Photo via Facebook from, I think, the Vancouver Sun.

Hugo Schwyzer says in support of the recent "slut walk" protest in Toronto. The emphasis is his but I heartily endorse it.

There are so many things that trouble me about the obsession with regulating women’s bodies. But as a man, I am particularly exasperated at the assumption that lies beneath the insistence on modesty: the myth that men cannot control themselves. As feminists often point out, the real “man-haters” are those who promote modest dress for women out of the belief that men lack self-control. There is nothing more contemptuous than the suggestion that those of us with penises and Y chromosomes are prisoners of our biology, liable to rape or commit infidelity at the first sign of cleavage. The myth of male weakness sells us woefully, heartbreakingly short.

...

SlutWalkers believe in men’s capacity to do two things at once: be aroused by what we see while honoring the humanity of the woman whose body attracts our eye. The most pernicious of all lies about men is that because of our make-up, lust and empathy can’t coexist within us. If you want kind and compassionate men who will respect women’s boundaries, the myth suggests, those women will have to conceal the parts of themselves that will turn men bestial and irresponsible.

We present women with a brutal binary: hide your sexuality and be respected; show your sexuality and be slut-shamed, harassed, or worse. But if ever there were a false dichotomy, rooted in ignorance about male identity, male biology, and male potential, this is it. While none of us want to live in a culture where women are compelled to display those parts of themselves they’d like to keep private, none of us should settle for living in a society where women are compelled to conceal those parts of themselves they’d occasionally like to display.

Source: Hugo Schwyzer

And I'd just add that the man-hating, slut-shaming meme isn't even about protecting women from all men (as a few feminists and most anti-feminists believe.)  Because research from the anecdotal to the latitudinal suggests that only a very small number of men commit the vast majority of sexual assaults.  So the message in the photo, to tell men not to rape, isn't a hopeless pie-in-the-sky recommendation: it's actually quite specific. And, I might add, a very much more-solid policy recommendation that telling all women to remain cloistered in the vestments of nuns, lest all men assault them.

Image suggestion via reader DA