Yesterday, over a thousand women, men, and children took the streets of Toronto in the first-ever SlutWalk. The walk was organized to protest comments made by a Toronto Police officer during a safety presentation at York University in January. The officer suggested that women could avoid being sexually assaulted if they didn’t dress like “sluts”. Yesterday’s participants—many of whom wore tights, thongs, short skirts, and other “slutty” apparel—sought to take back the word slut and prove that rape had nothing to do with what a woman wears. One of their chants said it all: “No matter what we wear or where we go, yes means yes and no means no!”
While I wholeheartedly support the message of SlutWalk, what I am most taken with is the reappropriation of the word slut. Words have power, and much like African-Americans have taken back the “N-word” in order to eliminate at least some of its negative power, so, too, can women take back the word slut and remove many of its negative connotations, particularly those that roughly translate to “She deserved it” or “She asked for it”.
Let’s take the sting out of the word slut. And while we’re at it, let’s take back the words fag and homo and tranny and dyke, and all of those racial and religious slurs that are meant to blame people for the hatred and violence they endure, when we all know it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the offenders.
Words are powerful, but as the history of language shows, they are also malleable—they can change meaning and connotation. All it takes is for a group of people, like those who marched yesterday (and those of us who were there in spirit), to start using the word differently—to adopt a label meant to shame and wear it as a badge of honour.
Shame doesn’t belong with the word slut; it belongs with the word rapist.
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