A funny thing happened on my way to London’s SlutWalk on Saturday: I got scared. It was around about the time I exited the Tube station at Piccadilly. A sudden hit of adrenalin, and not the good kind.

I’m not sure what to blame it on. Being hit with the reality that while for me, SlutWalk was an act of solidarity with sexual assault survivors and every other woman who has ever been labelled a slut, by others it would read as a declaration of sexual availability? A sudden, irrational fear that “hardly anyone” would turn up, and it would just be me and handful of others marching the streets? (Less bodies means more visibility.)

But it was a timely reminder that as much as we live in a culture that valorises sexual activity as a path to status, maturity and (yes) empowerment, we also still live in a culture that condemns women if they dare to be sexual in the wrong way. In such a culture, going on a “SlutWalk” isn’t conforming, it’s confronting. A little bit gutsy, even. Even when you’re surrounded by 5000 other bodies.

It was a timely reminder that, for all the talk of “raunch culture”, being a “slut” is still a transgressive act. And a transgression that, on some not-even-very-buried level, I am personally afraid to make.

That’s not to say I’ve never been called one. The occasion that most readily springs to mind is when I was 16 and beyond virginal, but had the misfortune to wear a short dress around a couple of (I presume) similarly virginal guys who, so one of my friends told me, deemed such a get up “slutty”. (They later apologised, for what it’s worth.) I’m sure there have been plenty of others too, which just didn’t happen to get back to me.

The other issue SlutWalk got me thinking about is how very poorly we human beings deal with ambiguity. Or rather, how much we want wrongdoers to look and behave like cartoon villains. And how, when they don’t, we don’t know what to do with them. I mean, nice guys (and girls) don’t rape, right? (Wrong.)

I actually think that feminists have dealt quite well with the sexual assault issue in that - internally, at least - we’ve managed to find a language to reconcile the fact that most rapists aren’t strangers lurking in dark alleyways. That actually, most sexual assault happens at the hands of someone who is already known by the victim. Someone who, in many cases, was liked and trusted by the victim until the assault happened.

But it’s not just law enforcement and the newspaper reading public who struggle to come to terms with that apparent contradiction. It’s the survivors themselves. There are many reasons that it takes many sexual assault survivors a while to fully register what happened to them as assault, but one of them is the sheer disbelief that someone they liked and trusted would do that to them.

I wrote a story for Cleo last year about emotionally abusive relationships, and on the morning of SlutWalk, I was mulling over that issue with one of my housemates. Specifically: how do you know when enough is enough?

Articles like mine will lay out the signs - control, manipulation, nastiness, see-sawing emotions, the sense that you are absolutely losing your mind. We’ll even tell you that people in such abusive relationships will often fail to recognise it. Maybe their abusers is really quite lovely when they’re not acting out. Maybe it doesn’t seem as bad as other people’s relationships. Maybe they fight back themselves occasionally. It’s still abuse.

But when you’re actually in that situation yourself, it’s much harder to call a spade a spade. It’s easier to rationalise that your own issue isn’t that bad. You don’t want to take away from the people with “real” problems - maybe it’s all in your head. The other person seems perfectly nice in other contexts, after all, and you don’t want to destroy their life - or your relationship with them - over something small. And what if you really are just losing your mind?

Since it’s fairly obvious that I’m drawing upon my own experiences here, I think it’s important to clarify that I am not talking about my relationship with The Boyfriend, or any relationship within my family. I’m not even entirely sure what I’m trying to say with this post. But I do know that I ponder these issues a lot lately. And I also know that, like many, I’m yet to quite answer the question of how much is enough.

Related: Back in my day, sexual harrassment was another way of saying ‘hi’
Ask Rachel: What are your thoughts on SlutWalk?
“But women don’t rape!” Sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse

Guest asks: Thoughts on SlutWalk?

Short answer? I’m all for it. I applaud the premises, I think it’s great to see grassroots activism go global, and I’ll be marching in the London one if I’m in town that weekend.

How I got to that point is a somewhat longer story. I have to admit, when I first heard about SlutWalk, it didn’t “grab” me in the way it has grabbed so many other people. It’s not that I found it offensive, so much as I acknowledged its existence and moved on, thinking: “I can see this has good intentions, but it’s not for me.”

Not because I’ve never been called a “slut” (what woman hasn’t?). Not because I’m not comfortable with people using or attempting to reclaim the word, either. But because, philosophically speaking, the idea that “slut” equals progressive and liberated and “prude” equals conservative and repressed doesn’t gel. Sexual freedom doesn’t always mean sleeping around; it means behaving in a way that is authentic to your values and desires.

Of course, SlutWalk doesn’t claim any of these things - not directly. But when I first heard about it, at least, I felt like it played into a broader discourse that does.

