On Saturday June 30, the sluts in Vancouver marched. In the second year of the international slut walk movement, I attended the event held in my city, armed with a list of questions, a camera, a recorder, and a fellow MRA to watch my back. Recalling the naked and forceful hatred of the first such event I’d attended the previous year, I half expected to be jumped from behind by white knights, eager to show their feminist superiors how loyal they were to the holy doctrine. What I found at the 2012 Vancouver slut walk was just a tiny bit underwhelming.
To be fair, partial blame for the diminished crowd almost certainly belonged to Vancouver’s weather. However, a turn-out of 1/8 of the previous year’s crowd can’t be blamed entirely on dampening of spirits from a bit of rain. West coast wet weather cannot entirely account for not only the low turn out, but a substantial shift in the tone of this city’s second slut walk. Gone were the hundreds of identical, professionally made picket signs, all lettered in the same handwriting “teach men to not rape”. In fact, there were precious few signs at all, and those few in evidence were hand-made, hanging from yarn around the necks of a small fraction of the attending slut-walkers. The T-shirt uniformed volunteer brigade of the previous year, showing the colours of the Vancouver rape relief shelters were similarly absent. This year, the few visible event organizers were identifiable by orange arm-bands. Also, at the steps of Vancouver’s downtown art gallery, an array of posters presented the previous year, this time took the somewhat down-scale format of hand-written slogans on brown corrugated cardboard. Oh dear.
However, livening up this year’s slut walk were a number of highly enthusiastic participants, dressed in brightly neon coloured work-out gear . Unfortunately for the slut-walkers, these gentlemen and ladies, who managed to upstage just about everybody else were not a part of the slut walk. They were staging their own physical fitness-related event, a dance-off. Apparently unaware, and uninterested in politically motivated public sluttery, the costumed gentlemen of the dance party showed off their own buff backsides to the visible entertainment of photographers and other attendees.
In spite of the reduced crowd, I managed to ask a few questions. What I learned was that this event is, regardless of it’s dialled down size and vitriol, about deferment of responsibility for safety in public. A group of 4 sisters in their late 20’s, chaperoned by their 60 year old mother finally after much double-talk admitted that their goal was a world in which women could go anywhere, do anything, clothed or unclothed, drunk or sober, in perfect expectation of safety. I pointed out that nobody can do this, and the real world doesn’t work like that. They reluctantly agreed, but were insistent that it should.
However, even this expressed goal of an idyllic fantasy world was difficult to obtain as an answer, because the hovering 60 year old mother did her level best to re-characterize my carefully neutral questions into violent and hateful accusations.
Although I philosophically oppose a movement I see as socially corrosive, the goal of my questions really was to discover the opinions of slut walk attendees, and conversing with civility through the hate-flavoured filter of a chaperone dressed as a 19th century prostitute challenged my self discipline.
Another attendee explained, when asked that the word slut was being re-claimed. Her home-made sign made economical use of just the single word: “slut” Normally a rude question, I asked for a definition, she eventually claimed “sexually liberated woman”. I did not tax her to explain what that buzz-phrase meant, as she seemed to have been tired out by my first question.
She did claim that the usual sexual dynamic of men competing for female attention, and women selecting from competitors didn’t exist, and that a woman with many sexual partners was in fact an accomplished seducer in exactly the same way a man with many sexual partners was. I did not bother questioning this view, but I do have the bad habit of letting doubt show on my face.
There were also several public speakers, one of whom was a former prostitute who made several interesting admissions. First among these was the claim that she’d had more than 20,000 penises inserted into her various bodily orifices. Immediately following this claim was the admission that she’d done this “because [she] was utterly filled with hatred”.
Between these two claims, I cannot help my own observation that it is such possession by hatred, and not a numerically prodigious count of penises that would motivate responsible avoidance of any individual, whether as an acquaintance or as a sexual service provider. However, for the attending crowd, both 20-thousand cocks, as well as the claim of consuming hatred both merited applause.
This speaker also talked in disparaging tones of a woman who had once fired her from a child care position, because she had slapped the 6 year old boy she was charged to care for. The reason for the firing (physical abuse of a toddler) was given in a tone of sneering contempt, with no apparent recognition that violence against a child is indefensible behavior – particularly for an adult paid to care for that child.
None of the slut-walk attendees in the audience commented, although one of the neon-clad dance party attendees shouted the obvious from off-stage: “well you shouldn’t have slapped the kid”.
Another speaker, this one in her 30’s, and not a former sex worker followed with a lengthy declaration that nobody should ever be judged based on their appearance or attire. She meant of course, that women using their clothing to command sexual attention should be able to select whose attracted attention is valid, and whose is not. Nobody pointed out that male attire is a principal metric women use to determine whose attentions are welcome or unwelcome. By this point in the event, I’d had enough to being told obvious falsehoods, and of listening to reality denial from grown-up toddlers.
However, the slut walk movement does appear to have dialled down the most obvious and blatant of it’s anti-male hatred. Media attention since the 2011 inception of this coordinated exercise in public shame and coercion has sucked some of the steam out of this engine of hate. If slut walk still exists next year, It will only do so if the movement substantially re-defines itself. The naked hatred has worn so thin, that even most slut-walkers are apparently backing away from the movement.
