Response to Luke Buckley: ‘Why Luke Buckley, not Slutwalk, is missing the point’
By Anna Friedler
By Li Sian Goh
As an organiser, steward, participant, and all-round champion of Slutwalk, I was very surprised to be told in last week’s OxStu that I was ‘missing the point’. Luke Buckley wrote an article criticising Slutwalk Oxford, a march against victim-blaming which was held here on the 19th of May. Because I believe that it is important to critique the things one supports, I read the article with an open mind but was disappointed to find an article that rehashed old arguments about feminism.
Misconception the first: ‘No matter what you achieve or how brilliant you are, you are always a victim, and in the eyes of men, you are always a slut’. Buckley claims that this is the underlying message of Slutwalk. He argues that women are needlessly cast as ‘sexual objects’, that Slutwalk emphasises victimhood, and that this is outdated in ‘a world that has begun to move beyond the rigid socio-sexual divisions of old’. To put it politely: you’re wrong, Mr. Buckley. It is true that the movement towards gender equality has made huge strides: women in most parts of the world are allowed to vote, to work, and to control their reproductive destiny (though that is a right currently threatened by laws in the US). However, huge problems remain, and the prevalence of sexual harassment, assault and rape is amongst them. Last November, this paper reported that 60% of female students in Oxford have experienced inappropriate sexual behaviour in nightclubs. NUS research has found that 1 in 7 women in the UK will be raped while studying at university, and 1 in 4 women will be raped over the course of her life. Last Friday, the Guardian reported that 43% of women in London have experienced sexual harassment in public spaces over the past 12 months. Not only is the problem one of prevalence, but of dissatisfying redress: about 80% of rapes are not reported, and only 3% of rapes go convicted. Much as I (and most women) would prefer not to be a victim, my personal experiences of sexual harassment have told me that I am. Statistics and talking to other women have shown me that my experiences are shared, if not practically universal. We’re not making a fuss about nothing, and we’re certainly not making up our victimhood. Mr Buckley, thank you for complimenting my ‘wit, charm, finesse, intellect, presence, confidence, and personality writ large’. However, the fact that I am extraordinary in all these aspects does not obscure the fact that I, and other women, can be victims of rape and sexual assault, because that simply is not how rape works. One does not, by dint of being an amazing person, miraculously become immune to sexual assault.
Misconception the second: that Slutwalk is about the idea that ‘emancipation consists of self sexual degradation… that they must buy things to achieve this; fishnet stockings and Jimmy Choos’. Not to sound sniffy, Mr Buckley, but if you had even looked at our manifesto or our Facebook event or anything the Slutwalk Oxford team has been saying, it would become apparent that one of Slutwalk Oxford’s (and indeed, Slutwalks all over the world) key messages is to come as you are. Wear whatever makes you feel comfortable: during the march, we were pleased to observe that participants turned up as they were: in jeans, a skirt, a headscarf, a tank top, a dress, draped in a rainbow flag. Moreover, nowhere did Slutwalk Oxford suggest that sexual liberation lies in dressing ‘sexily’. The main point of Slutwalk is that no matter she (or he, or ze) was wearing, it is never the victim’s fault if they get raped. The very name ‘Slutwalk’ is in direct response to police officer Michael Sanguinetti’s statement to Toronto law students that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. Slutwalk Oxford, and Slutwalks the world over, have emphasized that you do not have to identify as a slut or even believe that the word can be reclaimed in order to agree with the key message of Slutwalk: that it is not the survivor’s fault. If she was wearing fishnets or Jimmy Choos, something which Mr. Buckley has suggested is both ‘petty and consumerist’ (another debate for another day), it is still not her fault. It is never, ever the victim’s fault.
We’re not denying that certain aspects of the Slutwalk movement are potentially problematic, and here in Oxford the organisers have discussed them at length. For example, we were worried that by highlighting a certain aspect of rape culture: victim-blaming based on the clothes and sexual history of the rape survivor, we were inadvertently neglecting others. ‘Other aspects’ include the increased vulnerability of sex workers and female asylum-seekers to rape, and the fact that between 70 – 80% of disabled women have been sexually assaulted. (The fact that sex workers and disabled women are somehow considered ‘unrapeable’ only helps to obscure the reality that they face much higher rates of sexual assault and rape.) The Slutwalk organising team has worked hard to make the movement as inclusive as possible, and hope that this has been reflected by the array of speakers we invited to the post-march speaker event, such as Black Women Against Rape and Black Feminism UK. At the same time, we have been ever mindful that there are some aspects of rape culture that we have not thought of because of our privileged status as young women in higher education. This was why I so eagerly flipped to the Slutwalk article, in hopes that we could take constructive criticism on board for next year’s march. An opportunity for fruitful feedback and dialogue has been wasted by denial, lazy misconceptions, and condescending assertions that really – far more than Slutwalk ever has – do miss the point.
