This post was written by Agenda intern Andrew Lynes.
Carrie Bradshaw, Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, and Miranda Hobbes – you probably know the four independent, smart, beautiful protagonists of the acclaimed HBO series Sex and the City. The show profiled their lives and mutual friendship as they lived out the experience of modern urban women.
As the title suggests, a key theme throughout was sexuality. The show was willing to explore the topic to a degree previously unseen on television. The characters – especially Samantha – had a lot of sex, and talked about it even more. But there was a difference between having lots of sex and being simply promiscuous – this was sex on their own terms.
Or was it? Professor Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality and one of our guests tonight, doesn’t think so.
In that book, she writes, “The Sex and the City women capitulated to the pornography that invades their sex lives. In their desire to get a man and keep him, they were willing to do anything, even if they felt uncomfortable.”
Carrie Bradshaw herself once asked “Are we simply romantically challenged, or are we sluts?”
Many of the women who took part in a SlutWalk, the topic of our program tonight, don’t see anything wrong with being sexually provocative or having “hookup sex” (as Dines calls it). One of the goals of the SlutWalk is to take ownership of the word “slut,” a word which they argue has always been used to shame women for their sexuality.
Prompted by comments by a representative of the Toronto Police Service who said in a York University campus safety information session that women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized, the SlutWalkers want to stop what they see as victim blaming, an imperative they share with other feminist actions like Take Back the Night, whose mission is to make women safer from the risk of sexual assault.
As the SlutWalk website argues:
“What we want is meaningful dialogue and we are doing something about it: WE ARE COMING TOGETHER. Not only as women, but as people from all gender expressions and orientations, all walks of life, levels of employment and education, all races, ages, abilities, and backgrounds, from all points of [Toronto] and elsewhere.”
Dines, however, writes that there is no way to turn the word “slut” into something positive:
With hookup sex comes, for women and girls, an increased possibility of being labeled a slut -- a term that is used to control and stigmatize female sexual desire and behavior. There is, after all, no male equivalent of a slut since men who are thought to be highly sexually active are called a stud or a player – labels most men would happily take on. What it means to be a “slut” shifts over time, as previous generations of women carried the label just for having sex before marriage. But for all of women’s so-called sexual empowerment today, the effects of being labeled a slut are as devastating now as they were in the past. A study by academics Wendy Walter-Bailey and Jesse Goodman shows that these girls and young women “often resort to self-destructive behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders, self-mutilation, academic withdrawal, or risky sexual conduct.”
Still the SlutWalk movement is spreading from city to city, and across borders. This weekend, a SlutWalk will take place in Boston. There have already been several of these events across Canada, the United States, and around the world.
Tonight we’ll take a closer look at SlutWalks, female sexuality and the power of words.
