Ed posted at Dispatches today about Slut Walk and Vox Day’s reaction to it. My favorite comment of the thread so far, hands down, comes from Eric:

Just as you don’t teach a tiger to stop devouring steak by continuously waving a bloody t-bone in front of it…  He’s not just wrong in comparing men to beasts, he’s wrong in his understanding of beasts. Multiple-fold analogy fail.  Because you do in fact train animals to ignore food by putting food in front of them, then giving them an alternate reward when they succeed in ignoring it. Over time, you can balance a steak on a dog’s nose if you really have the patience to go that far. Though I’m not sure I want to try and analogize that. 🙂

I think I do, actually. The Vox Days of the world are apparently rape-tigers. No, that’s too flattering an image…let’s stick with rape-dogs. And the only way they can learn not to eat the tempting steak/rape the scantily dressed woman in front of them is to be desensitized. So the solution, the way to get them to stop, is by repeated exposure to tempting steaks/scantily clad women. The way to reduce sexual attacks, or at least the belief that sexual attacks are provoked, is to have more women dress like “sluts.” Which is precisely what the Slut Walkers are encouraging.

So congrats, Vox, you actually stumbled onto a viable hypothesis. It’s unfortunate that it happens to be diametrically opposed to what you thought. That’s what happens when you switch the responsibility for rape from victims back onto rapists.

Of course, it’s not actually true that there’s a direct inverse relationship between the amount of clothing women wear in a given society and their personal safety. But it does seem to be the case that in societies where women are free to be more sexually liberated they are also safer, and vice versa. You’d think that would be common sense, wouldn’t you?

“I see cleavage!  Must rape!”

Holy cats. If you have a need to troll for misogynists, apparently there’s no better way than to have a Slut Walk. Articles on the subject appeared in the Guardian and the Daily Mail yesterday, and Dawn Foster found these in the Mail’s comment thread:

If women were a little, just a little, more interesting then men wouldn’t treat them as mere sex objects. But tell me this – If women are NOT sex objects, what exactly is their purpose? To Women, men are nothing than an alternative source of income and to men, women are nothing more than a source of relief so I think women should just accept this fact and get on with it. Also, as a minor point, those so called women in the picture are those that should not worry about being viewed as sex objects, because they most certainly are not. They would turn most men into using their hand for relief, rather than a sex object. – Adam, Sutton Coldfield – UK, 10/5/2011 14:31  …the way some women dress encourages men to have inappropriate thoughts and, for the less principled and disciplined males, inappropriate behaviour often follows those thoughts. If women can’t accept this or don’t/won’t understand it, then they don’t know much about the male species and have no one but themselves to blame when it goes wrong for them. – Reubenene, Somewhere In The World, 10/5/2011 13:13  The one holding the banner sayins ” SEX is something people do together…” must have read it in a book. She can’t possibly be speaking from experience. – Peter, France, 10/5/2011 12:05  Judging from the photos you are all quite safe “ladies”. – Mike Roberts, Stevenage, Herts, 10/5/2011 12:30 

Yes, yes, I know people call it the “Daily Fail” for a reason. It’s sensationalistic, lurid, and often misleading. There was never a celebrity drug problem the Daily Fail didn’t like. But these comments, especially the first one, verge on sociopathic. I’m starting to think it’s axiomatic that in any online discussion about male/female sexual relations, there will inevitably be at least a few men who not only effectively declare themselves to be misogynistic, but also insist that the same is the case for the entirety of the male “species.” I like how Reubenene, while acknowledging that not all men are inspired to rape at the sight of a woman who is dressed in a certain way, attributes the reason for that to “principle and discipline.” As though looking at a woman appreciatively and raping her are on some kind of continuum, and the only difference between an admirer and a rapist is that the admirer stops a bit earlier– rather than attraction and attack being, you know, two rather fundamentally different things.

In response to this, Dawn says:

So we’ve learnt that two stubborn false preconceptions about rape exist: 1) If women don’t modify their behaviour, rape is inevitable, and always their fault. 2) Rape is about physical attractiveness, not power. I’m so bored of hearing people with no concept of what rape is, and how it occurs, argue that rape occurs when one person finds another attractive and the object of desire doesn’t reciprocate. This is patent bullshit – rape is about power, not sex. Inches of column space were spent pondering why the “Night Stalker” in London had raped elderly people, querying why he found them attractive, rather than looking at the fact that he was targeting the vulnerable.

I don’t like the “power, not sex” explanation. Never have. It seems to me that there is already a multiplicity of reasons why rapists rape, and narrowing it down from two to one motivations is working in precisely the wrong direction. I think rape is “about” power and sex, along with a lot of other things, but the insistence that it’s about power only is useful because it makes it easier to assign responsibility for a rape– on the rapist only. Unlike a fist fight outside of a bar that erupts because an argument got too heated, a rape is one-sided in terms of moral responsibility. I don’t think it’s invalid to ask why a rapist might be sexually interested in his/her victim, but to make it all about sexual attraction is missing the point completely. For the purposes of assigning responsibility, a rape is a kind of attack– period.

