“You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here,” Michael Sanguinetti said: “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”
And from that statement, an international protest movement was launched.
A sign typical of the sentiment behind slut walk protests reads:
“Who should we blame for rape? Sluts rapists fixed that for you”
Another, shaped like a cocktail dress reads:
“This is not an invitation to violence”
These signs illustrate an interpreted meaning behind Constable Sanguinetti’s words. That meaning being something like: “female victims of crime are to blame for their own victimization,” or in more extreme terms: “rape victims are asking for it if they dress provocatively”.
Other signage visible at multiple slut-walks states “don’t tell me how to dress, tell men not to rape,” and the ubiquitous “Not asking for it,” which implies that the Canadian cop, addressing only 10 people, meant – if you get raped, you were asking for it.
That is one interpretation of constable Sanguinetti’s statement and a very convenient interpretation for anyone wishing to exercise moral outrage.
Another interpretation of his words: “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” is that women should take some personal responsibility for their own safety, just as every other adult must do, even in a city with low crime rates and a strong, well organized, and trained municipal police force. One clumsily worded statement by a cop, speaking informally to 10 people – with multiple possible interpretations.
One of those interpretations being “Women dressed in short skirts deserve it if they’re raped,” and another interpretation being “Women, like other adults, should take some personal responsibility for their own safety.”
One of these interpretations is absurd. The victims of crimes are not to blame for their own victimization. One of these interpretations is reasonable and logical – women, like other adults, should take some personal responsibility for their own safety.
Sanguinetti did not say “just wear coveralls, so we don’t need a police force, or municipal street lights, or courts.” But something like that appears to be the reading given to his statement, badly worded as it was that: “Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”
I don’t buy it. I do not believe that anyone, not even the protesters marching at slut-walks, actually think Michael Sanguinetti meant “you are to blame if you get raped.” I think every adult man and woman at a slut walk understood his statement to mean “Women should take some personal responsibility for their own safety.”
The outrage, the chanting, the poster-board signs, the thousands of marching women – and their fawning fan-boy “I love sluts” male cheerleaders all understand that the interpretation of Sanguinetti’s words driving the slut walk movement; that “sluts deserve to be raped,” is fabricated false outrage.
What if Constable Micheal Sanguinetti had actually said, and meant the words “Women dressing provocatively, who are subsequently raped, deserve it.”?
What if he said that, in those words? One cop, in the Canadian city of Toronto, addressing a crowd of 10. What if he had said exactly: “Women dressing provocatively, who are subsequently raped, deserve it.”?
He might have been fired, or placed on administrative leave and required to take some kind of awareness training. But let us compare that insensitive statement – which we must remember is only one possible interpretation of Sanguinetti’s meaning – let us compare that to what else cops in large cities get up to. Sometimes they shoot unarmed civilians. Sometimes they beat people to a bloody pulp in the course of making an arrest. Sometimes they detain and harass law abiding citizens based only on ethnicity or skin color. These offences are many orders of magnitude worse than the worst possible meaning we can assign to Sanguinetti’s statement and these cops not only keep their jobs, they don’t, or rarely, even spawn protest marches in their own cities.
For that matter – there is no international protest movement against the United States’ legalization of the fiat murder of American citizens. There is no international protest movement against Israel’s continued blockade of water, food, and international aid to Palestine. There is no international protest movement against the continued illegal American occupation and brutalization of Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no protest against the newly legislated powers of the United States government to send its own citizens to Guantanamo Bay indefinitely, without trial. No international protest movements for these things. But a single Canadian Cop says something that might be interpreted badly against women, and we have an international protest movement for that?
The outrage behind slut walk is false. The purpose of this international protest movement is not to end “victim blaming” or reclaim the word “slut”.
The real reason for slut walk is that women must never be criticized – ever, and the international show of force is a reminder to men, to know their correct station. Women are victims, men are predators, and we must never be allowed to deviate from that narrative.
The slut walk movement is a show of force to shame men, and preserve the culture; preserve the cultural narrative of universal and identity based female victimhood.
The gist is that by virtue of being female, every owner of ovaries is, at the level of their identity, a victim. When we are told we must never blame victims, this is a sort of code.
Victims, particularly female victims, are afforded a sort of elevated status within our culture. Now this serves some legitimate purpose when the victimhood is specific, such as an individual being subject to a violent crime – including rape. However, when this victimhood is attached to feminine identity – in the women=victim and man=predator conceptual model of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, then it has a different purpose. It makes women into children, to be protected, sheltered, given succor, but most especially, carefully separated from the personal accountability we associate with full adulthood. Infantalization and victim identification of half the population gives them, as individuals, some pretty impressive social power, but it also strips their individual volition and adulthood and is toxic to them as individuals and society as a whole.
