You must adore a bit of no-nonsense feminist parenting in action, go Catherine Deveny:
Deveny wrote an article for The Drum yesterday explaining why she was taking her three young sons to SlutWalk. When asked if they had wanted to come, Deveny explained: “The 13-year-old at the end went ‘I don’t wanna gooooo’ and I said ‘well women don’t want to get raped either, get in the car.’”
Updated: Also, this from Godard’s Letterboxes via tigtog.
I want my boys to grow up to be the ones who intervene, who say ‘that’s not cool”, who help the passed out girl home. I’ve had friends like that, I will treasure them for ever. I want my boys to be good sexual citizens, I want them to treat women (and men) with respect, no matter what they wear, no matter who they have (or haven’t) slept with.
The time to start learning respect is now. When they are 9,7 and 5. Not later. And that is why they’ll be coming to Slutwalk with me. And with my male partner.
Perhaps the key to saving the world isn’t just raising feminist daughters, but feminist sons?
You could well be right, Stef.
Concerning the OP, I don’t agree with Catherine Deveny on everything, but on this I think she’s right. Hoping my own kids will march with me in Sydney.
This made me raise an eyebrow – her analogy is a bit odd. Women don’t want to get raped so to teach you about how bad that is I am going to force you to do something you don’t want to do either…
It reads funny as a sentence, but the nature of having to do things that you don’t always want to do – like cleaning out the guineapig cage because the guineapigs don’t want to live in filth – is pretty different to the loss of bodily autonomy that occurs with sexual assualt.
Exactly! That is why I just thought it was a dumb comment. It made no point at all except to say something quite flippant about rape.
I’m finding myself disagreeing here. I think it was a shorthand, reasonably age-appropriate way to insist that social conscience, and actively participating in agitation for change, is something we do because it needs to be done, even if it is not primarily about us individually. Perhaps that should have been how she explained it, but perhaps she did once they got there.
Yeah, I agree with that totally. But saying “Well women don’t asked to be raped so I am also going to force you to do something you don’t want to do” just seemed like a dumb comment to me. What makes what she did feminist parenting was that she took her son to the rally. Not that comment.
And to be honest, I don’t think flippant comments like that about rape are age appropriate at all. They are just dumb. And not appropriate at all. It just trivialised what rape actually is without actually adding any knowledge at all (other than there is some tenuous connection between being raped and forced to do anything else a 13-year old might not want to do)
On another point, I am of two minds about the slutwalks. They do seem like an overly simplistic response to the realities of rape. I found this article thought provoking:
http://globalcomment.com/2011/slutwalk-goes-international-the-uses-and-limitations-of-a-simple-idea/
And the fact that so many people at these walks are “dressing slutting” in a way that to me is nowhere near the equivalent of liberation leaves me cold.
The point is (if you ask me) that *anything* can be called “slutty” by those who wish to degrade women and blame victims. This blog post (but mainly the comments) help show both sides of it, and I particularly liked this comment:
“I remember being in a mall in Riyadh with some Saudi workmates who pointed to a group of women in full burkha and whispered ‘Check them out’, without a trace of irony (the women were unescorted, so presumably single, hence intense excitement.)”
http://dimpost.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/slutwalk-or-social-activism-as-reality-tv/#comment-45015
Good point. Which is why I find it a bit odd that so many women are attending the SlutWalks in clothes that they wouldn’t ordinarily wear and are instead carictures of outfits that oppress women but in a different way. And are shouting that that is liberation.
I have mixed feelings about the slut walk too.
I should say that I was at a London university security briefing where a police officer said basically the exactly same thing as a officer in Toronto. I was aghast and said so. The general view was that I was a irresponsible for not advising my students to dress more “cautiously” when they went out at night.
So I think the fact that so many people are standing up and saying that this attitude is fcked up and potentially dangerous is a good thing. I just not sure about the particular strategy – what it fights for with one hand it destroys with the other. Or something like that…
ps: http://tumblinfeminist.tumblr.com/post/5532695085/fool-proof-sexual-assault-prevention-tips-id
@ Jane – how do you know the women are attending Slutwalks in outfits they wouldn’t normally wear? A lot of the outfits look like pretty normal uni wear for particular groups when I was at Uni, admittedly a while ago now. It’s not clothing I see often in my country town, but I would expect to see it in Sydney, or at a nightclub, or King St Newtown. I think these women are marching to say – we wear this type of clothing because we like it, it doesn’t make us sluts and it doesn’t mean you can rape us.