Li Sian Goh is Chair of the OUSU Women’s Campaign. To get in touch, email her at lisian.goh@ccc.ox.ac.uk. WomCam meetings are every 5.45 – 7 pm every Monday at Corpus Christi College’s Seminar Room.
Anon
29/05/2012 at 01:02
Not wishing to aggravate anyone here, and I think rape and sexual assault are completely unacceptable, but so too is violent crime on any person, yet people have no problem being advised to keep their valuable belongings hidden when out in public or a strange place where they know few people. Surely our bodies are the most precious things we own, so why is it unacceptable to advise (not force, nobody does that with people’s valuable either, but advise) women to consider what they wear when going out, if it’s likely that wearing revealing clothing, just as waving an expensive digital camera around, is likely to attract unwanted attention?
The use of the word “slut” by the police officer was brash and thoughtless- he should’ve seen the backlash to that kind of language coming- but the basic principle seems to be a good one, and it doesn’t have to be about victim-blaming, just as telling people to keep valuables hidden isn’t about victim blaming, it’s about common sense.
Luke
29/05/2012 at 01:06
good article, though, without descending into a you miss the point flame, i didn’t pick that title and I don’t disagree with around two thirds of what you are saying (and you got 300 words more than me!
). the point is that sexual harassment, rape etc (a bit more complicated than your statistics suggest though, to say the least, look no further than the american campus rape industry for that one, parodied analagously in a recent south park) occur because of the de-subjectification and instrumentalisation of women (i.e. considering women as objects for a particular end as opposed to subjects and all of the necessary implications this has in terms of the ontological space for action against them), and the slut walk, by recasting this as an overarching modality of life – which it does necessarily (despite protests to the contra) and which your article shows brilliantly (by the way you utilise statistics that render immanent fear, even if utilised solely to mobilise or justify) – reproduces and i would say hardens the material and symbolic order in which women are first and foremost sexual beings. So, i’m making a point on a completely different level to the one you suggest, divorced especially from those fancy but dubious statistics you quote and most of the substantive criticisms (that relate to your slut walk specifically and empirically as opposed to at the level of subconscious ideology). Though I must admit that I don’t explain myself very well (it’s a comment piece, and anyway it’s explained much better by Bourdieu) and 600 words is space to be snappy, not write a balanced thesis 
as for your other points about the links with sex as emancipation, I think they are there and I don’t think you can make sense of the slut walk at all without taking that discourse into account, though again, the links are subtle and would require a proper article to draw out meaningfully and fairly.
Luke
29/05/2012 at 01:11
just for the record i don’t agree with first poster (anon)… again, i’m not making a point about what the police officer said, or what the slut walk consciously is about for the people who participate, it’s about what it does at a different level, especially for those who aren’t familiar with the story (which I am… short article again
). I think the way the police handle some rape cases is disgraceful, though in other circumstances it is genuinely difficult to pin down guilt (if you think of how complex consent is). Nothing can be worse than our rape crisis centre solution that tells victims that the most important thing is keeping evidence (which you can guess what that entails) as opposed to looking out for their wellbeing (and then you get into really interesting issues about agency, do we really want to be declaring rape or domestic violence victims as hostile witnesses and what are the implications of that, I say we shouldn’t).. Hence my antimony to the constant use of statistics 
Anonymous
29/05/2012 at 03:18
One thought: on one reading of Luke’s article it does have something interesting to add. Bear with me (or not):
Arguably one of the reasons why SlutWalk has been so successful (read: widely emulated and gets lots of press) is precisely because it does subvert the semiotics of traditional (2nd wave) feminism by appearing to embrace its opposite (i.e. porn aesthetic etc.). SlutWalk doesn’t advance a feminist agenda directly, it simply reflects the sexism/patriarchy etc. of society in a way that makes it visible (i.e. ‘sluts’ dressed as ‘sluts’, no one cares, (self-defined) feminists dressed as ‘sluts’, that’s a story). However, this means that (naturally) the semiotics of SlutWalk can be attacked as failing to advance a real critique of sexism (Luke’s article + comment on Li’s – worth reading). The necessary response, however, is to point out that SlutWalk is in essence a satirical comment on the notion that clothing choice and justified blame are connected. Attacking it for representing women as sluts is like attacking Rory Bremner’s George W. Bush impression for advocating an attack on Iran.
