Slutwalk

SlutWalk is a transnational rally, march, protest and movement aimed at highlighting the prevalence of victim-blaming, rape-culture, street harassment and sexual violence. It emerged in 2011 following a Toronto police officer’s remarks saying that “women should avoid dressing like sluts” to prevent being sexually assaulted.

What NYC SlutWalk Was, and What It Wasn’t

Union Square was packed when I arrived at this weekend’s inaugural New York SlutWalk. The crowd was mostly women, mostly young and mostly white. Clothing styles ranged from topless to scanty to normal street garb to formal. One woman wore a business suit. A common thread was “slut” in red and black markers across foreheads, […]

A 17-Year-Old Does SlutWalk

At the crack of dawn I sneak soundlessly into my mother’s bedroom. Luckily, it rained last night, so the sky is wet and dark and soporific, so I don’t wake her. I tiptoe over to the closet, which looks like the holy arc in synagogue where they keep the Torah, and in my nervous haste […]

Pan Am: Will Women Take Flight?

Though I agree with Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker that you can’t judge a show by its pilot, I would counter that, in the case of Pan Am, there is quite a bit we can glean from the season opener. Indeed, just as one can gather quite a bit from a book’s cover–is the […]

Should Black Women Oppose the SlutWalk?

An Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk, signed by a hefty list of black anti-violence activists, scholars and community leaders, has been stirring conversation online since it was posted on Friday. Like previous Black feminist critiques of SlutWalk, the letter calls into question the anti-rape march’s reclamation of the word slut. The authors […]

Tavi Talks New Mag, SlutWalk and High School Politics

When we last spoke with Tavi Gevinson, uber-precocious 15-year-old fashion blogger and out feminist, she was talking about launching a reboot of feminist ’90s teen magazine Sassy (which shared offices with Ms.) A year later, she’s made it happen. In honor of Tavi’s new accomplishment, the online mag Rookie, an aesthetically astute, hip teen site […]

South Africa’s Subversive SlutWalk

In 2008 hundreds of South African women donned their miniskirts and protested at the taxi rank where a young girl was brutally accosted by taxi drivers and hawkers for wearing a short denim skirt. The men who accosted her allegedly stuck their fingers into her vagina and called her a “slut.” Women were outraged. The […]