Nicolya wrote:

The Conservative War on Women Sexuality.
I see the logic of Conservatives. Girls dress up nasty, expose their bodies "for sale", have no any decent and intelligent thought left in their brains, do not use contraceptives and PRODUCE MORE IDIOTS!!!!
This also explains the war on birth control recently. And they target religious groups as well to hire them into their ignorant army of idiots.
But it is very sad that many girls do not know their limits and look like sluts rather than like ladies. They are no more feminine. They expose too much of curves and skin and it deprives men from other thoughts than having sex with this individual. Women disrespect themselves today by doing this. Moreover, it's astonishing how many men allow their women to expose themselves like sluts or even do striptease dances (not for them but for everybody). Sexuality is a bit different thing than this. And this is just the meat for cock heads.


There is absolutely NO logic for conservatives to condemn the way women dress or to advocate AGAINST birth control, which will actually result in MORE unwanted pregnancies, NOT less! In fact Santorum is so crazy that he does not believe that people should have sex, except for procreation!!! This means that married couples (who have 2 children) should ONLY have sex a couple times during their entire marriage and those married couples who are sterile should NEVER have sex. Ridiculous stuff that should NOT be legitimized by saying that there is "logic" to this type of thinking!

Like the article that Sean posted said, conservatives are conducting a war against women's sexuality, which is both scary, extremely disgusting, and very disturbing and it is especially frightening that anyone would find their stances in any way legitimate!

It is NEVER okay to call a woman a slut! It is a misogynist word with an obvious double-standard and is always applied to women in an attempt to demean and control them. It is especially egregious when a fellow woman participates in this "slut-shaming!"

This type of thought is also anti-men. Men have functioning brains and can think beyond only "having sex" with a girl who shows some skin. Moreover, there is nothing wrong about finding a woman or man attractive, but to imply that men cannot control themselves if a girl dresses a certain way is ludicrous! Moreover, these types of attitudes are dangerous in that they are commonly used to blame the victim when it comes to rape by saying that a woman dressed like a slut, so she deserved to be raped. It is NEVER okay to say that a woman "deserves" to get raped because of the way she dresses!

Also, what does "too much of curves and skin" actually mean? People dress in many different ways around the world. In Brazil many women normally wear very little clothing for carnival and are not considered sluts. There are are tons of topless beaches, nude beaches, and even normal beaches around the world with women wearing FAR less than they do on the streets and all of this is perfectly fine and is not about women "disrespecting themselves" and men do not seem to be "deprived from other thoughts than having sex with these women." In certain countries, a woman is considered a "slut" if she is not wearing a burqa!!! If a woman shows her ankle or her face, she is considered promiscuous. These types of attitudes are NOT okay. We do not want to live in a society where women are FORCED to cover their entire bodies, including their faces, in a mistaken and unsuccessful attempt to avoid having men wanting to have sex with them.

It is also pretty demeaning to tie an individual's attire to her intelligence. This is another false negative stereotype that should not be perpetuated by another female.

This sentence is also very disturbing: "it's astonishing how many men allow their women to expose themselves like sluts or even do striptease dances." ALLOW??? Wow!!! If a woman is with a man who dictates what she can and cannot wear, then she should run away from that man, because he is a control-freak and does not deserve to be in a relationship with any woman!

If people have a problem with modern attire, then we should focus our blame on media entities that use overtly sexualized images of mostly women to sell everything these days. This constant onslaught of sexual images are being fed to our children in order to push capitalism and blatant consumerism, so we should fight against the media and corporate entities that like to make women into commodities and things in order to sell products, not the girls who view these images and attempt to imitate them. We should be fighting against the conservatives who never bemoan corporate depictions of women, but attempt to wage a war against equality for women and legitimate and important sexual rights, which are imperative for empowering women and making society a safe and positive place for girls!


Here are a couple of articles about this topic article1, article2, article3:

Soraya ChemalyFeminist satirist and media critic

Slut-Shaming Needs To End Now
Posted: 11/21/11 02:15 PM ET

"Did you see what that girl was wearing?"
"Someone should tell her she looks like a streetwalker."
"She's going to get a reputation if she's not careful."
"What a slut."

Sound familiar? Everyone does it.

It's hard to describe the breadth of what the word "slut" means to people, or to agree on the use, "reclaimation," or abuse of the word.

So, what's slut-shaming?

After reviewing a wide array of gender studies and feminist sites and sources, I came up with the following definition: It's embarrassing, insulting or otherwise denigrating a girl or woman for her real or extrapolated sexual behavior, including for dressing in a sexual way, having sexual feelings and/or exploring and exhibiting them. I know, pretty broad. But perhaps the most useful and meaningful qualifier is the addition of "in a way that you wouldn't do if she was a boy or man." It's the flip side of stud-baiting, which I would describe as pressure on boys to be "play the field." [source of quote?]

