Germaine Greer: Hail the SlutWalks

We're dirty sluts and we're proud, she crows
By Mary Papenfuss,  Newser Staff
Posted May 13, 2011 3:00 AM CDT
Germaine Greer: Hail the SlutWalks
Bridget Matros of Boston waits while Mara Brod, writes a slogan on her chest before the two participated in the "SlutWalk" in Boston last week.   (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)

Get down and dirty and hail the SlutWalks. That's the advice from über feminist Germaine Greer. The global SlutWalks—organized to protest a Toronto cop's comments that women should stop dressing like sluts if they want to avoid rape—definitely feature people "taking liberties," notes Greer. "That's where liberation begins." Besides, "taking part in what looks like an endless "vicars and tarts' street party is not just bad-ass. It's fun," she writes in the Telegraph. But it's not just scolding for their sexual behavior that women should be challenging—it's the whole idea that women should somehow be purer or cleaner than men, notes Greer.

The term "slut" was not initially used to criticize a woman's sexuality but her dirtiness. The word denotes a "woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits," and was most often once used to refer to kitchen maids, who were also suspected of being "dirty" in their sex habits, notes Greer. "The rejection by women of compulsory cleansing of mind, body and soul is a necessary pre-condition of liberation," she concludes. "We have to be able to say: 'My house could be cleaner. My sheets could be whiter. I could be without sexual fantasies, too—pure as the untrodden snow—but I'm not. I'm a slut and proud." (More Germaine Greer stories.)

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