I do agree with Dawn, however, on this point:

I’m always amazed men aren’t more furious at the way the rape problem is framed. If women dress “provocatively” and are likely to be raped as a result that means you men must, if you see an attractive enough woman, feel the urge to rape. You are so unable to control yourselves, that essentially you are purely animal, you are a baser human than women. Do you honestly feel like this? At any point in your life, have you been walking home, and thought “Gosh, I’d really like to rape her”. Because that is what these kind of stories and comments are claiming. 

Exactly. Comparing women to meat being dangled in front of the cages of predators is the road to putting all of us– well, all of us women— in burqas. It’s a sexual heckler’s veto. We might as well just cover ourselves completely and call it a day, because men can’t be expected to control themselves within sight of a women who is sufficiently uncovered (all existing evidence which takes place nightly in clubs and bars across the world to the contrary). It couldn’t be at all possible that the urge to brand women as “sluts” if they dress a certain way and tell them to cover up if they don’t want to get raped stems from the very same thinking (that “slutty” dressed women deserve to be raped, or at least it doesn’t matter much if it happens) that causes rape in the first place. Nope, not at all.

I wonder how many rapes take place in nudist colonies.

I find it difficult to imagine how someone could read this without being creeped out by the author rather than the subject of his own disturbance:

I saw someone at the airport the other day who really caught my eye.  Her beautiful, long blond hair was braided back a la Bo Derek in the movie “10” (or for the younger set, Christina Aguilera during her “Xtina” phase). Her lips were pink and shiny from the gloss, and her earrings dangled playfully from her lobes.  You can tell she had been vacationing somewhere warm, because you could see her deep tan around her midriff thanks to the halter top and the tight sweatpants that rested just a little low on her waist. The icing on the cake? The word “Juicy” was written on her backside.  Yeah, that 8-year-old girl was something to see alright [sic] … I hope her parents are proud. Their daughter was the sexiest girl in the terminal, and she’s not even in middle school yet.

This is a CNN columnist, LZ Granderson, attempting to shame parents for the fact that he looked at their prepubescent daughter and found her sexually attractive. Oh wait, he didn’t find her sexually attractive…he’s just pointing out that some other adult might, and therefore they shouldn’t dress their daughter like a “tramp.” That’s the take-home lesson– it is the responsibility of parents not to allow their daughters to dress in a way that connotes sexual attractiveness in adults, because…adults apparently can’t handle themselves? The sight of an eight-year-old’s midriff is just too much to take? Really?

Strange how uncannily that sounds like the comments that residents of Cleveland, Texas made only recently about an 11-year-old girl who was gang-raped: “she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.” Ergo, we can dance right up to the edge of saying She was asking to be raped, that little whore without actually doing so.

Hypothesis: The general resistance to the idea of young girls dressing “sexy” is almost entirely an attempt to protect adults, not children. And it is done by transferring the blame of adults finding themselves attracted to children, to the children themselves and to their parents. Don’t dress in a way that might cause me to look at you inappropriately, little girl, and I (probably) won’t. But if you do and I do, it’s your fault. That’s how we get a grown man reacting with horror to the fact that a little girl is dressed in a way that almost certainly isn’t remotely sexual to her. She thinks she looks pretty and is dressed comfortably. That’s it.

The column goes on:

Abercrombie & Fitch came under fire this spring for introducing the “Ashley,” a push-up bra for girls who normally are too young to have anything to push up. Originally it was marketed for girls as young as 7, but after public outcry, it raised its intended audience to the wise old age of 12. I wonder how do people initiate a conversation in the office about the undeveloped chest of elementary school girls without someone nearby thinking they’re pedophiles?

Answer: they don’t. Someone like you will always think it, without any sense of irony.

The way I see it, my son can go to therapy later if my strict rules have scarred him. But I have peace knowing he’ll be able to afford therapy as an adult because I didn’t allow him to wear or do whatever he wanted as a kid.

Maybe I’m a Tiger Dad.

Maybe I should mind my own business.

Or maybe I’m just a concerned parent worried about little girls like the one I saw at the airport.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls issued a report linking early sexualization with three of the most common mental-health problems of girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression. There’s nothing inherently wrong with parents wanting to appease their daughters by buying them the latest fashions. But is getting cool points today worth the harm dressing little girls like prostitutes could cause tomorrow?

1. You can suggest that certain things are for adults but not children without suggesting that they are nasty, tawdry, or otherwise disreputable.  A high-end prostitute (not that there’s anything wrong with being one) dresses similarly to any other attractive well-to-do woman going out on a date. There is no guaranteed way to distinguish between the two.
2. If you’re concerned about your daughter becoming a low-end prostitute, a street walker (my mother’s favorite term for what I was emulating when my skirt was a bit high or shirt too tight for her liking), her apparel is probably the last thing that should dominate your attention. Try focusing on her grades. Or her general sense of well-being. A good way to prevent other people from defining your daughter by her appearance is not to do so yourself, don’t you think?
3. An eight-year-old only understands that there is something wrong with going topless because her parents tell her so. And there is nothing inherently wrong with going topless; it’s simply a social convention. Sooner or later every woman– every human being, if they have a spark of intellect and creativity– will come to challenge social conventions, and it doesn’t mean he or she is less of a person. Quite the opposite, actually.