Slut Walk

by Sabrina

This weekend, the city where I live is going to have its very own “SlutWalk” (if you aren’t aware of this movement which hopes to assert or remind people that a woman, no matter how she dresses, should be safe from physical or sexual assault, you can read about it here. 

I’ve known about this movement for awhile, and while I support the goals, the name makes me cringe every time I read it.  “Slut.” I’ve read the assertion that these walks are going to help women take back the word. Personally, I’d rather not take it back. And using it in the context of a march asserting a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her sexuality is beyond ridiculous to me.

At its core, slut is a demeaning term which reduces a woman to an object that doesn’t need to be treated like a person, an object who no longer has the same presumed rights to decide what she does with her body. It is also implies that the value of a woman is closely tied to her sexual inexperience. 

Calling a woman a “slut” isn’t simply saying she is a woman who enjoys sex, is open with her sexuality or who may in fact be promiscuous. It is taking choices she has made at one moment in her life and reducing her permanently to those choices. As a feminist, I support a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her sexuality. Sure, some of those decisions might be healthier or less regrettable in the long run than others, but unless she puts her life in danger, they shouldn’t define her. Most importantly, the right to make a decisions about your body isn’t a one-time thing. A woman can make the decision to fool around with a random guy at a party one night and the next week decide that she wants to be more reserved.

What perhaps bothers me most about the term is the fact that it’s most commonly bandied about in regards to young women, teenagers and college students. At a time when young women most need support, while they try to negotiate changing bodies, surging hormone and try to figure out relationships and their place in the world. When I thought about writing this, I imagined overhearing my son calling a girl a slut (he’s only a year now, so at this point I’m not too worried about it). I remember the term being used alot in high school, sometime even in reference to girls who wouldn’t put out. A guy I was friends with told me at one point that the theory was a girl would be more likely to “give in” to a guy if everyone already thought she had. It depresses me to realize how right he was. Girls were probably as likely as guys, if not more likely, to use that term to hurt and demoralize someone they had a problem with.

So instead of taking the word back, let’s just bury it.  Let’s work every day to define violence against women (or men) as indefensible, and let’s work so girls and young women grow up feeling empowered to make the right decisions for themselves and to know that if the decisions they have made start to feel wrong, they are always free to change course.