SlutWalk/SlutFest 2012: Beth Clements Mosley

This is the text of Beth Clements Mosley's speech at SlutWalk/SlutFest 2012: 


I may only have occasion to say this once in my life, but I have to thank Rush Limbaugh.

I have to thank him for making SlutWalk’s point for us – by showing exactly why we’re here today.

The word ‘slut’ calls to mind many things; in Shakespeare’s time it was a woman who didn’t keep a clean house. When I was in junior high it was the girl who wore a lot of makeup and got boobs first, the one all the boys stared at.  For most of my life I’ve heard it applied to women who were ‘too sexual’ – or maybe just sexual in some nebulous way of which the user didn’t approve; maybe she wasn’t ashamed of her body or had sex with too many people - or just with the ‘wrong’ partners. Maybe she was the girl your boyfriend started dating too quickly after you broke up, or the woman who wore something too revealing, or the one who was vulgar or bawdy or too friendly and flirty with too many men. Whatever behavior it was being used to describe, the meaning was clear: less than. Unclean.

When Mr. Limbaugh used the word to describe a modest-looking college student who wished to testify before Congress about insurance coverage and birth control, however, he showed his ass. Now we know: a slut is any woman you think you might be able to discredit or shame into silence by humiliating her sexually. A slut is someone who’s gotten too close to the source of her power and is consequently to be feared – because to claim the full measure of our sexual possibility is to unlock the potential of an integrated self and become whole, and a whole woman is a powerful woman, a fearsome woman… a dangerous woman. Why do you think it’s so important to some people to keep our sexuality contained, sanitized, domesticated? Women are infinitely more than our eroticism – but it’s a potent part of who and what we are.

Sexual radicals – sex workers, lesbians, ‘sluts’… women who wish for their insurance to cover birth control – are canaries in our cultural coalmine; they show us where the air is foul. Instead of huddling together and reviling those who endanger our illusion of equality by venturing too near these behavioral boundaries, you might want to ask yourself why, if we’re truly free, there are boundaries at all – and why, instead of disassociating ourselves from those whose business or pleasure brings them close enough to those barricades to show the rest of us where they are, we don’t concern ourselves with tearing them down. True equality is not conditional: it doesn’t have to be earned and neither can it be compromised; it’s not for others to bestow or rescind. What we have now is not equality, but conditional privilege; we affirm that – and implicitly accept it - each time we seek to punish or ostracize those among us who test its limits.  This isn’t about a certain kind of woman; this is about all of us, about what we’re allowed and what happens when we get out of line.

It wasn’t fear that got us this far; be assured that it won’t get us any further – and, as we can all plainly see by this new epidemic of laws regulating our bodies, it’s not even going to keep us where we are. Instead of fearing the loss of the ground we’ve fought for, I suggest that we allow our anger to feed our courage to conquer what remains. We’ve never been so close – or stood to lose so much. We’re already going to have to fight – again - to keep what we’ve won; as long as the gloves are off, let’s kick some ass.

I’m not here because I want to be called a slut. No: it’s because I’m claiming all the positive things about my womanhood, my personhood, my birthright, that this language seeks to take from me. It’s my body, my sexuality – MY right to decide the time, the place, the context, companion and circumstances for myself. I get to set the guidelines for how I look and act: decisions about women’s bodies aren’t supposed to be made by committee. I’m here to reveal the tactic of attacking my dignity through my sexuality for the cheap trick it is. I’m asking you to look at what words like these really mean – the baggage they carry, the harm they do. I’m asking you to fight for the sovereign right of all women to define their own experience and to look carefully at the condemnation and contempt directed at those who dare to claim what lies beyond the borders words like that are intended to enforce.

