Our womenfolk are taking to the streets again in an attempt to convince us that they should be allowed to be called sluts without men thinking they might be ‘sluts’.
Our womenfolk are taking to the streets again in an attempt to convince us that they should be allowed to be called sluts without men thinking they might be ‘sluts’. There is a ‘slut walk’ about to take place in London and there have been similar events in India, Canada and the USA. In them, lots of feminists march up and down wearing skimpy and supposedly provocative attire; clothes which I might add, perhaps unchivalrously, do not always suit them.
Normally the idea of thousands of women dressed in thongs and boob tubes and proclaiming themselves to be ‘sluts’ would be a cause for rejoicing, but perhaps not in the case of some of these women. Of course I do not mean this disparagingly: it is every woman’s right to be a munter or a moose, words which, like slut, they may well wish to ‘reclaim’ from the misogynist’s lexicon. I put reclaim in quotation marks in order to cast doubt upon it, by the way.
Many of the women behind this march have said, rather mystifyingly, that they wish to ‘reclaim’ the word slut, as if it once meant ‘strong independent woman in a very real sense’ and men have somehow, over the years, debased it; but of course it didn’t. The word slut has always meant an ‘immoral’ woman, or a prostitute or a slattern. I suppose they could try to reclaim the word immoral, too, mind. Some of the more sensible feminists (the more radical ones, as it happens) think that the slut walk is a very stupid idea indeed and do not wish women to revel in what is, simply put, a long-standing term of misogynistic abuse.
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