Then I got commissioned to write a story on SlutWalk, thought about it a little more deeply, and realised that my initial concerns were beside the point.

Here’s why. In the past year or two, there have been occasional stories in the femmesphere addressing what is usually referred to as “prude shaming” (personally, I prefer “compulsory hypersexuality”, but basically we’re talking about a critique of the idea that everyone is getting laid all the time, and if you’re not there’s something wrong with you - be it psychological, physical or political).

Whenever these articles are published, there’s inevitably a comment from someone saying that “prude shaming” doesn’t exist, because they don’t see no prudes being shamed. All they see is a whole lot of slut shaming. And I always think to myself, “Oh, for god’s sake! Just because slut shaming is alive and well, doesn’t mean that its reverse isn’t, too.”

But that frustration goes both ways. Just because there is cultural pressure - on both men and women - to behave in ways that are cartoonishly sexual, doesn’t mean slut shaming doesn’t also exist, or that we shouldn’t be doing something about it. You can be angry about both at the same time.

SlutWalk isn’t about shaming people for not being “liberated” enough, just as it’s not about whatever else your pet issue might be (“compulsory hypersexuality” being mine). It’s not representative of the entire women’s movement, or even the entirety of conversations taking place around gender and sexuality.

SlutWalk is a protest and subversion of the way in which the word “slut” is used police women’s (and gay men’s, and trans people’s) sexualities - who we sleep with, how we sleep with them, what we wear, where we walk at night. In particular, it’s a protest of the way in which the word “slut” is used to scare, shame and invalidate sexual assault victims. And these are all things I unequivocally support.

Getting down to an even more micro level, it is a specific response to a specific remark by a Toronto police officer, who told a group of university students they “should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised”. As co-founder Sonya Barnett said when I interviewed her for my article: “If he had said something else, we would have called it something else.”

There probably is a debate to be had about the kinds of issues and activists that attract the most supporters and media attention, but none of this means SlutWalk deserves less support. It just means that others deserve more.

Got a burning question you’d like me to answer? Leave a comment, or send it to rachel dot hills at gmail dot com, and I’ll answer it here.

Related: Talking rape myths in this month’s Cosmopolitan
Kids today, they don’t know how slutty they are!

Elsewhere: In defense of prudes (Salon.com)
If SlutWalk truly wanted to be representative… (Creatrix Tiara)

I just wanted to post a quick heads up encouraging you to check out one of my stories in the latest issue of Cosmopolitan. 

Given the role that mainstream media plays in shaping our perceptions of what sexual assault looks like - and given the high proportion of the population who think it’s only “real” rape if it’s committed by a stranger (always a man!) in a dark alleyway, and there is no prior interaction between rapist and survivor - I am really glad that Cosmo decided to tackle this issue with no ifs, buts or excuses. I’m also grateful that I was given the opportunity to write it, given the amount of time I’ve spent thinking and reading about consent over the past few years.

A couple of excerpts from the article:

Much of the time, when we talk about rape, we draw upon one of a couple of familiar stories. There’s stranger rape, committed by anonymous criminals in alleyways. Then there are alleged “misunderstandings”, in which one person – usually a man – has sex with another thinking that they consent.

However, a new study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) has shown that most sexual assaults don’t fit either of these narratives. For one, the vast majority of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim – a friend, work colleague, family member or even a boyfriend. Nor are perpetrators easily identifiable creeps or misfits: the women interviewed for the AIFS study described their rapists variously as charming, talkative and engaging.

And:

This kind of behaviour is not uncommon, says Quadara. “Some men would send follow-up text messages asking their victim out again. In other instances, particularly drink-spiking or drugging, the perpetrator told them that they were wild, that they were up for it. They imposed their version of events on the victim/survivor.” And, often, it works. Just as it took Erica some time to register what had happened to her as rape, Jenny was scared to report her attack. “Because I was taking him back to the room, I didn’t feel like I could report it. So, I never reported it,” says Jenny.

“Survivors sometimes think, ‘Am I confused here?’” says Quadara. “Maybe he has absolutely no idea. In many instances, they give their attackers the benefit of the doubt until they’re in serious emotional or physical distress.” However, while a flirty phone call or text message could be interpreted to suggest a genuine misunderstanding, Quadara says this is not the case. “When you get into the detail of these stories, how they progressed from one step to the next, you see a very deliberate unfolding of behaviour designed to get someone into a vulnerable position,” she says.

A big thank you also to the Australian Institute of Family Studies’ Antonia Quadara and writer/researcher/campaigner Nina Funnell for their expertise and help with the piece. You can read the whole thing in the current edition of Australian Cosmopolitan, with Leighton Meester on the cover.

