ask not to present yourself as bait? As a matter of routine?”
“You can easily avoid letting your butt and boobs hang out,” she added. “You can’t easily avoid exposing your face. Assuming you want to have peripheral vision. And breathe.”
“Wait a minute,” Jane said. “I thought you supported Gwen Jacobs and the repeal of the shirtless laws. Now you’re saying ‘Cover up!’?”
“No! Yes! I don’t know!” Spike groaned. A thoughtful minute and one profiterole later—the classic pastry cream one—she tried to sort through her apparent inconsistency. “I agree that women should be able to wear whatever they want. That they should be able to go wherever they want, alone, even at night. That they should be able to get drunk if they want. I agree that telling them otherwise diverts attention from the real cause of the problem, the men who rape.”
“Which is why, for one thing,” Jane interjected, “reporters should use the active voice. Instead of ‘A woman was raped last night,’ they should be saying ‘A man raped a woman last night.’ ”
“Right. Good. But—” Spike bit into the next profiterole. The caramel cream one.
“Remember Twisty’s ‘List of Shit Women Do To Confuse Dudes Into Raping Them’?” Jane licked the last of the chocolate lava off her spoon. “They’re drunk. They leave the house. They’re girls.”
“See and that’s the thing.” Spike waved the third profiterole in the air. Chocolate cream. “If you live in a country overrun by morally-challenged muscled-up idiots who think you’re just a walking receptacle for their dicks, you shouldn’t go out alone, especially at night, you shouldn’t get drunk—”
“ ‘Should’ in principle versus ‘should’ in practice. Theory versus advice.”
“Yes! If you do any of those things, is any consequent assault deserved? No. But should it have been anticipated? Yes.” Satisfied, Spike took one, then another, bite of the profiterole, finishing it.
A moment later, she continued. “SlutWalk organizers don’t think through the male over-dependence on visual signals. The gawkers and hecklers who typically undermine the event should be expected. The inability of men to process verbal messages, even those just a few words long, in the presence of so-called ‘fuck me’ heels should be expected.
“And given men’s inability to pick up on subtle cues and/or their refusal to understand the difference between yes and no, let alone yes and maybe …” She waved another profiterole. No idea what kind it was. But it was the last one.
“Maybe when men can handle a sexually charged atmosphere without assaulting— Maybe when other men do speak out and take action against the rapists, one way or another— It’s no coincidence that there are close to 400,000 samples of DNA evidence in rape kits that remain untested and therefore inadmissible in court.” She bit into the profiterole. It was—actually, she still had no idea what it was. Kind of nutty, kind of creamy. Cashew cream? Almond cream? No matter. It was good. Very good.
“But here and now,” she said, “given our culture, given men, if a woman is wearing ‘fuck me’ shoes, she can hardly complain when someone fucks her.”
Jane raised her eyebrows. “No, that can’t be right,” she said a few moments later.
They both stared out the window for a bit.
“The civil rights movement had lots of white people accompanying black people into white-only places, didn’t it?” Jane asked.
“So, what, it’s hopeless until some men help us out?”
“No, that can’t be right either,” Jane muttered.
They stared out the window again.
“It’s one thing to just go without a shirt on a hot summer day and another to wear a push-up bra halter top,” Spike tried again, backing up a bit. “SlutWalk comes across as advocating our right to tease. Which is not only immature, it’s legally uninformed.”
“The provocation defence.”
Spike nodded.
“But the provocation defence stinks,” Jane said. “Apart from using ‘an ordinary person’ as the standard for determining whether the act in question was sufficient to deprive one of self-control—as opposed to ‘a reasonable person’—because in my experience the ordinary person is a walking miasma of unacknowledged emotions and unexamined opinions, most of which are decidedly unreasonable—apart from that, it puts the blame back on the woman: ‘It’s her fault; she provoked him.’ Which is ridiculous!
“Even if we assume that so-called slutty attire is a promise of sex, ‘You promised!’ isn’t a sufficient justification for assault, let alone murder!” She leaned back. Nailed it!
“As Lucy Reed Harris* points out”—she got her sledgehammer out—“a flagrant display of cash in public may well precipitate a robbery, but in that case, the law doesn’t hold the victim responsible!”
* Lucy Reed Harris, ‘Towards a Consent Standard in the Law of Rape’, (1976) University of Chicago Law Review 43(3), article 7.
“I didn’t say it was a justified defence,” Spike protested. “I just said SlutWalks seem ignorant of the fact that provocation is available as a defence. You’d think, if they were aware of that, they wouldn’t encourage provocation.”
“Oh. Okay.”
There was more staring out the window.
“So the SlutWalk message shouldn’t be that we can dress however we want,” Spike ventured, “but that we aren’t sexually available to everyone. No matter what men might think. For whatever reason they might think that.” The more she added, the more she doubted. So she shut up at that point.
“But isn’t the message supposed to have something to do with appearance?” Jane asked. “Didn’t some police officer say that if women didn’t walk around looking like sluts, they wouldn’t be raped? Isn’t that what started SlutWalks?”
They considered that.
“So … he mistakenly equated an invitation to sex with an invitation to violence?” Jane asked, eyes wide.
They stared at each other then. It all made perfect sense. If men equated the two.
“And speaking of going shirtless,” Spike said as they got ready to leave, “remember that woman, post-bilateral-mastectomy, who was barred from swimming in a public pool unless she wore a bathing suit top?”
“Yes …” Jane had yet to figure that one out.
“That proves it’s not about covering up. Or whatever. It’s about maintaining sex-differentiation. Because the patriarchy, men’s power over women, depends on it. So focusing on appearance, as SlutWalk does, is a red herring”—Spike had reached a new conclusion—“a huge distraction from the real issue.”
“Which