Of course Luke can respond that the satirical core will not necessarily be comprehended (and not just because of media bias) and thus the point being made will only be understood by insiders (i.e. SlutWalk would preach only to the choir). Two points come into play against this however. Firstly (as pointed out above) the contradiction between the dual identity of SlutWalk (‘slut’ and ‘feminism’) prevents the assimilation of SlutWalk into either of the tiered categories of ‘slut’ and ‘feminist’ and motivates further investigation because of the dissonance this causes. At that point, articles like Li’s – written to critique the critique by pointing to the orthodox issues (primarily by use of – hopefully – accurate statistics) – will actually be read by a wider audience because the unresolved controversy generated will mean that people are actually paying attention (hell, that’s what happened in my case!). Feminism doesn’t need SlutWalk to win arguments about rape, just to make people listen. But this can only happen in Stage 3 (Li’s article) after Stage 1 (the protest itself) has been critiqued by Stage 2 (Luke’s article). Or at least that is when it is most effective.
People talk about how SlutWalk has re-invigorated feminism, and I agree (to an extent). But the way it has done this is more complex than has been acknowledged – particularly the way in which it is based on a repudiation of elements of feminist tactics and arguments. It’s important to recognise this if we want to keep it alive. For example, one implication of this argument is that the idea that you can wear whatever you like/feel comfortable in for a SlutWalk is potentially problematic. Only by reading (and taking on board, in spite of rejecting) comments like Luke’s can SlutWalk think about this coherently and intelligently. It’s not ‘simply’ a misconception.
Luke
29/05/2012 at 09:34
i really appreciated your response anon (2nd). a bit i left out of my article and my analysis was identity, and you tease out well the parts where that could be salient, particularly at the level of symbolic order, which is the same level i make my point on. One thing I would add, I was thinking about this last night, is that slut walk necessarily mobilises discourses of feminism as sexual freedom, the kind of feminism i feel is both tautologous and self defeating (Because it relies on men considering women to be objects and women utilising that, i.e. enhancing their own objectification instrumentally, which might make sense for some women but not for women generally, for whom it can only be a tragic submission), and it does this because it is in that framework that the problem emerges in the first place. I.e. at least part of the slut walk, of its feel good factor on the streets, is this i should be able to wear what i want discourse (let’s not pretend that you can make sense of this outside of advanced capitalist societies), and i don’t think we would have that desire or pose the question “why can’t i wear what i want” unless there was some reason why wearing what i want felt good, which is of course, because capitalists sold to women in the 60s the notion that they could express themselves in and through clothes ( see curtis century of the self, and increasingly men are subject to this too), and it was through clothing themselves that women could gain identity and independence (especially salient when you think of this as a passive consumer role, which is my point exactly, why do we not allow women to find identity in meaningful activities, and why is it that we always judge women on their clothes) and this was linked with the notion of emancipation explicitly (think of cigarette marketing as freedom torches which broke the taboo of women smoking but was conceived to sell cigarettes). My point being, if you looked historically at the movements, ideas, values, ideologies etc that underwrite slut walk, they have at their heart a lot of anti-feminist ideas, and i think the slut walk mobilises these necessarily, as well as rendering immanent in the mind of women (vicarious) the notion of themselves as objects or potential sex objects, in the same way that scarey statistics on swine flu render immanent in practice (and become linked with identity and biography in complex and specific ways) particular forms of discipline, like wearing a mask (irrespective of their actual efficacy, or indeed, any ‘actual’ epidemiology of the virus). Again, I don’t think this is what we should be doing. You could have the march and all of those statistics and call it something else, and the reason you haven’t is precisely because of the powerful discourses that the notion (the precise reason why it’s popular) draws upon… I also think the article in response is that lazy women’s feminism (women’s office, notice, not gender officer or equality officer) in which they perceive patriarchy to come from without, when it also comes from within. Women are part and parcel of patriarchy… As Bourdieu said, the most successful ideological effects are those that have no need for words, and ask for no more than complicitous silence. My intellectual background for the piece i wrote was Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Natasha Walter, Ariel Levy, Naomi Wolf, in conscious opposition to folk like Dworkin, Mackinnon, and all those other womenists.