I’m here for my friend, who called me twenty-one years ago tomorrow and told me that she had been raped. She sounded so small, so fragile, so unlike the person I knew; when I saw her I found that she was physically unrecognizable, too - brutalized beyond recognition. She wanted to stay with me, she said, because she was afraid to sleep in her own home, terrified that her rapist would return. She told the police what had happened, about the five hours she had spent blindfolded, tied to a chair, unable to see which direction the next blow would come from.  When she got to the part about how he had told her while he was raping her – repeatedly - that he wanted her to move the way she danced, how she had tried to do what he said so he wouldn’t hurt her any more, their faces changed, closed.

So, she was a stripper; he had seen her at the club. Maybe, despite the disfiguring bruises that covered her, this hadn’t really been a rape. They used a rape kit, took his DNA – and then, even though she told them she thought she knew who it was, never followed up. Once they found out what she did for a living they treated her violated body as if it were a stolen bike. It’s bad enough to have to say that no one did time for what happened – but that’s not true: my friend did twenty years. Twenty years of living in fear, of wondering if he’d come back or that he might be watching her from somewhere in a crowd, savoring the memory; of knowing that he’d gotten away with it. I’m here today for her.

Did you know that according to some statistics, 97% of men who rape never spend a day behind bars? Why do you think that is? It’s not because what happened to my friend is an isolated incident.

I’m not here because I hate men; I love men; they’re our friends, our fathers, our brothers, our lovers; I’m here to empower women and help us find a way to navigate the deep complexities and convolutions of our fraught gender-relations and be free to love and enjoy men in respect, dignity and good health, under terms of mutual consent and equal power.

I’m here to insist that equal protection under the law isn’t based on someone’s notion of virtue or merit. I’m here to say that inspiring sexual desire doesn’t mean submitting to oppression, degradation or abuse. We have the right to enjoy our power to compel, excite and appeal without being subjected to harm, blame and shame. There is no such thing as ‘asking for it’. No one ever asks to be raped. No one ever invites assault. No one ever deserves to be harmed. Sex is natural; violation is unacceptable.

I am not unclean. I am not undeserving. I am not less than. This body and all its possibility belongs to me, and the opinions of those who don’t live in my skin may not dictate what is good and right, necessary and proper for me.

I’m here because I will not be shamed into silence, into compliance, into invisibility.

You don’t have to like my choices – you do have to respect my rights.

My Short Skirt

From The Vagina Monologues

By Eve Ensler

My short skirt is not an invitation

a provocation

an indication

that I want it

or give it

or that I hook.

 

My short skirt

is not begging for it

it does not want you

to rip it off me

or pull it down.

 

My short skirt

is not a legal reason

for raping me

although it has been before

it will not hold up

in the new court.

 

My short skirt, believe it or not

has nothing to do with you.

 

My short skirt

is about discovering

the power of my lower calves

about cool autumn air traveling

up my inner thighs

about allowing everything I see

or pass or feel to live inside.

 

My short skirt is not proof

that I am stupid

or undecided

or a malleable little girl.

 

My short skirt is my defiance

I will not let you make me afraid

My short skirt is not showing off

this is who I am

before you made me cover it

or tone it down.

Get used to it.

 

My short skirt is happiness

I can feel myself on the ground.

I am here. I am hot.

 

My short skirt is a liberation

flag in the women's army

I declare these streets, any streets

my vagina's country.

 

My short skirt

is turquoise water

with swimming colored fish

a summer festival

in the starry dark

a bird calling

a train arriving in a foreign town

my short skirt is a wild spin

a full breath

a tango dip

my short skirt is

initiation

appreciation

excitation.

 

But mainly my short skirt

and everything under it

is Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

Most Men Don't Rape: Why We Should be Marching

I don't think the SlutWalk is about convincing men not to rape. Most men don't rape, and the ones that do aren't going to be convinced with rational discussion, because they hate us and there's something wrong with them. Imagine an anti-robbery march: HELL, NO, WE WON'T GO! BREAK AND ENTER, NO NO NO!

Neither is this about persuading The Big Machine to take us seriously. Never in the history of the world, as far as I know, has a marginalized group achieved equal status by convincing its oppressor of its worthiness or by pointing out that it isn't nice to dehumanize.

