Everyday is a Slutwalk

in photo: slutwalk supermodel talisa cruz




Feminists are not quite dead yet. Okay?

And no, they aren’t home nursing their wounded egos and the scars on their bellies. Neither are they at Sears shopping to death and fitting into mastectomy bras like I last suspected. I saw them lately: they’re on the streets across the globe, and they’re running a great show: Slutwalking!

When viral friend and Cyber geek-in-residence Moira Lanzona informed me about it, my first reaction was, Couldn’t wait to get into one! Maybe this is the answer to the rape culture? And this is June, when Pride parades are just kicking off, imagine whole contingents of LGBT marchers sweeping the highways doing broad-daylight slutwalks? Traffic jam. The policemen will break their necks from looking. What could be more fun.

The basic idea about slutwalks is this: that sluts don’t cause rape, rapists do. It is not what one wears that brings on sexual assault. It’s what the men think.

Ironically, a stupid remark set it off. A Toronto policeman, perhaps thinking himself the wiser, made a mistake of telling college women on campus “not to dress like sluts” if they didn’t want to get raped. Their nails and clits, it would seem, went up in rebellion. They organized a slutwalk. If the law and society, they declared, treat women who are raped as sluts who deserved it, then everyone is a slut. Because we can all be raped at any time, no matter what we are wearing.

Sarah Seltzer, writing for the online magazine Guernica avers: If it had really been just one guy’s mistake, hundreds of women wouldn’t be participating in “Slutwalks”. Men call women sluts for nearly any reason at all, she says. “If we’re dancing. If we’re drinking. If we have ever in our lives enjoyed sex. If our clothes aren't made of burlap.”

In Sulu, where a series of gang rapes were reported just a few years back, and in other Muslim enclaves where Islamic education is “optional” for young girls, madrasah teachers like to blame the spate of sexual assaults on the young having lost their way, as evidenced by the Muslim women’s now dressing themselves up like Bisaya girls: cropped hair, jeans, short sleeves, skirts that show skin. In Saudi Arabia where wearing the burqa is de rigueur and women not even allowed to drive, according to a doctor friend who had worked in a hospital there, slut is when you are on the street unaccompanied by your husband and you got into conversation with a male pedestrian about the weather and the time of the day.

In the Islamic City of Marawi where I spent some college two or three decades back, slut was synonymous to Christian. Maranao boys on the roadside would say "slut" just by my walking by with a Maranao boy classmate I made the mistake of smiling back to. It was horrifying. I would find out later that I was not the only slut they sniped at. A handful of us Catholic girls had been actually molested by college boys and even by little Maranao boys vending boiled corn and peanuts. Coming from the opposite direction of the road, their hands would suddenly shoot up as they met up with us on the road, reaching for what we then kept sacred between our thighs. Sexual harassment wasn’t around yet to bail us out from our misery, so imagine the terror we felt in our hearts. How did they know that we were sluts even then?

My question is, can a slutwalk be staged in Davao? Will our feminist frontliner Gabriela and gayest of friends tuck up their pants and spearhead a little rebellion cum fashion show? Dream on, Honey, dear, lolas would say. Not now when we are so busy fending off accusations over the RH bill which will purportedly encourage free sex. The Church would think: Now look. This is what they want free contraceptives for. So that they can be the sluts they don't want to be caught at. Dirty-minded Catholic Church.

The idea excites me. If women and transpeople (lesbians, gays, transsexuals, queers) can whiff up a drag show that puts together the serious-political and the sexual-theatrical, maybe the staleness and rigidity of street protests will for once die and give way to a livelier time?