As a mother (and former girl), I've seen a lot of girls shaming other girls in this way. They get a whole lot of input that teaches them, from a very early age, that it's OK to do this. When I see slut-shaming firsthand it often comes from parents policing their own children and their children's friends. Every parent of teens occasionally sees their kids or their kids' friends behave in ways that gives them pause or cause concern, but slut-shaming goes beyond that and into the realm of destructive gossip and innuendo and often has real consequences for the girls involved. It's often a girl's first real exposure to gender based double standards. It's illogical and confusing to a girl who's been told she can do anything a boy can do for her whole life until that point. It's particularly egregious in this country, where we teach our kids to assume equality and then effectively turn on them as they become teenagers by enforcing repressive, damaging, antiquated and gendered rules like these. Rules that hurt both girls and boys.

At its core, slut-shaming is an overt and socially acceptable illustration of the misogynistic impulse to control and police female sexuality as it develops in teenage girls. Jessica Valenti's He's a Stud, She's a Sluthttp://www.amazon.com/Oth...F8&qid=1321294653&sr=8-3 will clear up any ambiguity you may have in believing that.

Slut-shaming enforces a sexual double standard in which boys can engage in sexual behavior freely, whereas girls can only do it when it's part of transaction that includes "true" love or marriage. You don't even have to use the word "slut" to be a slut shamer. Next time you talk about, with a wink and a nod, what a "man about town" or "player" a boy is, think about saying the same thing about his sister. I am not saying girls should be "like boys" (whatever that means) or that I think rampant promiscuity is a good thing for teenage boys or girls. I'm saying there should be the same standard of behavior for both.

The rule in our house is that we don't ever call a girl or woman a slut, because it's a code word for a double standard that punishes girls and rewards boys for the exact same behavior. I don't fall into the "reclaiming the word" camp, even though I heartily appreciate the use of the word for Slut Walks.

Teenage girls will experiment with make up and clothes and maybe alcohol and drugs. Like boys, they will take risks and make mistakes as they figure out their place in the world. But they will be held to a much higher public standard. Everything from the amount of eyeliner they wear to the height of their heels is scrutinized for any signs of incipient sluttiness, which could mean they're burdened by a "bad reputation" for making immature, impulsive decisions and trying to sort things out. Kids have to learn limits and rules, and they have to understand the consequences of their actions, but not this way.

And, the consequences of slut shaming for girls who are victims of it, sadly, continue to be significant.

On an individual level, girls who are the victims of this type of bullying can suffer the effects for years. These range from how she perceives herself to how others treat her. Girls who are slut shamed are often harassed and shunned. It's why Phoebe Prince and countless other girls have killed themselves after intense slut shaming bullying.

At a societal level, women continue to be told not to "dress like sluts" or they're inviting rape, which perpetuates the very dangerous myth that the way a woman dresses encourages rape and continues the habit of blaming the victim instead of the perpetrator.

In some countries the same underlying principle of shame and honor manifests itself in radical and violent control of girls, resulting in stoning and death ... a solution that was suggested in a letter to the Editor in a US newspaper this summer.

In any instance, slut-shaming is a subtle and powerful social tool. The way you keep a group (ie. women) oppressed is to divide and conquer. In a world that consistently portrays women as isolated and competitive this is easy to do. Catty, backstabbing women are a pervasive trope in our media and entertainment portrayals of women. They are the highlight of every base reality TV show and the majority of movies that feature more than one woman. It's also a persistent Biblical theme. Our culture revels at making women the tools of their own undoing.

In this manner, slut-shaming is a way that women gain power by participating in a system that denigrates them. It enables girls and women who engage in it aggressively to be and feel more "virtuous" by comparison. It gains them the approval of the reigning powers that be ... insert your hierarchical patriarchal structure here. And, I know. I'm dating myself. Race, class and sexuality all very legitimately compound these issues and are valid concerns. But, I'm sticking to patriarchy because it's simple and evokes a really clear picture of the guys at the top of the heap who get to make and enforce decisions about females, their bodies and their sexuality. Don't you think it strange how every picture of the people making decisions ... oops thought for a split second that this was an article about Congress and reproductive rights? Sorry, that's totally unrelated.

We live in a world that sends massively conflicting messages to boys and girls. It's a place where women are celebrated for dressing like "sluts" to sell, well, everything but they are "shamed" for doing it to protest rape and sexual assault. That's confusing and wrong.

So, if you suspect that you are, indeed, a slut shamer, do what Tina Fey says in "Mean Girls" and stop


He's a Stud, She's a Slut: The Sexual Double Standard
"Slut" is applied to women engaged in any activity besides knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest any sudden movements be deemed whorish.
May 30, 2008 |

From the book He's a Stud, She's a Slut by Jessica Valenti. Reprinted by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008.

