Tricky ground here, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ve never wanted to shy away from what I feel needs thinking about, and I feel that a few stories have come together recently that warrant some comment.
Firstly, the ‘Slut Walks’ began after uproar broke out following a Canadian policeman’s advice to a personal security class that women should stop dressing like sluts to avoid being sexually assaulted. Within weeks, thousands of women had taken to the streets to defend their right to dress minimally and show off their bodies.
This week, the Justice Secretary Ken Clarke got himself into all sorts of trouble for suggesting that there were ‘different sorts of rape.’ When challenged that ‘rape was rape’ he said, ‘no it’s not’ and proceeded to suggest that date rape was not as serious. We also have the story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is accused of sexual violence against a maid in the hotel he was staying in as as head of the IMF. For the Americans it’s clear: no matter who he is, he shouldn’t have behaved like that, whereas for the French there’s some leeway appearing to be given that he’s a ‘strong male’ who is just acting on his urges.
There is a serious issue here about power and sexual activity, but let me say first: rape clearly is rape. There is never an excuse to force someone into having sex because it violates our right to only offer the most precious and deeply personal gift that we have only to those that we choose to give it to.
But this does not mean that there are not complex questions surrounding the issue (though I don’t think the case of the maid is relevant in this sense.)
One of those questions is why some women feel that they want, or need, to dress in very revealing ways. Stripping away the arguments about fashion, we can think about the social semiotics of this: wearing short dresses and tops that reveal a lot does send out signals saying ‘I am a sexual person.’ That’s not to describe this as wrong or ‘sluttish’ but to simply try to understand it in observational biological terms. I teach in an all girls school, and girls have been very clear in class that they actually feel a pressure to dress this way when out with others because of a sense of competition. It’s a vicious circle in other words: if they all believe everyone else thinks they should all do it, then they have little choice but to follow. Peer pressure is real and strong, and pressure to live up to what they think boys expect of them is tragically very real indeed.
So in one sense it’s an ‘evolutionary blind alley,’ as Konrad Lorenz put it in On Aggression. He describes how the Argus pheasant has, over millennia, evolved longer and more elaborate feathers in order to ‘win’ the competition for mates. This has ended up with it being a rather limited bird – impressive feathers, but not much else.
So one of the things that has been playing on my mind is how we might interpret this ‘slut walk’ phenomenon in terms of evolutionary biology. Darwin’s theory is about natural selection, and how species adapt in order to make themselves more likely to pass on their genes. In this sense, dressing in a sexual way is a good strategy: it can be interpreted as a clear signal that someone is a sexual person.
Or can it? Some women would argue that the way they dress is no comment on whether they are trying to be ‘sexy’ or not. It is simply a fashion statement and nothing else. The problem lies with men, who are unable to control their urges or interpret a bit of flesh as an offer to approach. In this interpretation, we have moved ‘beyond evolution’ and are living in a world beyond the raw game of reproduction. It also appears – and I need some expert advice on this – that this moves us outside of what is considered ‘normal’ in the animal world: the males of the species having sex with females whenever they like. The idea of consent is problematic of course, but there are documented cases of groups of male dolphins cornering a female and preventing her from leaving as she appears to wish until they have all had sex with her.
So here’s my tuppence worth: I think part of our social confusion over this, why policemen and politicians are getting into problems, is that we are struggling to work out what the correct line is between our twin urges. We are highly evolved people, but evolved nonetheless, and thus have a basic need to be sexual and reproduce, and we flag up our ‘hotness’ by arranging our plumage appropriately – which sends the males crazy. But – our other urge is love, not sex. We have evolved somewhat beyond our basic evolutionary urges, and want to be free to express ourselves in non-basic ways, enjoying company but definitely not having to give in to powerful men who want us.
Ironically then, those who say women should be able to dress exactly how they please without unwanted attention from men are perhaps wanting to ignore our evolutionary heritage and declare humanity as specially exalted above the animals. Revealing dress is thus an almost spiritual statement. And those who say women should be more modest are in a funny way declaring that we have moved little beyond our animal friends and are unable to resist the sexual urges that they have. Thus the Christian conservatives and radical Islamists who want women to cover up are actually denigrating us to non-spiritual, animal status.
What I’d like to see then is not a protest march about the right to wear revealing tops, or legislation banning burkas, or any more Jurassic comments from men who should know better, but a conversation about who we are as people, and who we want to be. Why is it girls want to go out to clubs wearing almost nothing? Why is it some men want to lock women up behind veils?
All sexual violence is wrong. But I do believe that some of the men who perpetrate it do so out of confusion – alcohol fuelled, no doubt – about the sorts of people that they are meant to be, and the sorts of people they think women are.
