose that n=1, your mileage may vary, and highway conditions may change after you receive this report. Make of that what you will, I just thought point that not all men’s reports about catcalls from passing vehicles came from hypercritical situations.
I assume you mean “hypocritical”? And… who is saying that women should dress “in a titillating manner” for SlutWalks but not for Halloween? I’ve not seen that from anyone.
Yes, yes… Spellcheck fail. In any case, Charlotte Allen makes the point better than I do:
Kollege Messerschmitt:
I honestly never knew that – and can readily see how it might be a bit weird. Which reminds me of the Turkish film star Kunt Tulgar, who was advised to change his name, but the reasons weren’t spelled out, so he assumed that ‘Tulgar’ was the problem (why?) and changed it to ‘Kunt Brix’. Which is why you’ve almost certainly never heard of him unless you have a specialist interest in Turkish popular culture.
CassandraSays:
On the other hand, I can’t think of any British television programme that uses the word “cunt” anything like as frequently (and in a high-profile, non-muttered fashion) as Larry David does in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
But with regard to Scotland, there was a huge row when James Kelman’s novel ‘How Late It Was, How Late’ won the Booker Prize (generally regarded as Britain’s highest literary honor), after one of the judges condemned the decision on the grounds of the stratospheric level of swearing. Kelman pointed out that what she thought was swearing was, quite literally, verbal punctuation marks in his native Glasgow – he said that he had no idea of the sexual meaning of the word “fuck” until he was well into his teens, but had used it constantly more or less from the time he first learned to talk.
There was a similar cross-cultural misunderstanding in connection with Ken Loach’s film Sweet Sixteen, given an 18 certificate (the equivalent of an NC-17 rating) for excessive swearing. Loach had been given 18s before, but he expected them for things like Ladybird, Ladybird and its unflinching depictions of domestic violence – but this took him completely by surprised as Sweet Sixteen had been partly aimed at Scottish teenagers like the film’s protagonist. In the end, some Scottish local authorities downgraded the rating to a 15, though it remained banned to under-18s in most of the rest of the UK.
I remember that particular Booker debate. It was pretty damn funny, for a Scot who was living in London at the time.
“Changes the meaning a bit, doesn’t it?”
Not really. With or without the ellipsis, it still shift the responsibility onto the victims. The sentence removed acknowledge that the rapists are still the bad guys, which the least you can expect in a debate about rape, not a big concession.
“Moreover, I don’t think this isn’t Charlotte Allen’s core message. Even if this point falls, it’s still rather hypercritical to say encourage folks to dress in a titillating manner for the StlutWalks, but then turn around and and discourage the same dress for Halloween.”
As it as already been said, feminism is not about saying women what they have to do but about saying them what they DON’T have to do. So “women should have other costum options that sexy-whatever” “women who dress/behave as “sluts” should be respected” “Rape isn’t about the clothes the victim wear, so stop shaming us” (btw, it’s called slut walk, but that doesn’t mean you have to come dressed as a stripper. You can, but not all do. Especially in cold places.)
Feminists are usually pro-choice. And not only about pregnancies.
Charlotte Allen is a fucking moron. The Feministing bit she quotes isn’t telling women to “cover up” for Halloween. The main feminist point for both the Slut Walk and Halloween is that women deserve to be treated like the people they are rather than reduced to their body parts. Go to any Halloween costume website and you’ll see that 99% of the female costumes are as ridiculous as the female outfits in any comic book or video game. You have the choice of going as a sexy nun, a sexy Indian princess, a sexy devil, a sexy ghost, ad nauseum. Jessica is pointing out that it’s easy to put together your own costume, something clever and something that interests you….that it’s about YOU.
As for the Slut Walks, fuck Charlotte Allen and her scare quotes. Our supposed “rape culture” that “blames the victim?” Her entire fucking column is about what women do to provoke sexual assault. THAT is precisely the point that feminists make on this issue!! Everything is about what women have to do to stop rape. When the FUCK are we going to start talking about what men need to do to stop rape?
I don’t know why the idea that feminists believe women should have the choice to dress sexy, but also the choice to not dress sexy, seems to raise so many eyebrows. It’s only confusing if you assume feminists are in the business of limiting women’s freedom of choice.
CassandraSays:
Regional variation is a feature of all human language. In fact, one strange quality of English is that there is basically one main dialect throughout all of Canada (except Newfoundland) and some Northern areas of the states, and it is odd to not have some distinguishable speech communities in an area so large. The More You Know!
“Of course some Scottish slang is actually Gaelic, ie the words make no sense to non-Scots because they aren’t English words at all.”
We got some of those too e.g. craic (pronounced “crack”) meaning fun. We mock misogynists for the craic =D
“It’s only confusing if you assume feminists are in the business of limiting women’s freedom of choice.”
My assumption with more extreme feminists is that they think a woman is objectifying herself by dressing slutty, that we are catering to what men want to see us as.
Regarding the Black women and Slutwalk issue (as a White chick understands it, so take it with a grain of salt): Firstly, there are all the stereotypes of Black women being hypersexualized, sexually aggressive, wild in bed, etc. Their bodies also often tend to be seen as public property at least twice over: once for being a woman, and once for being Black. So they’re likely to get raped and/or sexually harassed for existing in public in a brown and perceptibly female body regardless of what they wear and are victim-blamed because of racist stereotypes, making the clothing-centric-ness of Slutwalk ring a bit hollow for them. And while White women have managed to advance their social standing to the point where “slut” is a safe enough word to take back, it’s still too loaded for many Black folks to want to take on.
But again, grain of salt! I’m mainly just trying to parrot a patchwork of what I’ve picked up.
Dammit, I proofread, but some stuff still came across a little unclear. Add “promiscuous” before “etc.” and “; essentially stereotypically slutty no matter their clothing.” to the end of the first sentence.
lol, culture differences? I’m Irish*!” any time she acts like an ass on account of her privilege.
*she freaking grew up in Boston. -_-
AHHHHH I’m from Boston and I hate when people use things about the Irish once being oppressed as reasons that other groups are being too sensitive about things. like one guy told me “go ahead and call me a Mick, I don’t care”. I’m like yes but that doesn’t happen and is so different! I told them I’m going to start a rock band celebrating my jewish-woman heritage where we sing traditional yiddish songs and see if that goes over as big as a band like Dropkick Murphys haha. People don’t use the Irish thing often, but I have heard it a few times and I’m like “stfu!!!!”