No: this is about addressing why feminism finds itself in bed with the patriarchy itself in deciding what sort of behavior is appropriate for women and what sort compromises our personhood, equality and safety. If we only get to pretend like we're equal as long as dominant culture lets us, then guess what: that's not really equality. The funny (read: sad) part about it is that at this point, we're still in that position because of our infrastructure-weakening internal strife. We're really only fighting each other, while the patriarchy leans back on its adjustable deathbed, sucking on a bendy-straw and cackling feebly – and until we get our collective mind right about sex, that's the way it's going to stay.

As long as we continue to accept that male sexual attention has the power to strip a woman of her agency and reduce her to an object, then we also accept that women who solicit sexual attention and enjoy sexual activity, especially outside accepted patriarchal parameters, are inviting that diminishment – not just for themselves, but for all of us. As long as we accept that, then we ourselves are complicit in perpetuating the notion that there are, in fact, conditions under which women do not deserve full citizenship with all its benefits, protections and responsibilities. Men are free to do what they want, but not us – and if some of us misbehave, it's we who will punish the bad girls, confiscating their car-keys and bringing them to Daddy.

Children of abusers will recognize this pattern of policing each other, forming factions and blaming whoever provokes the latest round of abuse for endangering us all.

There's a schism dividing the feminist paradigm, and it goes like this:

It's unequivocally, inarguably wrong to rape – but some of us really are asking for it.
I am a sovereign, autonomous individual, equal in all respects to you – unless I use my freedom to make a choice of which you don't approve.
Women are as capable, competent and worthy of respect as men – except the sexual women; they're inferior and worthy of contempt, maybe by choice, maybe not. Who cares? Do what you want with them; they're a problem we'd like to be rid of.

SlutWalkers: march not to decry our victimhood once again, but to reclaim our power and move out of our embattled, injured state and into our full human potential.

ACM
SlutWalk Colorado Springs

SlutWalk: the March for Unconditional Equality

Nadine Strossen said it best, I think, nearly twenty years ago in Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights:

“Women should not have to choose between freedom and safety, between speech and equality, between dignity and sexuality. Women can be sexual beings without forsaking other aspects of our identities. We are entitled to enjoy the thrills of sex and sexual expression without giving up our personal security. We can exercise our free speech and our equal rights to denounce any sexist expressions of any sort – including sexist expressions that are also sexual – rather than seek to suppress anyone else’s rights.”

It’s taken nearly a generation for that idea to gather enough momentum to finally propel itself forward, stridently claiming its place in the feminist dialogue. Openly erotic women, women who avail themselves of the right to sexual self-determination by making unpopular or rebellious choices with their bodies, are no longer willing to be feminism’s poor relations, begging morsels at the table of socio-political equality. We will no longer bear the brutal brunt of gender-conflict while being denied full access to the ground our sacrifices have helped to gain.

SlutWalkers march in the face of passionate opposition from many directions. Those who wish to keep us silent have much to fear: sexuality is the last frontier, the final battleground in the quest for full, unfettered cultural citizenship. If we wake up – truly arise and reclaim the source of our power - then all is lost, and the doddering, shuffling patriarchy will finally crumble. Pay attention: there is a reason why pornophobic feminists, in their misguided, fearful quest to suppress sexual expression, have found their greatest, most powerful ally in the patriarchal monolith of the Religious Right. Read The Handmaid’s Tale, and be very wary of that poisonous partnership.

There is no single path to gender-equality, no one party line, and that’s alright: compelling the patriarchy to cope with the validity of our conflicting agendas helps enlighten dominant culture to the breadth and truth of our possibility, the fullness of our humanity. Ladies: march proudly (and carefully; don’t want to turn an ankle in those shoes), speak out in solidarity, and continue to offer support where you receive no thanks. Our day is coming.

ACM
SlutWalk Colorado Springs