So rather than talking about how we dress, rather than let the clothes fashion us, let’s talk about the people we are and make ourselves. As I put it in the book, Volf talks about ‘becoming the sorts of selves that can live in harmony with others’ – which means not be prescriptive about what people wear, but generous in our own thoughts about what is appropriate.
Comments
11 responses to “Date Rape, The Slut Walk, and the Problem of Evolution (Plus Dolphin Sex)”
The point of the Slut Walk is not protesting the right to show off one’s body. It is protesting the right not to be blamed for rape, the right to feel safe, regardless of what you are wearing.
I actually can’t find the words to comment any further at the minute.
Like Shirley, I’m a bit too speechless to know how to respond to what is essentially a few words of sense in amongst an avalanche of bullshit. The main thing I’m concerned about is your complete misunderstanding of what sexual violence is. For example,
“I think part of our social confusion over this, why policemen and politicians are getting into problems, is that we are struggling to work out what the correct line is between our twin urges.”
Sexual violence has little or nothing to do with urges for sex or love or anything else, but has everything to do with power and control. If you were able to fully understand this fundamental error then you’d understand why I have such a problem with everything else you’ve written about, from short skirts to burkas and dolphins. As Shirley points out above, the Slutwalk movement is about protesting the blaming of victims and it’s worth remembering that women are raped wearing skirts, low cut tops, tracksuits, trouser suits, duffel coats…if you read stories of street harassment over at the hollaback blog you will see that it is often when we are feeling least sexy and most vulnerable that women are harassed – not when we’re putting ourselves out there.
And finally, why do you assume that only women who dress in a revealing way are expressing that they are “sexual people”? We are all sexual people. If I wear jeans to work Mon-Fri and then put on a short skirt on Friday night at the club am I only a sexual person on Friday night? What if I’m married but I still want to squeeze into my sparkly minidress when I go out dancing with my friends? Am I making a false statement about my sexual availability? Oh those poor men…how confusing it all must be trying to negotiate a world full of deceitful women!!
I think perhaps I should have used a different word to ‘urges’ – perhaps tensions, and of course, you’re right that sexual violence is about power and control. But it can also be about losing control – and there is a difference there. That is why drink etc. is so problematic here, as you have hoards of people who are essential out of control, and this can lead to awful violation and violence.
And I’m not making that assumption. Because I’ve said x = y, that does not mean that other things can equal y too. I was simply making the point that what we wear does carry some semiotics. Our clothes fashion a story about us, and while you may have a very mature and bounded story with yourself – which is great – there are many women and men who, with the loss of meta-narratives, are confused about the stories they are telling with their clothes.
I find your last point interesting…perhaps reflects back on you that you perceive men to be confused because you think they find women deceitful?! I’d refute that strongly.
But it doesn’t matter. Should I wear a t-shirt with the words ‘I am a massive slut’ emblazoned on the front, it simply does not matter. It does not matter what ‘story’ people think I am telling. We need to be sending the very clear, very uncomplicated message to men and boys that you NEVER touch anyone who does not want to be touched by you. It doesn’t matter how they look or even if they appear to be inviting your touch. If they say no, or if they are too drunk or whatever to say ‘yes’ then you don’t do it. That’s pretty simple. And I wish more people would make an effort disassociate this imperative with an argument about fashion, clothes, semiotics, metanarratives, whatever. Because it’s really not at all confusing. Our brains evolved too, to the extent that I can tell my 6 year old ‘no’ and she understands that it means ‘don’t do that’ regardless of what she feels like doing.
Nothing I don’t agree with there… I just wish my 7 and 4 year old knew that ‘no’ meant ‘no’ immediately!
And that each of us did.
Because here’s the thing that Paul gets right to the heart of the human condition with in Romans 7: “The desire to do good is inside of me, but I can’t do it.” We know what is right, but we don’t always do the right thing. That’s the human tension: knowledge and free will. And this is why I wanted to try to steer the argument away from clothing to thinking about how we can be generous to one another.
So let me ask this: should school uniforms be ‘moderate’? Or should we allow kids to wear whatever they like in school? And why?
If you want to steer the argument away from clothing why do you keep talking about clothing?
I think kids should be allowed to wear whatever they like in school, but that is a separate argument. And that’s my point. What people wear and why they wear it is a separate discussion to the one about who can be blamed for rape (not in the least because there *is* no argument to be had in that respect, regardless of the fact that ‘we are all sinners’ or whatever….
The discussion about how people (and let’s be honest, we’re talking about women here) ‘should’ dress is one which we might want to explore in terms of *who* gets to decide that that’s something that needs talking about, before we even get to ‘low cut tops’, ‘suggestive’ clothing, right down to make-up, hair dye, shaving her legs, even bothering to brush her hair at all…. One thing is for sure, it has no place in a discussion about rape.
By the way, if your kids are saying they don’t know what ‘no’ means they have totally scammed you! 😉
Haha. They know. They just sometimes go ‘deaf’.
