Feminism Vs Sl*twalk

It’s been a while. Hi.

I imagine you are already aware of the current phenomenon known as Slutwalk, but if not, allow me to give you a little summary.

In January this year, a Toronto police officer advised a group of students that to evade rape, they should “avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” The students in question were so enraged, that they staged a protest, taking to the city’s streets in ‘slutty’ outfits. What then followed was a wave of ‘Slutwalks’ across North America, Australia, and most recently, the UK.  Performed not only in solidarity with the original cause, but also in protest against the usage of the term ‘slut’, and the pervading mentality that shames and blames rape victims.

This story caught my attention from the outset for a variety of reasons: the excitement of seeing women self-organise out of anger and frustration, the seemingly organic manner in which Slutwalk caught the imagination of women across different nationalities, and, of course, the implicit possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, feminism hadn’t become a totally irrelevant political stance – that women could still pool their creative energies and react with palpable ferocity against oppression. Perhaps for me, my own yearning for second wave sisterhood danced before my eyes. But as I read more blog posts and articles, saw more photos, watched more videos, I started to wonder, what is Slutwalk actually challenging?

Chicago Sluts

This thought crystallised in my mind while reading an article by The Daily Mail, which initially supported Slut Walk. To the right of the articles headline, which read “Yes means yes and no means no! Scantily-clad protestors join in ‘Slut Walk’ to end rape victim blaming”, are the Daily Mail’s other ‘Femail’ articles, and the one that caught my eye detailed how a particular exotic fruit had the same shape and level of ripeness as Pippa Middleton’s bum (including, of course, a photo of said bum, as Pippa leant over). The juxtaposition of the two, seemingly incompatible, articles astonished me at first, before I realised how, ultimately, they reflected each other. The reason Slutwalk has received so much wide spread coverage is that it enables the media to apparently support women’s struggle against rape in a manner that belies any other wider cultural context or sense of responsibility. Much like the commonsensical notion that rapists are abominations to society, aberrations as opposed to fathers, brothers, workers and leaders, Slutwalk manages to keep its rebellion well within the confines of capitalist ideology.

To my mind, Slutwalk seems to adhere to a major philosophical point, one that also informed Third Wave Feminism, namely that feminism is primarily about choice: the choice to wear heels and lipstick, the choice to be the primary bread winner, the choice to stay home and raise children. Under this approach, all female choices become by their nature feminist, with the only necessary premise being that they are chosen by a woman. And so, Slutwalk cries out, ‘We CHOOSE to dress as sluts! The choice is ours and we are empowered by it!’

UK Sluts

Of course, the major flaw of this perspective is that you are choosing between options that have been preordained for you, choices between limited and limiting social identities. The manner in which ‘sluttiness’ is performed within these walks is a sad echo of how we are taught to exhibit our sexuality. Confined between virgin or whore, we seize upon ‘whore’ because it is a marginally broader role to occupy than Madonna. But that doesn’t prevent it from being an expression of our own constraints. Of course we should be able to dress how we want without the fear of sexual abuse, but why should we settle for the binary position of slut when it is fundamentally just another female archetype; moreover, one that is used within a patriarchal society? I understand that reclaiming words can be an empowering experience within marginalised communities. However, Slutwalk goes beyond the reclaiming of a word, becoming, as it does, the embracement of an age-old masculine projection of what it is to be a sexual woman.

Titillating, playful, a bit ‘girl power’-esque, Slutwalk is a true product of feminism’s desire to go mainstream.

Not that there is essentially anything wrong with trying to extract feminism from its own ghettoization. Feminism should – no, must – be aware of its own subcultural nature, its tendency towards ‘more feminist than thou’ attitudes, and its history of a white, middle class focus. The problems come when, in reaction to our failings, we climb into bed with the powers that directly contribute to our own oppression.

The media can be used and manipulated successfully to express ideas and actions that run contrary to its own interests. But it’s a dangerous game. By simplifying its message to one of ‘slutty and proud’, to gain media attention, Slut Walk has ultimately done itself a disservice. The original, impressive act of women reacting against a powerful sexist attitude has become lost. At the best, articles supported the idea that women should not be blamed for their own rape, regardless of their attire. At the worst, it became an excuse to show angry girls in hot pants using a provocative word: the act of ogling female flesh done under the guise of documentation, and in some cases, reason enough to wheel out ‘political correctness gone mad!’ or ‘Those pesky feminists!’.  Press reaction has been huge, criticism and support coming from a variety of sources. But the unifying message behind all responses being of course rape is bad ladies. Irregardless of whether the press piece sees Slutwalk as demonstrative of the demise of womanhood, or a reassertion of feminist politics, it has been a spring board for media outlets to present themselves to women as representing their interests. Stimultaneously, the isolated nature of Slutwalks political scope, has allowed them to continue to perpetuate images and attitudes that contribute to a culture that fosters horrifying levels of sexual abuse against women. It doesn’t offer any sort of critique of a society that teaches men to be aggressors, penetrators, conquerors, nor does it combat the images of dead-eyed, sticky-mouthed women that are supposed to represent the female experiences of desire. We are left with empty readings of rape, and ultimately irrelevant ponderings surrounding the semantics of ‘slut’.