Related: Guest post: Being ‘Hip’, Notes on Sexual Assault in the London Art World
Kyle, Jackie, Matthew Johns and the most innocent of victims
“But women don’t rape!” Sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse

As a researcher who talks to young-ish people (18 to 29-year-olds) about sex, one of the things I find most consistently - and most consistently amusing - is that almost everyone I interview thinks that other people are more promiscuous than they are.

If they went to state high school, they tell me private school kids start having sex earlier, with their Gossip Girl-style social lives and greater access to recreational drugs. If they went to a private school, it’s the state school kids who are really at it - they attend classes together, after all, so they have more opportunity. If they grew up in a big city, it’s bored country kids; if they grew up in the country, it’s city kids who grew up before their time. 

Almost everyone I interview though, no matter how old they are, tells me one thing: people their age are totally misrepresented by the media, but those younger people? Things are very, very different for them. Totally sexualised.

It doesn’t matter if they’re 28 and talking about 18-year-olds, or 18 and talking about 14-year-olds, the story is the same. The funny thing, of course, is that 10 years ago, when those 28-year-olds were 18, older people (Tom Wolfe, for one) were writing and saying exactly the same things about them.

Part of it is the tendency to view ourselves - or our own age group, at least - as the centre of the universe. When we’re kids, we have no trouble imagining the complex psychological lives of four-year-olds (or at least I didn’t, if my fifth grade fiction is anything to go by). When we’re in Year 8, Year 7s seem embarrassingly immature. When we’re 18, we don’t want to go to bars populated by 30-year-olds, because, you know, they’re old. And by the time we’re 30, most people under the age of 20 seem like children.

Part of it, though, is that even if we’re critical of media portrayals of young people and sex, to some degree we internalise them. We know (in the case of most people I speak to) that it’s not true of us, or anyone we actually know. But if people are saying it all the time, we figure it must be true of someone.

And we don’t just internalise the idea that everyone else is on some Bacchanalian bender - we also take on the value judgements attached to those behaviours. Even if we fancy ourselves as non-judgemental progressive types. So, if we hear a 14-year-old girl has had sex, our immediate visceral response is to assume it’s because she’s been “sexualised”, because she thinks that having sex will make her cooler, sexier, more grown up. We rarely consider that it might be because she actually wants to have it, that it might have been a deliberate decision that was actually right for her.

(I’m not saying here that having sex is the right decision for every 14-year-old - in fact, I think it’s the wrong decision for most 14-year-olds, which is part of the reason why we have an age of consent, and why the vast majority of 14-year-olds aren’t having sex - but as Emily Maguire and Jessica Valenti have written, boys aren’t the only ones whose bodies are flooded with hormones and desire. Or love, for that matter. This is about agency, and trusting people to make their own decisions.)

There’s also a strong whiff of sexism to these assumptions. We don’t assume that teenage boys who have sex are foolish, self-deluded or tricked into it, for example. (And often this double standard is as much to teenage boys’ detriment as it is to teenage girls’.)

Then you have people like the New York Observer’s Nate Freeman, who have internalised stereotypes around young people and sex to such an extent that the fact that no one at a house party got laid at the end of the night (that he knows of) is considered cause for shock. Newsflash: the majority of people at a party not getting laid at the end of the night isn’t symptomatic of narcissism, low libido, or an obsession with updating one’s Twitter profile. It’s just the way most heterosexual casual sex cultures operate.

At the end of his article, Freeman recounts an exchange with a couple of the cast members of US Skins, who I think get it pretty much right:

The Observer asked them why young people in New York don’t want to have sex.

They both laughed.

“That’s a funny idea!” Ms. D’Elia said.

“I haven’t actually, um, heard that?” Mr. Newman said.

“I’m 19, so I don’t think I can weigh in,” Ms. D’Elia said.

Mr. Newman gave her a mischievous smirk.

“Both of us are kind of right out of high school,” he said. “We’re in that period where you supposedly ‘lose it.’”

“Everything makes you assume that this is Your Time,” Ms. D’Elia said. “For example, the media …”

“Or, for example, television shows …” The Observer said.

“Yes,” Ms. D’Elia laughed. “For example.”

Freeman, bafflingly, draws from this exchange that the characters on Skins get laid more often than the actors who play them because they don’t own web-enabled mobile phones. I’d be more inclined to suggest that they get laid more often because they’re fictional, and from a narrative drama perspective, having sex is more interesting than not having it. As one of my interview subjects put it: “Television is not an accurate portrayal of real life, but that’s kind of what we all like it for.”

Image: Cast of US Skins.

Elsewhere: Hormones rising by Emily Maguire (Sydney Morning Herald)
Sexless and the City: Web Warps Libido of Coked-Up Careerists (New York Observer)