But the trouble is that it is in a discussion about rape – it’s all over the place. And both men and women have raised the stakes on that – and I don’t think I’m wrongly interpreting the slut walks. At least, I’m simply communicating what the media here have taken from it, which is that it is about clothes. So perhaps the organisers have mixed their message… like we all do! And what I have probably failed to do, but aimed at (blogs, always written too quickly, *sigh*) was to agree and say that it’s not about clothes, it’s about who we are as people.
As an amateur blogger myself I know how much energy and thought goes into sitting down to put a post together and that even the internet can seem too small a space at times to tease out the kind of nuanced dialogue on an issue that you feel is going on inside yourself. Sometimes people just jump on one aspect of what you’re bringing to it and follow a thread that you didn’t mean to be any more significant than all the others. So I hope that’s not what I’ve done with your post here, I hope I’ve been able to give it a thorough reading and hold all aspects of it together. That said, I still feel like the dangerous thread running through it is the fact that you chose to write about rape in the context of what women wear, why they wear those things, what evolution might tell us about why women dress a certain way, what biological messages we are sending out through our clothes… I know at the end you make statements about wanting to move beyond being concerned with clothes in the last 3 lines: “So rather than talking about how we dress, rather than let the clothes fashion us, let’s talk about the people we are and make ourselves. As I put it in the book, Volf talks about ‘becoming the sorts of selves that can live in harmony with others’ – which means not be prescriptive about what people wear, but generous in our own thoughts about what is appropriate.” But I have to confess I don’t really understand at all what you mean here. Maybe that’s where the disconnect lies for me with what you hoped to achieve with this post.
I do know that the issues you have focused on here are extremely unhelpful to all women. The statement you make about dress being part of a story we are projecting should not be the starting point for a discussion about rape and sexual violence. It has no place in that discussion, the only people who try to give it a place are those who don’t understand the true nature of sexual violence or the wider oppression of women that it both perpetuates and is a symptom of. (The people organising slutwalks are not trying to give dress a place in the conversation – they are reacting in anger to the idiots who keep trying to bring the conversation back to issues like dress, and doing so in a clever, creative and provocative way). So basically, I don’t care what semiotics are carried in the way I or any other women dress. If I go out wearing revealing clothing I may well be hoping to attract a man because I’m looking to hook up. But there is nothing in that which is connected to the possibility of me getting raped. If dress sends out a signal that confuses men, then where do you draw the line? I could meet a guy at a club and attract him with my revealing dress and talk about hanging out later at his place but then before the bars lets out I might realise I don’t feel too good and I’d rather go home instead. I might even get home with him and be starting to get busy but when I go to the bathroom to freshen up discover I’ve just taken my period and don’t feel like taking things any further. Maybe we even get right down to it but I suddenly realise he didn’t put on a condom like he’d said he would so I make him stop. There should be no confusion here in any of these situations. Consent is the bottom line. The person who ignores the withdrawal of consent is not confused or out of control – they are willfully abusing their power over another person. So to talk about the stories women tell about ourselves through the clothes we wear and how this leaves men confused… “about the sorts of people that they are meant to be, and the sorts of people they think women are” I just think you’re way down a road that has nothing to do with the real experiences of the 1 in 4 women in the UK who have experienced sexual violence in their lives.
for me the root of this debate is about partriachy, objectification of women and men’s relationship with sex.
Men are not evolving in the area of sex,many often act like they are animals (it’s instinct) when it comes to sex, they are out of control, needing to satisfy their feelings, but have limited emotional intelligence. I feel that until men can begin to learn empathy, treat women as equal human beings, question male gender roles and increase emotional intelligence – nothing will change!
Not sure if I really want to enter the debate on clothing – but I do feel that men are generally in control of the fashion and sex industry and therefore impact clothing styles. That concerns me.
The only thing I’d say here – and there’s nothing in your comment that I don’t agree with – is that what I’ve written isn’t the starting point for a discussion. It’s come into an already existing discussion that is – unhelpfully in my view – linking these two things. I’ve probably not succeeded, but I was trying to say we should get well beyond the clothing issue in this debate, and talk seriously about the sorts of people we are.
And we are complex people. I do think that the twin pulls of our evolutionary history and our conscious present do present struggles, which we need to be open about. The danger of hardcore Darwinists has always been that the violence of the animal world is carried over into our world – and I fear that the same idiocy of eugenics could be used as an excuse by some men that they ‘have these needs’ when, as you say, that is outright wrong. But in a world where new atheism is taking these hard lines, we do need to be careful that this doesn’t take hold, because if you eavesdrop on some men talking, I’m horrified to say that that is how their thinking goes. The question is, how do we move forward on that? My concern is that the slut walk is not actually that clever, because it hasn’t communicated the message you are sharing very well.