Sao Paulo Sluts.

Yet the Slutwalk train speeds on, with new protests springing up all the time, the latest across South America and India. For all its faults, Slutwalk has caught the imagination of women on a global scale, and it has shown that we will fight for our voices to be heard.  These calls for freedom from violence are real, and they are here. Whether Slutwalk indicates the shaky firsts steps of an emerging movement built from these voices, or a one-off parade of sensationalism, is yet to be seen.

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Posted in Culture, Feminism, Social Theory | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

TV-B-Gone

Check out this jacket recently seen at the CES fashion show. Stylish, warm.

 

Let’s just try zipping it up here…

OH POW!

All television sets in range have now mysteriously been turned off. What a super power!

Especially pertinent after all the bollocks TV I witnessed over the Christmas period. (Mad Men, Doctor Who and Misfits are all excluded from said judgement.) As seen on Flickr Continue reading

Posted in Fashion, Technology | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 8,200 times in 2010. That’s about 20 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 36 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 22mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 2nd with 3,008 views. The most popular post that day was What Happens If We Leave?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were wordpress.com, facebook.com, 1x.com, twitter.com, and WordPress Dashboard.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for what happens if we leave afghanistan, anna clover, time what happens if we leave, what happens if we leave, and disfigured afghan girl.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

What Happens If We Leave? August 2010
170 comments and 34 Likes on WordPress.com

2

Graffiti Project May 2010

3

Graffiti-me May 2010
4 comments and 3 Likes on WordPress.com

4

Whovian Hall July 2010
1 comment

5

In defence of the hipster – cos being a dickheads hard. November 2010
3 comments

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“But tell me! What are the 39 Steps??”

Portrait posed for Jon Cartwright – you should check out his stuff ‘cos it’s got pictures of me in it. And also, he’s pretty good.

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In defence of the hipster – cos being a d*ckheads hard.

Discussing the finer points of the culture known as ‘hipster’ has as of late, become as fashionable as extraditing yourself from it. A slew of articles have emerged recently with the intention of unraveling the loaded term. Along with more serious article such as The Guardians, ‘Why do people hate hipsters?‘ and adbusters.com somewhat hysterically titled ‘ Hipsters: The dead end of western civilisation‘  we have  popular humour sites such as ‘Look at this fucking hipster‘ and the highly circulated ‘Being a dickheads cool’ video, which became something of an online sensation this summer. Most of these express a similar sentiment; The hipster movement is a vacuous non-culture, a scene which has taken all the codes which marked former youth movements, and spliced them together to create a mutated monster mouthing the words ‘kill me’ to its creators.  Gleefully these articles proclaim how hipsters have no collective political ideology, and no art movement that expresses its particular ethos. Their political stance is apathy, their art movement is selective consumerism. Hipsters appropriate the symbols of other groups, and re-assemble them to create a nonchalant look that belies the excruciating nature of its own self awareness. People really, really don’t like this. And what’s more, not liking hipsterdom does not make you a square. Unlike proponents against other youth subculture, hating hipsters actually propels you up the cool ladder. Because – and this is where it starts to get complicated- being part of the complex cultural exchange that informs hipsterness, requires the direct denial of being any part of it. It is such a loathed term, that even those who wear its mass of ever transforming symbols will insist that they themselves have nothing to do with it. As the joke goes…

Why is the hipster culture so troubling to people? What is it exactly that marks it out as being so different from any other fleeting youth movement of an era? Essentially, hipsters are young, white, privileged, and disenchanted youth. They occupy urban spaces, ride bicycles and are meshed in a constant hunting pattern for the obscure and the authentic. To be a hipster is to take the Foucaldian idea of self regulation to a whole new level. The hipster must be intune not only to their bodies, but to the never ceasing wash of information that characterises our age. It is this awareness that crystalises to form a knowing look based on an odd form of bricolage. Old and new merge and transmography to create a walking set of symbols that communicate an understanding about semiotics of past style. What makes hipsters approach to bricolage different to say, punks however, is that the objects and styles chosen are done so in a manner that essentially only communicates an intellectual elitism about knowing their original symbology. For the punks,  the wearing of the safety pin was an intended homage made to the everyday nature of its intended use, and its association with the British working class.  Something seemingly mundane and innocuous we taken up, and re-established with a new meaning through its relationship with other objects. When a hipster places an original 1940s fedora hat on top of their newly cut hitler-youth hairstyle, what is being communicated is not political. It is about knowing the right vintage clothes shop, the right kind of pieces to wear at that particular moment in time, and the right way in which to mark themselves out to other hipsters as being of a selective group.

