Holly has just knocked another one out of the park re. the imputed "intention" of SlutWalk to somehow recruit "sluts."

[Q] Are you encouraging women to act like sluts?

[A] Nope! We're just saying it's an acceptable option.

Lots of people at the Slutwalk were dressed very modestly, and I personally know that some of them were monogamous or celibate. Absolutely nobody was telling these people that they needed to be sluttier to fit in. Slutwalk is not an event to recruit sluts, but to defend sluts.

Source: The Pervocracy

And that's not, incidentally, to defend sluts from rapists (it's about defending everybody from rapists. Instead its to defend against the idea, again somehow shared by rapists, law enforcement, the general public, and and anti-SlutWalkers, that if someone actually happens to be a "slut" then she's got it coming to her because men are either a) unable to control their animal natures or else b) socially sanctioned enforcers of the bogus Two Rules of Desire and don't you forget it.

[Q] What is the message of Slutwalk?

[A] The message of Slutwalk is that SOMEONE BEING A SLUT DOES NOT EXCUSE SHAMING, HARASSMENT, OR SEXUAL ASSAULT.

In other words, if you see someone looking or acting like oh my god such a slut, you let her go on her merry way. You have no more right to abuse, mock, harass, or assault her than you do any other person. And if a slut is abused or assaulted, she did not want it and did not deserve it, and the people victimizing her are every bit as guilty as if they did it to a non-slut.

And meanwhile, there's the issue of what the fuck exactly does it mean to "dress like a slut" in the first place? (Emphasis mine)

[Q] But isn't it safer for women to dress modestly?

[A] Yeah. That's the problem.

Actually, there aren't any statistics on clothing and sexual assault, but there doesn't seem to be much connection. Sexual assault isn't a matter of "she aroused me so much I just couldn't stand it;" it's an act of deliberate violence. The majority of assaults are committed by people who already know the victims. Often the assaults take place at home. Speaking anecdotally from three years of experience as an EMT and an ER worker, most of the sexual assault victims I've seen were wearing jeans, sweatpants, pajamas, even hijab. (Or little footie pajamas with Elmo on them.)

It's that last little bit that keeps me coming back, and back, and back to this topic.

There's more though. And you really should to go read the rest of her post (actually if you're not already then you should immediately subscribe to Holly's RSS feed. In fact if you've only got time to read one blog a day maybe you should stop reading this one and go read her. And I don't say that lightly.)

But one of the points Holly keeps coming back to over and over is the near-uniform failure to distinguish the intense loathing so many people -- conservatives, liberals, libertines, prudes, feminists, and MRAs alike -- feel for women who look or, worse, act like their definition of a "slut" and the little matter that even if someone does offend you to the core it's still not ok for someone to rape them for you.

Talking Points Memo says

MSNBC announces Ed Schultz's "triumphant return" to the airwaves after all that 'slut' unfortunateness.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Wouldn't it be interesting if progressive and human-potential activists (feminist and otherwise) spent a tenth of the time slamming MSNBC's decision to "triumphantly" reinstate Schultz, who used the word "slut" in it's usual sense, than they've spent slamming the founders and imitators of SlutWalk Toronto, who organized their protests because they deplore use of the word "slut?"

Because Great Sticks of Butter there's a lot of heated opposition to SlutWalk.  And meanwhile, of all things, MSNBC executives have been more publicly demonstrative against Schultz!

And by that I don't mean that MSNBC execs have been all that great shakes.  Just that too many of the people* who might otherwise have sent testy letters to the network have been otherwise distracted.

I mean, not everyone's been thrilled with the name (I'm not thrilled with it) but you know what?  A lot of people have been thrilled by its spontaneous, non-organized emergence from a single online protest into a very wide-spread, frustration-fueled cluster of independent public actions.

For instance via Jill Filipovic, Jessica Valenti has written

[T]he success of SlutWalks does herald a new day in feminist organizing. One when women’s anger begins online but takes to the street, when a local step makes global waves and when one feminist action can spark debate, controversy and activism that will have lasting effects on the movement.

Source: The Washington Post

Yeah, this is definitely important for a lot of reasons.  Almost none of which have anything to do with the name itself.

Could the organizers in Toronto have come up with a title that was less offensive to collar buttoners of left and right? Sure, if they’d formed a committee and made an org chart and focus-grouped it and recruited Significant Board Members from Around the World and waited for the same brigade of professional-left activists and assholes to show up offering logistical support in exchange for including speakers for their laundry list of unrelated outrages that have diluted every other attempted march and demonstration for the last 20 years. And if they’d known or cared their rump outburst of irritation at a specific word uttered by a specific cop in a specific city in Canada was going to spread to 75 cities and counting then they might have done so.

