Democracy High on its Heels

In a few hours, New York City's Union Square will be the gathering point for a mass of vocal women, clothing optional. The purpose of this act isn't to get the men flocking but, rather, backing the fuck off. To put it simply and perhaps most practically for the folks over at NY Metro, SlutWalk NYC is a movement to end sexual violence. But at its core, the SlutWalk movement is a challenge to rape culture. For those unfamiliar, SlutWalk began last April in Toronto, when a York University police officer, after a rash of sexual assaults on campus, told female students that in order to avoid being victimized, they should "stop dressing like sluts." This ludicrous statement became the premise of a worldwide movement against the all-too patriarchal blame game: to suggest that a woman wills a rape to occur in the mere act of clothing herself is ludicrous. To suggest further that she should be shamed for it is nauseating.

And because the world won't listen to our silly little theories unless we give it just cause, allow the journalist in me to reference precedent in the form of high-profile cases inovlving Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexual assault of hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo and the acquittal of NYPD cops Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata on charges that they sexually assaulted a woman. If these cases, however fraught in the justice system, have not brought rape culture to New York's (and the world's) consciousness, then I'm not sure where we can go from here.

Aside from condoning male aggression, rape culture is the phenomena that allows for conflating violence and sexuality.... a society in which violence is sexy and sexuality is violent, rape is flattery, and (normative) sexuality is based on hetero-masculine dominance.

Moreover, rape culture is the phenomena that regards and perpetuates the normativity of straight sexuality. It encounters queer sexuality with the same violence, forcing it against its own will to be the bedfellow of nonconsensual sexual practices like pedophilia and bestiality. Rape culture privileges heterosexuality because it relies on this nonnormativity to retain its normative acceptance. That is, rape culture would be dismantled would it not be for its lifeblood of gender-based dominance and submission.

Though it was planned months earlier, SlutWalk NYC is being referenced in the same media breath as the ongoing agitation of Occupy Wall Street. But are we really so radical? The individuals in Union Square today surely aren't the same school of feminists that populated 1960s media, with our bras still very much intact and our love for sex in full swing. I guess we do have similar pains and similar needs in facing the democracy that couldn't. But what it comes down to now is getting our voices, and our bodies, heard... at Union Square and on Wall Street.