 

All youth movements have had an elitist element to them, a desire for the underground and the not yet discovered. Something which can be seized upon as ‘theirs’, that is rejected by the mainstream mother culture. Hipster culture is also carried by this desire, but has found itself faced with the free exchange of information that typifies modern western culture. The internet has meant that everyone and anyone has easy access to all forms of creative expression, the most obscure bands can be found in a matter of minutes on google, self published zines can be read online by anybody. To know about a particular band from the depths of musical history, or from the outer reaches of the globe, is just not t hard anymore. Bob Dylan built a career from discovering a rare collection of Woody Guthrie records, barely heard of by most people of his generation. It is inconceivable that such a thing could happen now. That sense of a few people all tuning into something at the same time, the essential blood to counter culture, is no longer possible.

Not only do we have the free and mighty internet, we have a consumer culture that has finally caught on to the fact that kids will buy cool. Scenes barely have enough time to emerge,  before ‘cool scouts’ are taking photos of what they’re wearing, and selling them to fashion conglomerates. The organic and natural progression of a youth culture has been stunted by a constant media fascination with what kids are wearing and listening to, and how exactly it can be re-packaged and sold back to us.

A hipster girl in Hackney gets 'cool scouted'

In the face of this, hipsters have created a scrabbling culture, that moves more quickly, and rejects more swiftly past trends than any other youth movement that has come before it. It centres around the need to know ‘obscure’ music, that ‘you probably wont have heard of’ because it recognises that this is something that has been taken away from us, something that was at the cornerstone of all other counter cultures, but is now unreachable. In the past, young people would rally together with those few others that had heard they’re much loved but sidelined bands. Jonny Ramone couldn’t help but be friends with DeeDee because he was one of the few other people to like The Stooges. There is an awareness that this how it used to be, and hipsters try to recapture this sense of belonging through music, drawn by the need to find things that haven’t yet been seized upon, sanitized, de-politicised, and made appopriate for mass consumption. Hipsters are left trying to keep one step ahead of a constant barrage of products that have been distilled from counter culture and then re-sold. The mother culture can no longer be resisted in the same way. It has come to realise the lucrative potential for absorbing dissonance and re-selling it. Reification baby. Hipsters are criticised for being consumerist, for being smug and apathetic. But this seems to me only a natural reaction to the suffocating situation young people have found themselves in. We have no real movement, because as soon as anything springs up, it will be plastered across magazines and news articles, picked up by fashion houses, and any political resistance it could potentially have is neutralised. Young people know that any political ideology would quickly be gobbled up and regurgitated out by mainstream culture as merely a trend, and so hipsters have embraced the mentality of style over substance. We simply do not have any space in which to express a political movement, we are too scrutinised, too self aware. When young people have as of late reacted in a political manner, they are treated as though they are bad parodies of a bygone era, as if they are only poor imitations of the ‘real’ young people of the 60′s and 70′s. Is it any wonder that hipsters fetishize objects of the past? The hipster movement is, as all youth cultures are, a direct reflection back upon the nature of our culture as a whole. The 60′s beats were a product of a changing understanding of the world,  a desire for change and belief in the new. The 70′s punks reflected back across middle england the dissastisfaction of a country being squeezed by Neo-Liberalism. The 90′s grunge scene saw young people reclaiming music from the bloated corporate music industry in a renaissance of the punk spirit. And hipsters.. Hipsters show us the ultimate result of a world saturated with information. Of a world that hinges around globalised knowledge, and high speed consumption. Hipsters give insight into the core experiences that inform our modern age, of consumerist culture and deadening of resistant politics. Ultimately, it seems to be that most people find it far easier to mock and belittle the actions of young people trying to forge a collective sense identity, than it is to look with a critical eye upon the culture they are reacting too. The Hipster movement does not exist in a vacuum, and if it is to be problematised, so too should be the consumerist nature of our capitalist society.

Posted in Culture, Music, Social Theory | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Gay and Straight

This article is interesting. Surprisingly. Always good to see some research about sexuality not informed by a projected fear of the unknown. http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/

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Narlywhal

It’s not a weapon. It’s not a means in which to attract a mate. It’s a sensory probe. I always suspected the Narwhal had tusk related super powers.

Awesome.

Posted in Geekery, Sea life | 2 Comments