The Metropolis

The London SlutWalk - awful name, but it was worth it

Mike Pollitt | Monday 13 June, 2011 13:45

Interesting to see the internet react to the SlutWalk.

Liz Jones, who normally writes offensive tripe for The Mail, sees it as the preserve of the confident middle class in a column which relies heavily on classic Mail stereotyping but is more constructive than the usual twaddle:

We all know rape is bad, don’t we? But the other women, the working-class women who have only been taught to shop till they drop will, if not be raped, put up with low-paid jobs and expectations, domestic abuse, bad relationships, debt.

Because what these women are lacking is self-belief, a quality the slut walkers have in droves. There is no sisterhood between these two groups, none.

Tanya Gold had a good write up of the Newcastle walk in The Guardian last week, and is not alone in being a bit troubled by the name:

I feel stupid attempting to ask a woman on a SlutWalk who wants to reclaim the word slut how she feels when she is actually called a slut. It is still not a word that I like by itself. But at least it isn’t Bunny.

The whole column is worth a read because she gets to what the walk is really about, which is not words, but rape. And that’s the point drilled home by Rikki at Indymedia in the best write up I’ve come across yet:

All controversy aside, the trafalgar square speeches, from organisers and invitees, kept returning to a simple single-issue point to be made, and ‘slutwalk’ might be strongest and least divisive if it continues to be clear about that one issue.

I thought it was best summed up by one speaker who invited us to imagine the case of a man appearing in the witness stand after being the victim of a rape where some penis-like object had been shoved up his arse. the first question he is asked by the sympathetic judge is “can you describe what you were wearing at the time?”.

This walk was about rape, and about challenging attitudes to rape which persist despite the great advances in equality over recent decades. On those terms, despite the ridiculous notion of reclaiming a word which has never been anything other than perjorative, the SlutWalk was a success.

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