Taking The Streets Back
The U.S.A saw it's first slut walk this week, a response to the outrageous comment by a Canadian police officer that if women wanted to avoid getting raped they should stop dressing like sluts. Not the best example of good PR - what ever happened to 'to serve and protect'?
Anyway by coincidence it comes at the end of a week when words and their meanings has been the subject of debate on one of the few remaining BBC Messageboards. The discussion meandered its way from the revelation that one of James Bulger's killers is to get another new identity, through the process of 10 year old children being tried and judged as adults to the use of the word retard, which I then added to by suggesting that spastic was another word that had become a no-go area.
The word slut is interesting because it originally meant a slovenly woman, slovenly itself being derived from an old English word meaning dirty or unkempt or excessively casual in their appearance. The first time I heard the word slut was as used by Sidney Poitier in the film 'To Sir With Love' when he describes the girls in his class who allow a tampon to be placed on a radiator as behaving like sluts. Of course this being the East End in the late sixties the words meaning has already moved on from the educated world of the New York teacher to mean something different. Fast forward forty years to another classroom, this time in the excellent award winning French film The Class and when the teacher admonishes two of the female students behaviour by telling them they are behaving like sluts (i.e they are being slovenly)the 13 year olds in his class only understand its meaning has being a put down associated with a casual attitude to sex and a near riot breaks out.
Words usage is all about context, you only have to look at the confusion among us white folks over the use of the 'n' word to see that, but surely in the 21st Century a person serving the public should know better than to state in public that there is a direct relationship between rape (power not sex being the trigger) and how women choose to dress.
2 comments:
Amazingly dumb thing to say for nearly anyone...but a police officer? Never ceases to amzae me, they say women are asking to get raped so what do they say to all the women on the beach, or at the swimming pool? Barely any or no clothes...asking for it?
P.S. That slut walk sound like a good idea, I think I need to go and observe one :-)
P.P.S. Words change a lot: how many people now say they want gay intercousre when all they want is carefree and happy conversation?!!!
Had to laugh about the P.P.S - I act for a club one of whose aims is to "promote social intercourse and awareness of its aims". Sounds like something that happens in a public toilet doesn't it?
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