Junior classical languages and literatures and history major
OK guys, this is going to get rough quickly, so hold on to your butts. I’m talking about SlutWalk and the inability of men to separate the sexual from the actual; maybe through this we can introduce some sanity, respect and intelligence into masculinity.
SlutWalk, a brilliant statement for feminist activism, centers upon the idea that a woman dressing in a sexually provocative manner should not be assumed to be “asking for” sex.
This point, of course, is unquestionably true, and is not up for debate in this column.
Because we have too many men speaking for women on the campus and Capitol Hill already, I am going to speak to the male experience here. But everyone please read on, as negative masculinity affects us all.
In the case of men viewing a SlutWalk, I’d expect the male reaction to be almost exclusively sexual excitement. Because our culture has been successful at sexualizing images like women in bras, for example, men’s first thoughts are of sex. And once those thoughts take hold, thoughts of activism and change go by the wayside, and those male viewers shut down.
This isn’t just a male reaction to SlutWalk. Any advertisement hoping to reach a male audience knows it only needs the slightest touch of sexual suggestion to lock the male mind into a single desire.
It is constantly mind-boggling to me that men as a whole are not up in arms about this — that almost every advertising director in this country thinks so little of the entire heterosexual population of our sex that they can put the same one-trick pony on parade day after day and get the same results.
It’s not like masculinity is lacking a heavy dose of inherent anger. Insult a man’s sports team or the size of his penis and a fight is about to go down. But tell him he’s a simplistic bug, responding to the most basic sexual stimulus, and he will give you a high five, a “Woo!” and a beer.
It’s this same masculinity that produces outrageous social norms, gems such as averting eye contact while eating a banana or turning into a voiceless, blind machine when walking into a locker room. Our masculinity breeds petrified fear of some nonsexual events and overt carnality toward others.
But SlutWalks, like advertisements, are not necessarily sexual events. The existence of an exposed bra does not mean “get horny,” it means there is a person in his or her underwear living a life as you gawk.
And what’s worse — after all the sexual and verbal assaults on women that these attitudes lead to — is that we men had no say in the matter. We did not decide to shut off our brains at each miniscule mention of mammaries; we were told to do so and, being children, we did — over and over again. There have been millennia of human history in which breasts and butts were no more than knees or ears, and sexual activity did not hinder or prevent any mind, male or female, from thinking or reasoning.
We do, however, have a choice to change now, and we’re past the point of making excuses for our behavior.
That’s the world I’m sick of: one that silences both sexes, with physically and emotionally disastrous consequences for women. It is long past due that we begin retraining ourselves to process events like these for what they are, rather than what we’ve been told we can get out of them, and it should have started the day before yesterday.
Erik Shell is a junior classical languages and literatures and history major. He can be reached at eshelldbk@gmail.com.