If you have a vagina, chances are someone has called you a slut at least once in your life. There's just no getting around it.

I remember the first time I heard the word "slut" -- I was in my fifth-grade science class. A certain little girl (terror) named Eleena had been making my life miserable all year in a way that only mean little girls can. She had turned all my girlfriends against me, spread rumors and the like. She walked up to me at my desk and said, "You called me a slut." I had absolutely no idea what the word meant. I just sat there, silently. She repeated herself: "You called me a slut, but you're the slut." I don't remember how long after that I found out exactly what "slut" meant, but I knew it had to be terrible and I knew I didn't want to be it.

Naturally, I'd be called a slut many times over later in life -- not unlike most girls. I was called a slut when my boobs grew faster than others'. I was called a slut when I had a boyfriend (even though we weren't having sex.) I was called a slut when I didn't have a boyfriend and kissed a random boy at a party. I was called a slut when I had the nerve to talk about sex. I was called a slut when I wore a bikini on a weekend trip with high school friends. It seems the word slut can be applied to any activity that doesn't include knitting, praying, or sitting perfectly still lest any sudden movements be deemed whorish.

Despite the ubiquity of "slut," where you won't hear it is in relation to men. Men can't be sluts. Sure, someone will occasionally call a guy "a dog," but men simply aren't judged like women are when it comes to sexuality. (And if they are, they're judged in a positive way!) Men who have a lot of sexual partners are studs, Casanovas, pimps, and players. Never sluts. In fact, when I just did a Google search for "male sluts," the first result I got was She Male Sluts DVD! I know, should have seen that coming. The point is, there isn't even a word -- let alone a concept -- to signify a male slut.

But it makes sense when you think about what the purpose of the word "slut" is: controlling women through shame and humiliation. Women's bodies are always the ones that are being vied over for control -- whether it's rape, reproductive rights, or violence against women, it's our bodies that are the battleground, not men's.

And if you don't think it's about control, consider this little bit of weirdness. The most recent incarnation of the sexual double standard being played out in a seriously creepy way is through Purity Balls. These promlike events basically have fathers take their daughters to a big fancy dance where they promise their daddy their virginity. Likewise, the father promises to be the "keeper" of his daughter's virginity until he decides to give it to her future husband. Where are the Purity Balls for men, you ask? Oh, they're there, but they're about controlling women too! Called Integrity Balls, these events focus on men not having sex because they'd be defiling someone else's "future wife"! Not because men need to be pure or be virgins -- but because they need to make sure women are virgins. Unbelievable, really.

Outside of the feminist implications of the sexual double standard, the slut/stud conundrum has always been my favorite because it just makes no sense logically. Why is a woman less of a person, or (my favorite) "dirty," because she has sex? (Heterosexual sex, that is; somehow lesbian sex isn't "real.") Does a penis have some bizarre dirtymaking power that I'm unaware of? Every time I have sex, do I lose a bit of my moral compass? "Sorry to mug you, Grandma, but I had sex twice this week!"

And let's face it -- the slut stigma isn't just dangerous to our "reputations" or to some weird-ass notion of purity. How many times has rape been discounted because a woman was deemed a slut? How many times are women called whores while their partners beat them? How often are women's sexual histories used against them in workplace harassment cases? The sexual double standard is a lot more dangerous than we'd like to think.

So ... What to Do?

First and foremost, stop calling other women sluts! It doesn't behoove us to bash each other, gals. And speak out when you hear men do the same. I'll never forget in college overhearing a conversation that my boyfriend's roommates were having. They both had slept with the same girl over the course of the year -- they called her a whore and made a joke about her vagina being "loose." I asked them why she was the bad person in this scenario -- after all, they had had casual sex with her, too. They couldn't provide an answer, but that didn't stop them from continuing to laugh. I always regretted not saying anything more. Outside of calling ourselves and others out on perpetuating the double standard, it's a hard battle. But I think if we recognize the hypocrisy of the slut/stud nonsense when we see it -- whether it's an anti-choice law or a movie that makes women who have sex look like deviants -- we're on the right road.


Los Angeles SlutWalk steering committee member and GMPM columnist Hugo Schwyzer argues that SlutWalk is for men, too.

The sluts are in the streets. From L.A. to London, Minneapolis to Melbourne, this has become “SlutWalk spring.” (Down under, I suppose it’s “SlutWalk Fall.”) SlutWalk began in Toronto, Canada, in response to a police officer’s remark that if women wanted to avoid being raped, they shouldn’t dress like sluts. That exercise in victim-blaming led Heather Jarvis, Sonya Barnett, and a handful of their friends to put together a small march and rally through the streets of Canada’s largest city on April 3.