Li
29/05/2012 at 10:39
Luke, thanks for responding to this article. Granted, 600 words isn’t a lot – I think you could have written a much more balanced argument had you left out the ‘Women of Oxford!’ apostrophising and the Barthes quote. Nevertheless, I’d like to reiterate that Slutwalk is *not* about sexual liberation or whether or not it’s liberating to dress to the male gaze, or be objectified. Yes, the fact that women may feel compelled to wear sexy clothing or wear makeup every single time they venture out of the house reflects a certain aspect of their oppression. Yes, they may find dressing up liberating despite that. Yes, what makes women (and men, and people of all genders) feel good is fundamentally a matter of societal conditioning, and not all choices are made in a vacuum. Yes, we don’t despite that have the right to criticise individual women for making the (fashion) choices they do. But Slutwalk isn’t about whether or not women who wear short skirts or whatever are ‘feminist enough’, it’s about the fact that women who wear short skirts (or drink, or flirt, or knew their attacker, or have had sex with them) do not deserve to get raped, no matter what.
Secondly, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call my statistics lazy, or at least gave me some idea of why you’re casting doubt on them. Here are my sources:
1. 60% of female students in Oxford: http://oxfordstudent.com/2011/11/03/%E2%80%9Cyou-come-to-expect-inappropriate-touching%E2%80%9D/
2. 1 in 7 women students in the UK: http://hiddenmarks.org.uk/2010/
3. 1 in 4 women: the most disputed. I haven’t found a better critique of it than this: http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2009/09/11/rape-statistics-1-in-4/ which is frankly disingenuous because it casts doubt on the idea that a yes to the question ‘Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?’ is rape.
4. 43% of women: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/25/four-10-women-sexually-harassed
5. 80% of rapes go unreported: http://londonfeministnetwork.org.uk/what-weve-done/letter-writing-campaigns/we-object-to-plans-to-grant-anonymity-to-rape-defendants
6. 3% of rape cases convicted: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2008/07/rape_a_complex_crime.html (the 6% is ‘of reported cases’, 3% is a modest estimate of the figure you would arrive at if you take unreported cases into account)
7. 70 – 80% of disabled women have been sexually assaulted: Scapegoat, by Katharine Quarmby
I do agree with you that it’s called Slutwalk because the label ‘slut’, after all these years, still has such power. Yet Slutwalk does not seek to find what you term ‘sexual liberation’ in the label; rather it means to question what the word slut means and reject the very idea that there is such a thing as ‘dressing like a slut’. (The idea that a woman’s level of promiscuity changes depending on whether she’s wearing a short skirt or pyjamas… well!)
It’s great that you’ve read ‘Bourdieu, Foucault, Walter, Levy, and Wolf’. I think you’d find though that you have a lot in common with Dworkin and Mackinnon, as Slutwalk is very much a product of the third wave – or perhaps you need to listen to some women and/or feminists who haven’t written books as well?
Alice
29/05/2012 at 14:48
Shorter Luke: TALKING ABOUT RAPE AND SEXUAL HARASSMENT TURNS WOMEN INTO OBJECTS ERGO WE SHOULD STOP TALKING ABOUT IT.
Sarah
29/05/2012 at 16:18
Luke -
While you raise some important and accurate points about female sexuality and how it is manipulated by consumerism, you operate with a subtle implied (and androcentric) judgement about what it is and isn’t OK to spend your money on.
Let’s be honest here: consumerist society has huge negative effects on women. A lot of women spend huge amounts on cosmetics, clothes, diet plans, magazines, only to feel worse and worse about themselves. These dynamics often have the effect of distracting and alienating women from taking part in activities that might actually provide them self-realisation and meaning in their lives, and destroying their self-confidence (which in turn makes it harder for them to get into healthier pursuits). This isn’t limited to women but seems (to me, from a female and potentially biased perspective) that women get the brunt of it. I’d like to thank you for putting forwards this argument, because it’s made me look at the debate in a new way and it’s probably the critique of SlutWalk which has been strongest.
However, the flipside of the coin is: what do you spend your money on?
In the anticapitalist discourse a huge amount of time is given over to vilifying the mass buying of make up, clothes, stuff to make you pretty. Relatively little is given over to critiques of spending money on music, games, and other male-dominated pursuits. In a similar vein, many anticapitalists are horrified by the notion of getting plastic surgery – but do not criticise someone who gets a massive tattoo. Why is the one OK but not the other? Is it because music, games, tattoos are ‘art’ and pretty clothes, makeup are not? I like dressing up – to an extent, I see it as an artform, one that, if I do it well, can help get me laid, which is always nice…
Many women enjoy putting together awesome outfits because it’s something creative. Is that a bad thing? Honestly, I’m not sure. It can be expensive, environmentally damaging, and probably doesn’t communicate to men in clubs my cutting wit and my well-rounded knowledge of economic theory. But I feel that if we’re going to criticise SlutWalk from this perspective, it’s important to make our value judgements explicit.