But they didn’t because, um, they were too busy taking direct action against a direct insult by someone who was so “well-intentioned” but wrong he didn’t even know he had his head up his ass.

And dear sweet mother of pearl, that something like that should take off spontaneously? That it should have bypassed a bunch of amen choir members who’s “activism” consists mainly of leaving gotchas in other bloggers comments? Horrors!

I’m not a huge fan of “reclaim the word X” initiatives (almost 40 years after appreciating a friend’s “That’s Mister Faggot to you” button the word “fag” has lost only a little bit of its sting) I appreciate SlutWalk not just because their intention is more about deploring then word than celebrating it. Because, yeah, it’s pretty much always been a slur and in this instance the Toronto cop’s intention was pure unadulterated anticipatory victim-blaming.  But because they're actually doing something!

It's not that it's the first it’s the first spontaneous mass feminist demonstration ever (heh, um, no.)   Instead it’s the first in North America to originate and translate from the internet to civic action.

I mean yes, yes, the 1970s were a wonderful time for women’s marches! I remember hitch-hiking along with friends to rallies between in Boston and D.C. And goodness knows the sacrifices and successes women made 150 years ago, and 100 years ago, and 50 years ago.

But in the last 20 years though? Well, there was the million-women march (ooh, wonderful giant puppets and always good to see those Free Tibet signs!) And there have been some excellent hyper-local Take Back the Night events.  But otherwise? Not so much. Which is why, at least to me, this is so promising. Because, yeah, we really, really do need to see more activism that's not managed, and not arranged by professionals, and not so routine that the press already knows where to setup their cameras.

But as my dad used to say “you can’t steer a parked car.” I think instead of trying to put the brakes on Slutwalk it might be cool to start crowd-sourcing new points for real-world activism. I mean, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to get a rally going before the mainstreamers, t-shirt vendors, and the YSA “volunteers” and PETA demonstrators sign-waivers could set up for the cameras and otherwise get in the way? I say yes. Too many other people are saying no way… because a handful of non-professional organizers were too focused to pick the “right” name.

Who knows?  Maybe Ed Schultz will to a segment knocking SlutWalk.  To make "amends."

$%!#@y

* By which I mean people on the left: since Schultz used the word to label a conservative wingnut the right-wing noise machine was on it instantly.  Which is probably why MSNBC suspended him at all.

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

Jessica of The Imperfect Parent says of the interminable breast/bottle battle

People, get a grip. The bullying that takes place, especially cyberbullying, over how a mother chooses to feed her baby, is nothing short of bullshit. There is nothing wrong with a mother choosing to formula feed.

On the flip side, nobody should give a flying squirrels butt if a mother loves to breastfeed but it's not something that other mothers should be forced to admire either.

Source: The Imperfect Parent

For the record my siblings and I were nursed right through the very pinnacle of formula feeding and the uttermost ebb of breast feeding.  My grandfather and early La Leche League proponent became an activist in direct response to the health differences he noticed between "scientific diet" fed city infants and breast fed infants of poor, often illiterate "hillbillies" in his mixed urban/rural western North Carolina practice.

But even he didn't panic over the differences.  He wrote a book strongly advocating breast feeding, but he also published a number of papers on normal, healthy children's awesomely omnivorous resilience to the extraordinary number of things people through out the ages, throughout different cultures, and even throughout different neighborhoods give them.

The key word there being healthy children.  Until relatively recently the debate over what was then known as "scientific diet," a debate that largely fueled the turn away from breast milk to formula* was fueled by physicians... who, he observed, dealt primarily with unhealthy infants.  Unhealthy infants require special treatment and special diets because they're unhealthy, not because they're infants.  My grandfather said this was an amazingly difficult concept to communicate.

If he were alive today (he'd be in his 130s) he'd almost certainly opine that it's the very resilience of normal children that's kept the bottle/breast controversy rage for nearly a century.

My main point, though, is that because domestic child nutrition has traditionally been the domain of women, and because the debate is literally unwinnable (at least at a granularity of centuries) the controversy provides an enormous, and enormously popular opportunity for further variations of slut-shaming and policing.

* the word formula itself hints at its origins in the "scientific diet" movement. --fl