Perhaps it was the controversy around the name, or perhaps it was the cause itself, but in the less than eight weeks since that first SlutWalk, the movement has become a global phenomenon with widespread press attention. Satellite SlutWalks have taken place or are in the planning stages on six continents. The Los Angeles SlutWalk happens on June 4; I’m proud to be on the steering committee for what we expect will be a major event.

There are many reasons why men should be involved with SlutWalk. The important ones have nothing to do with what the women marching might—or might not—be wearing. (There is no dress code for SlutWalk, and past marches have seen folks rally in everything from bathrobes to bikinis to Brooks Brothers suits.)

When that cop in Toronto made that unfortunate remark about women “dressing like sluts” being more likely to be raped, he was telling a partial truth. He wasn’t right about who gets sexually assaulted—there is no study that shows that women in miniskirts or tube tops are statistically at greater risk of rape than their more modestly-clad sisters. Rather, he was telling a truth about how our culture sees men. And that truth is based on one very great lie.

I’ve been doing work around gender and sexual violence for nearly 25 years. I developed my college’s first interdisciplinary course on “Men and Masculinity” a decade ago. And in all my years of teaching and activism, I’ve come to believe that there’s one lie that’s bigger than any other we tell about men: we cannot reconcile our arousal and our compassion. In other words, the lie says we can’t truly respect what we also desire.

More than a few men, if they’re honest with themselves, know that this isn’t true for them. As boyfriends and husbands, many straight guys discover that they can both lust after and be genuinely in love with the same woman at the same time. We learn (most of us) that the older boys in the locker room were wrong: a hard dick can have a conscience. But we often suspect we’re the only ones who can reconcile our libidos with our ethics.

And so out of fear what other men might do (or, perhaps, what we fear we might dream of doing ourselves) we urge our little sisters and our daughters to “cover up”, to avoid dressing “slutty” in order to ensure respect for men. Deep down, we know that the women we love are as vulnerable to rape in a mu-mu as in a miniskirt. Men rape as much out of rage as frustrated desire—and there is no outfit short of steel armor a woman can wear that will protect her from an obsessed stalker or a drunken frat boy filled with a sense of entitlement.

♦◊♦

I’m involved in organizing SlutWalk LA for many reasons. But I appreciate one assumption that the Toronto founders made in particular. Though what constitutes “slutty” clothing is obviously open to debate, SlutWalkers believe in men’s capacity to do two things at once: be aroused by what we see while honoring the humanity of the woman whose body attracts our eye. The most pernicious of all lies about men is that because of our makeup, lust and empathy can’t coexist within us. If you want kind and compassionate men who will respect women’s boundaries, the myth suggests, those women will have to conceal the parts of themselves that will turn men bestial and irresponsible.

There’s another lie SlutWalk refutes. It’s the one that says that men only need to “respect women who respect themselves.”

Too many of us still believe that “self-respect” for a woman means chastity and modesty. If she’s wearing revealing clothing, enjoys attention, and maybe even likes sex outside of a committed monogamous relationship, we call her a “slut”—and accuse her of not respecting herself. Perhaps she does respect herself, perhaps she doesn’t. (Promiscuity is not perfectly correlated with low self-esteem, despite what a lot of pop psychologists tell you.) But in the end, it doesn’t matter. Women aren’t commodities whose value is based on their own fluctuating sense of self-worth.

Common decency means respecting people because they’re people, not because of how we imagine they feel about themselves. So if a woman dresses in a way that we think invites sexual attention, or if she chooses multiple sexual partners, we’re not required to approve of her lifestyle or her fashion choices. But we are required to respect her right to move through public and private space unchallenged and unmolested. That’s not too much to ask for any man.

♦◊♦

When I was first publicly identified as an organizer of SlutWalk LA, someone sent me a tweet asking how I’d feel if my daughter turned out to be “a slut.” It’s not as offensive a question as it sounds. It was a reminder to me as a dad that I shouldn’t advocate for others what I wouldn’t want for my own child.

What I replied (in more than one 140 character tweet) was that my daughter was foremost in my mind when I committed to the SlutWalk campaign. I want a world where she is free to grow into a woman’s body without fear of being raped. I want her to have the freedom to express her sexuality safely and joyfully in whatever way she chooses, whenever she’s ready (and not a moment before). And I want her to grow up without shame about her own wanting and about her wanting to be wanted.
I want my daughter to grow up in a world in which all men are safe, responsible, reliable. We don’t have that world yet, of course. But the reason has nothing to do with biology: it has to do with our crushingly low expectations of men’s capacity to reconcile lust and humanity. In order for our daughters and little sisters and nieces to be safer, we must demand better of ourselves as men. And one way to start is to challenge the very roots of our thinking about sex, desire, and respect. That challenge is part of what SlutWalk is all about.


Anna

Last Edited By: AnnaMariaS Mar 5 12 1:20 AM. Edited 1 times.