What's in a name? That which we call a slut...

What a difference a year makes. Last year women around the world were marching in their underwear, the four-letter word, slut, emblazoned on their chests.

They declared that they wanted to transform the meaning of the word “slut,” to make it a new badge of feminine pride.

This year, in the heat of the political season, the word has just been placed on the list of the seven deadly slurs. Unless you are a liberal or progressive, you no longer have the right to call any woman a slut or a c*nt.

If the Slutwalks were supposed to take back the word slut, to make it into a badge of pride, they have apparently failed.

Slutwalks originated in Toronto when a constable declared that a woman could reduce the risk that she be the victim of a sexual crime if she not dress provocatively. In the ensuing uproar his remarks were made to mean that he was blaming women who had been raped. And also, that he was telling women that if they dressed like sluts they had somehow forfeited their right to justice. 

Within the courtroom, it is common practice for defense attorneys to cast aspersions on the character of rape victims. No one thinks that this is a good or just thing. 

Unfortunately, within the criminal justice system, there is very little anyone can do to stop it.

If the Slutwalkers had been protesting the way rape is prosecuted they would have had an unassailable point.

But as the movement grew, the message got muddled. Inspired by the likes of sex-positive feminist Jaclyn Friedman Slutwalking became an assertion of female sexual power.

At the time, sex-positive feminists like Friedman wanted women to get in touch with their inner slut.

When Friedman wrote an article about how she learned to like having casual sex with the anonymous men she had met through Craigslist she claimed that she was striking a blow for women’s equality.

If men could have casual sex and not be disparaged then so could women.

Instead of fearing being called sluts, women, according to Friedman, should embrace the term. Thus, they would deprive it of its sting and stigma.

More than a few feminists thought that she had lost her mind. Maybe that’s what too much casual sex does to women.

At the least, Friedman’s idea was original. But sometimes ideas are original because no one has been dumb enough to entertain them before. Why, beyond ideological zeal, should we want male and female sexuality to be similar or identical?

After all, feminine and masculine sexuality are like the sacred and the profane. Surely, the two need to get along. The two need to accommodate each other. But nothing is gained by profaning the sacred or by pretending that the profane is sacred.

Even when a man and a woman are having carnal relations they are not having the same experience, are not incurring the same risk, and are not making the same emotional or biological investment.

We can understand this without looking into gross anatomy. In an era where everyone is exhorted to speak openly and honestly about sex, and where women are encouraged to talk dirty in order to show that they are liberated, any time a woman refers to sexual experience she will most often use the word “intimacy.”

Men have been known to use the word too, but if they do that only means that they are trying to echo a woman’s thought processes. In some cases it’s a sign of respect. In others, it means that they are up to no good.

For all the open and honest and free discussion of sex, for all of the exposure of matters sexual online, when women talk about sex they use a term like intimacy that feels closer to the sacred than to the profane.

In so doing they draw a veil over the anatomical specifics.

Women define their sexuality in terms of relationships, emotional bonding, and, something that is or that resembles marriage. Women have a very strong preference for intimacy that is part of a larger context, a context that involves personal commitment.

On the other side of the sexual divide men have monopolized the market for profane and profaned sex. They have long supported sex involving prostitution, pornography, and stripping.

Women often feel repulsion when they see intimacy desecrated. They have no sympathy for those women who make a practice of profaning something that they hold to be sacred.

Women who profane their sexuality are either catering to male sexual proclivities or having sex as though they were men.

Having lots of sex with lots of different men diminishes a woman in the eyes of her peers.

It is important to note that a woman’s sexual behavior defines her self-respect in a way that a man’s is not.

You may think that this is unfair or unjust. It is more likely that it just is.

If a woman tells a woman: act as though you respect yourself, she is talking about sexual behavior. If a man says it to a man, he will be not referring to sexual behavior.

Also, and perhaps self-evidently, a woman bears the ultimate responsibility for how she conducts her sex life. By treating her sexuality as a sacred trust she will gain self-respect, confidence, and pride.

