The More Sexually Repressed the Culture the More Likely Women Have to Cover Up to Ensure Their Safety

Penguins march in Antarctica. Sluts march in Canada – for good reason. This weekend, Toronto held a near 2000 person Slut Walk, protesting the comments of a noodle-nut police officer who told women not to dress like sluts, in order to keep from being sexually assaulted.

Yep. You heard right. Officer numb-nuts, speaking at York University about personal safety, said women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimized.

So let me get this straight officer… a woman gives up her right to personal safety by dressing “slutty”?!? What exactly defines “slutty” dressing anyway officer? I’m curious, is slutty dress one of those things that ‘you know when you see it?’

Wow.

I’m kinda speechless. But fortunately, students in Toronto were not; they took to the streets to defend their right to dress slutty.

What concerns me here is that the police officer’s comments point to an underlying frame of suspicion, blame, and mistrust of female sexuality – by the very people in charge of investigating violent crime. That’s not good.

No matter what the circumstances, however, a woman is not guilty of her own rape or assault because of the way she dresses. Period.

What I find most striking in this story is the similarity between this Toronto officer’s comments, and the Muslim cleric’s comments who claimed that women, who don’t wear veils, are like uncovered meat, attracting sexual predators.

You may say that I’m being overly dramatic – however I disagree. The arbitrary “line-in-the wardrobe”, of what constitutes consent of female rape, seems to be at least in part, dependent on the level of religious or sexual suppression of the culture.

I assert, the more sexually repressed the culture, the more likely women have to be covered up in order to ensure their personal safety.

Perhaps it is sexual repression that is the problem – not the wardrobe.

What this story implies to me is that if we normalize the female body, female nudity, and female sexuality – we run the risk of people not giving a damn – one way or another – about how a woman dresses, or undresses.

I assert women deserve the basic human right to be free in their sexuality and their dress.
Women have the right to wear – or not wear – whatever the fuck they want.

March on sluts – march on!