Editor’s note: This is in response to Anthony Damron’s letter “Victimization of women is systematic in rape culture,” published in Friday’s Daily Lobo
Editor,
Damron, like your letter, SlutWalk promotes a paradigm whereby every male is inherently suspect. In contrast, effective prevention would require cognizance of injustices that have no recognizable solution or perpetrator, i.e., that women are generally more vulnerable than men, a physical reality that no amount of agitprop will change. Further indignation over a crime all decent people already oppose won’t dissuade someone who isn’t already dissuaded by the prospect of a decade behind bars. What will? Bear mace, perhaps. More realistically: basic precautions, like a buddy system and designated sober friends on a night out, or not letting someone you feel wary of buy you a drink.
Does that place even one iota of responsibility on women? Of course, but that’s distinct from victim blaming, not least because we’re talking about people who are far less likely to be victimized in the first place if we agree to realign the conversation this way. If we take the SlutWalk message to its logical limit, even women’s self-defense classes are asking too much of women, unless women are doing the asking. What about male friends and relatives? I call discrimination.
And your well-intended solidarity is condescending. Seriously, who still thinks that men are in full control of reproductive rights? Of the advertising industry? Women are full partners in the marketing of sexuality, theirs as well as men’s. And if I knocked up my girlfriend, I would have absolutely no say in whether a child sees daylight, nor would I expect to. So let’s readjust this discourse to present realities.
The concept of innate guilt is primitive and beneath us both, and you don’t deserve to feel beholden to declaim yours or anybody else’s. My letter contained none of your pronouncements regarding women’s rights, because they’re inarguable, not because I disagree with them. But there is a far more urgent issue at stake here: doing something practical to prevent rape, as opposed to merely talking. The bulk of your movement’s emphasis is on expressing moral opprobrium and stoking a sense of righteous victimhood. While those sentiments have their rightful places, in the case of SlutWalk, this approach is not only detrimental to prevention, it disempowers women.
You say that the purpose of SlutWalk “is not to discuss who trash talks whom.” Actually, SlutWalk was initiated in Canada in 2011 in reaction to a Toronto police spokesman who, when asked what women could do to prevent rape, uttered the horridly obtuse admonishment: “Don’t dress like sluts.” So from its inception, SlutWalk has been heavily focused on who is talking trash about whom — an entirely relevant issue in this context. Yet the objection you level against my comments is that I pointed out the female role in denigrating women’s fashion choices. This is highly revealing — no pun intended — and of a piece with your claim that I “understood the message (of SlutWalk) yet looked for a way to denounce (my) part” in rape culture. I’m actually denying that I have any role in it.
Aaron Cress
UNM student