I would like to emphasise at this point that I am also highly critical of the extent to which women are pressured to look pretty – there is a huge gap between what I’m talking about (people enjoying making themselves look sexy on a night out) and what currently goes on (people feeling like their worth is a function almost entirely of how they look). The one feeds into the other, I suppose. I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this.
Luke
29/05/2012 at 17:02
Sarah, you are absolutely right (thanks for an illuminating critical reply!), my response is gendered in that sense as is the frame of debate more generally. I can only apologise for being male and therefore being blinded (perhaps willfully) to the ways in which my own practices are intwined in similar processes
and you are right to say that there is an implicit value judgement, which should be explicit, because if it was explicit it could be exposed just as you have done in your comment.
There’s a really cool (well, interesting…) anthropologist called daniel miller at UCL who to some extent remedies the situation not by looking at how masculine consumerist endeavours are alienating but on how novel social forms emerge in and around ostensibly (though not always) feminine ones, such as the mother daughter shopping experience. His “theory of shopping” and “blue jeans” are brilliant reads and get at what you’re saying albeit from a different angle (i.e. criticising my implicit position but not explicitly making a theory of alienation based upon male activity).
As an aside, I like clothes, I have a “massive tattoo”, I like to appear in a particular way, and I think it is an important part of my self – as do most people (just ask them to wear something they don’t feel comfortable in and you will see how sacred and therefore intimately connected to their personhood it is) – but my body isn’t commodified in the way that women’s bodies are (though it is increasingly so), and if I ever appear on TV, provided i am wearing suitable conformist attire, it is unlikely that my appearance would ever be the subject of debate as women’s (unless I was particularly handsome of course). And i think to this extent, there is something uniquely feminine about fashion and what it means to both society and individuals. Fashion is a kind of sine qua non cultural capital without which women cannot move easily in the public sphere (and with which there movement is maybe more hindered, albeit in a different manner), it is a means of distinction, by which people define the conditions of entry to important social, cultural, economic and political spheres and institutions. Just think of all the newspaper articles about how women politicians look. I think my point in this article is that by emphasising this wear what we want argument the meaning of dress in society is misrecognised. Why would we want to wear what we want unless we believed that that said something about ourselves? And why do we say that? And why do women feel that they must express themselves this way, well probably because their avenues in expression in other spheres are limited (because of patriarchy). And I have sympathy for that. But I can’t help but conclude, again, that whilst it might seem like liberation, it is actually entrapment, it is continuously measuring yourself against others, it is existance on an essentially shallow plane (because there isn’t real expression, i mean, i wore a dress to lecture once and got spat at, it is expression within constraints, the major ones being industry), it is difficult, it requires effort, and therefore it cancels out the time for perhaps more fulfilling endeavours, and at a theoretical level, it sets hard in peoples minds the notion that women are nothing but object and affect, there is no depth, no below the surface, no complexity to be accessed, because with women we see it straight away, we see them in their clothes and we judge them. Now, i’m not saying that this is right. what i’m saying is that by expressing yourself through dress you almost set the conditions in which people can believe that everything about you is expressed by dress, i.e. that you are nothing but object and affect, and when we realise that a lot of harm done to women is legitimated or realised by a process of desubjectification, you must conclude that, whilst it might provide some release, it is ultimately a tragic submission, like the slut walk itself.
Your call for a similar critique of masculine pursuits is right on though. I would love to read a theory of gaming (I game), and dee always calls me a hypocrite for criticising fashion whilst simulating mass death 3 times a week. Perhaps because we are more sensitised to the subaltern position of women we are more inclined to research these areas (the obsession with the unfamiliar, abnormal or exotic), but in fact, the same processes apply in and through men. The whole Foucault criticise vs describe thing has something to say here too.
Alice
29/05/2012 at 17:42
Except that the point, Luke, is that SlutWalk is exactly the opposite of what you claim. It is decentering women’s dress as the sole expression of their selves by refusing to allow certain modes of dress — and the moniker of ‘slut’ for any mode of dress is inherently arbitrary and subjective — to be labelled as inviting sexual judgement. That is what you don’t understand, and that’s why we’re mad at you.
Spencer
05/06/2012 at 12:43
I think the event was poorly named.