Student Activists: Tube Tops

News Directors Dept: Thanks to social media, SlutWalks are spreading far and wide. One was held in Boston on the weekend, and more are coming in England and Australia. “We live in a society where rape isn’t taken as seriously as it should be,” said Katt Schott-Mancini, an organizer of the Boston SlutWalk. The walks are drawing major media coverage, because news directors think their audiences will be stirred by images of valiant feminists reclaiming their power and their agency. Either that, or by images of nubile young women in thigh-high cutoffs and tube tops. You really have to wonder who’s using whom, according to Globe And Mail. The highly educated young women who join SlutWalks are among the safest and most secure in the world. But you’d never know it from the fevered rhetoric. According to one widely cited scare statistic cooked up by the American Association of University Women, no fewer than 62 per cent of female students say they’ve been sexually harassed at university – a figure that is credible only if you include every incident of being groped by some 20-year-old drunk. The student activists at York continuously insist that their own campus is a hotbed of violence and sexual assault, for which the university administration is to blame. The only remedy is mandatory anti-oppression training for all. In fact, Toronto’s crime rate, and also York’s, is among the lowest in the country and you can imagine the outcry that ensued. Before you could blurt out the words “fishnets and bustiers,” an empowering new movement called SlutWalk had been born. Thousands of women marched through the streets of downtown Toronto to protest a blame-the-victim attitude that trivializes rape. “This thinking is unfortunately everywhere,” complained Heather Jarvis, a co-founder of SlutWalk.” We wanted to take back the word and sling it right back,” said co-founder Sonya Barnett. SlutWalks are what you get when graduate students in feminist studies run out of things to do. In fact, they’re flogging a dead mare. The attitude that rape victims bring it on themselves has largely though not entirely disappeared from mainstream society. When a Manitoba judge recently blamed the victim in a rape case for leading her attacker on, he was universally ridiculed. Everybody was amazed that any judge today would be so ignorant. It’s the same with the police. They’re not perfect, but they take sexual assaults far more seriously than they did in 1972. As for cases of domestic violence, laying charges is no longer optional. It’s mandatory. As reported in the news.
@t globe and mail, american association of university women