Amber Rose’s long discussed Slut Walk finally came to fruition in Los Angeles on Saturday, and garnered a huge amount of social media attention both supportive and critical. This was Rose’s first time leading a Slut Walk, an event that was launched in 2011 in Toronto where local women where outraged by a police officer who told a group of college students,”women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Like other Slut Walks, the Los Angeles event drew on messages protesting street harassment, slut shaming and victim blaming.
When she spoke before the crowd (see video below), Rose spoke about first being slut-shamed at the age of 14 when “I was still a virgin.” She goes on to discuss meeting Kanye West (not mentioning him by name) in 2009 and traveling the world with him as “a regular girl from Philly…who never asked for fame,” and the negative comments that rained down on her during the time they were together, including being described as “nothing but a stripper” and a gold digger. She also talked about meeting Wiz Khalifa, falling in love and having a child with him.
After describing Khalifa dissing her in a song post break up, Rose broke down and cried, finally recovering and recommending that the crowd forgive those that have hurt them, as she has forgiven West and Khalifa (who she said has apologized for the song). After years of being inundated by male-owned media’s take on her relationships, it’s something of a revelation to finally watch Rose tell her side of the story.
While some of the criticism of the walk included straight up blasts of Rose as an attention seeker, along with the usual nervous jokes, there were also quite a few people who called into question the use of the word slut to describe the walk, angry that the event in their eyes celebrated sexually permissive women.
What critics fail to realize is that the word slut was intentionally used to draw attention to its status as a word that epitomizes the double standard, one that celebrates male sexual activity while shaming women’s. All minorities are subject to efforts by the dominant culture to control their behavior, ranging from laws both on and off the books, as well as shaming language and messages meant to maintain their outsider status. Women are hit particularly hard because of their power to reproduce, which translates to all manner of efforts to control and regulate their bodies by governments, businesses and religious organizations. Women and men are not the same, but they are equal and their behaviors fall along a continuum that is not easily defined by and shouldn’t be judged by gender. Keeping women in their place sexually is more than just regulating their vaginas, ultimately it is connected to and limits where they can go in the world and what they can accomplish and own.
Author Karrine Steffans who literally wrote the book on unabashed female sexuality, in a recent interview (video below) with Vlad TV’s Vlad Lyubovny (who donated to Slut Walk), commented on the event, stating, “It’s really crazy to me that we’re in 2015 that this is still a concept. Slut shaming is so strange to me. How a woman can have the same sex a man is having…and then when she gets up, she’s this horrible person and he’s magnificent.”
Steffans concludes that part of the issue is that men are actually projecting their own self hatred onto the women they have sex with, explaining, “Men fill us with your anger and self-hatred and you want us to carry that shit and it’s called slut shaming. I don’t subscribe to that because I have the right to do what I want with my body. I have the right to do it, I have the right to not do it, I have the right to make all the decisions I want and not be shamed for my decisions just because I’m a woman.” Steffans then goes on to give a debate worthy critique on how hip hop once “created to uplift” is now being used to degrade women and ultimately aids in ripping minority communities apart.
Between the event, Rose and Steffans, it’s all a refreshing relief from the usual media narratives that accept shaming sexually active women as par for the course and a-okay.