If she does otherwise, she will lose a measure of all of them. It’s not for nothing that it’s called the walk of shame.

I am placing the emphasis on behavior because negative terms like slut are not just states of mind or figures of speech.

They correlate with human behavior. Sometimes justly and sometimes unjustly. No one ever wants to see any woman unjustly called a slut, but the best way to overcome the stigma is to request an apology by the offender and to behave in a way that gives the lie to the slur.

If a woman’s self-respect depends on whether or not she treats her sexuality as a sacred trust, then anyone who tells her to profane her sexuality is doing more damage to her life than is a talk show host who unjustly slanders a woman.

Encouraging women to behave like sluts in order to advance a cause is appallingly bad advice. Since it is being given by people are supposedly pro-women it is more likely to be followed.

By now everyone knows that Rush Limbaugh is hardly the only radio or television personality who speaks ill of women, who tries to brand them with profane epithets.

Yesterday, Kirsten Powers offered a long list of the slanders that liberal and progressive personalities have thrown at Republican women.

Powers speaks as a liberal. She is not trying to play the Limbaugh brouhaha for political ends. She feels strongly about the sacred aspects of feminine sexuality and has consistently defended it as such.

Powers has always distinguished herself for her intellectual integrity, and, since we see so little of it in today’s liberal commentaries, we should take special note of it.

Powers fully documents the case for liberal misogyny. I will quote her at length:

During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.” He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.

Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” Olbermann now works for über-leftist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore at Current TV.

…

But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny is without a doubt Bill Maher—who also happens to be a favorite of liberals—who has given $1 million to President Obama’s super PAC. Maher has called Palin a “dumb twat” and dropped the C-word in describing the former Alaska governor. He called Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann “boobs” and “two bimbos.” He said of the former vice-presidential candidate, “She is not a mean girl. She is a crazy girl with mean ideas.” He recently made a joke about Rick Santorum’s wife using a vibrator. Imagine now the same joke during the 2008 primary with Michelle Obama’s name in it, and tell me that he would still have a job. Maher said of a woman who was harassed while breast-feeding at an Applebee’s, “Don't show me your tits!” as though a woman feeding her child is trying to flash Maher. (Here’s a way to solve his problem: don’t stare at a strangers’ breasts). Then, his coup de grâce: “And by the way, there is a place where breasts and food do go together. It’s called Hooters!”

Of course, this means that the real double standard today exists in the way the media differentiates the behavior of liberals from the behavior of conservatives.

Of course, it isn’t a new thing. Clarence Thomas was excoriated and slimed when he was accused of making suggestive remarks to Anita Hill. Yet, when Bill Clinton was accused of far, far worse, of sexual harassment and rape… his accusers were attacked as belonging to a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Feminists were silent.

Clearly, there is a message here. And it goes beyond today’s politics.

It says that if you are a Republican or a conservative, you will be held to the strictest moral standards. But if you are a liberal or a progressive, you can abuse women, by word or deed, to your heart’s content. 

You disagree? As recently as last summer rapes and other sexual assaults were reported at the Occupy encampments. When they were, the leaders of the movement and the media conspired to keep the story quiet.

When faced with the choice between a woman’s quest for justice and the larger cause, the radicals in the Occupy movement opted for the latter.

It’s one of the ways that feminists recruit men to their cause. They have been intimating that if men hold the right ideological positions they can abuse women and not be held to account. Let's call it what it is: a recruiting tool. 

If men are not friends to the feminist cause your least mistake will become a mark of Cain, branding them as contemptible and unfit for advertisers.

A constable in Toronto sparked a worldwide protest movement when he said that he did not want to arrest a man for rape because his victim was dressing like a slut.

Yet, when an Occupier or a Bill Clinton is accused of assault or rape, his feminist enablers rush to the barricades to defend him. Aren’t they telling the world that if a man joins their cause they are willing to let him get away with sexually abusing women?

Why no protests about that?