The puerile association between a woman’s choice of tattoo placement and her sexual availability. AKA the Tramp Stamp. I hate that word. I hate it as a woman who has many tattoos and is bored rigid of all the shitty comments from the Morally Uptight Brigade about how ink looks “common” or “trashy” on women (and it’s almost always about women), how I’ll hate it when I get older, which is another dull reminder of how once we’ve lost our looks we’re for the bonfire of other people’s vanities.
But worse is the fact that tattoos, particularly this placement, have been added to the ever mounting list of Reasons Why Women Are Sluts. We marched for this, people!
A quick scroll around the internet reveals the extent of the problem. Over 2 million results on Google for the term “tramp stamp” alone. Top hit is the Wikipedia article which doesn’t even try to assert any form of anti-sexism editing beyond the coy reference to “lower back tattoo”, which I initially applauded until I saw the bare bottom shots used in the article. There are pages and pages devoted to deriding these tattoos, and the women who have them. So far, so bad.
The litmus test is whether the chaps get tarred with the same brush. Seems not. They may well have tattoos in this place (it’s a good bit of skin to get inked) but they’re apparently doing it for the irony factor. Or, poor thing, by accident.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not denying that some of these tattoos are ugly, silly or plain ridiculous. I’m very fussy about my tattoos and I love each one to bits almost as much as I love bitching about crap ones. Tattoos are a matter of personal taste, not a flag declaring whether or not I want to sleep with you: if you pour scorn and sexist drivel on my ink, then I definitely don’t.
Tramp stamp – another phrase that we can probably do without. Agreed?
]]>Mostly, it was lovely to see so many people rallying to the cause of (primarily, but not exclusively) women being able to wear what they want in public without it being seen as consent to harassment and assault. It’s true. Consent to sexual activity is divorced from anything other than what we say. Nothing else consents for us.
Later, we went clubbing, and on the way home on the tube, some men used me as their paid-for amusement for the evening against my will.
I was wearing this: 
So I stood out, yes. Get in. I looked the fucking business, people. We’d just been to a club whereby anything went as far as costume went, and I’m a guy that will jump at any opportunity to tart up. Thus, tarted up I was.
I was hassled for photographs by some young men who only cursorily asked whether they could get a picture of me before pawing me and grabbing me and threatening me. But that’s fine, if awful – I could deal with that. I’ve dealt with that before. They were young and quite drunk, for what it’s worth, not that it’s an excuse.
I clocked a group of people, some men and some attached women, checking me out and talking amongst themselves further down the carriage. As I watched, one of them – a young man, approximately a few years older than me – stalked down towards me, looking at my body as he went. He looked at my face, my jawline, my throat, my chest, my waist and my hips. He continued past me, and continued his observation of my body from behind. He said nothing, and got out his phone and started fiddling with it.
Intimidated, I moved to put my back to the wall of the carriage, next to the door, and told him that if he wished to take my picture as well, he could ask.
He looked up. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t want to take your picture. It’s just that my mates have a bet on as to whether you’re male or female.”
It couldn’t have hurt me more suddenly or sharply if he’d slapped me. He had been assessing my body to see whether I was of the female-assigned-at-birth or male-assigned-category. I bristled. “Firstly, I’m male,” I hissed, “and secondly, I’m not a fucking zoo exhibit. I am actually quite offended.”
“Hey, calm down,” he started, before my best friend Mim stepped in to ask him, in my defence, what sort of entitled arsehole he thought he was, and what gave him the right to use me as his amusement? Would he put bets on whether someone was gay or straight?
“I just wanted to know what she was dressed as,” he said.
Not only had I been gawped and ogled at like a caged animal, he didn’t even take my own word for my own gender. Apparently, his opinion based on his flawed assessment of my physicality over-rode my own identity. I had my identity casually erased before my eyes. Despite my protestations, I wasn’t human to him. I wasn’t a person. I was a freak, an indeterminate outsider, and therefore he found it acceptable to treat me like subhuman filth.
This may sound minor to some of you. He never touched me, he never hit me, raped me, spat at me, threw a beer can at me – none of the things he could have done. I got off lightly. I’m still intact, aren’t I? No swabs, police reports or bruises.
But he’ll have got home and laughed with his friends about how they hassled this weird girl on the tube who thought she was a man and forget all about it. I won’t. I’m not going to forget. Every time I wonder if there’s a place for me in society, it’ll be his face and words I remember. I’ll remember how he looked at my body – the very thing I fret about every morning to dress carefully around so that people won’t see my tiny waist and curvy bottom and think, “That’s a girl” – and how his cissexist assessment of my shape nullified my identity.
We had a march that very morning about this, didn’t we? Women marching, unified by their contempt for the assumption that they are somehow to blame for their own assault and victimisation. A Facebook event was made, and it ballooned! We had a whole march! And do you remember the John Snow Pub gay kissing incident and all the clictivism that happened for that? Hundreds of people kissed all over the pub in defence of those kicked-out guys.
And that’s brilliant. But where are we? Where is the mass anger and outrage for the trans* people? It’s still the Seventies for us in many respects. The internet-based feminist communities are slowly but surely opening their arms to us, but we’re still widely invisible. The beating of a trans woman in Baltimore earlier this year prompted the only bit of mass internet activism concerning a trans* person I have seen in years. We don’t get outraged marches or supportive column-space in newspapers. We’re still the circus freaks of popular culture, the strange deviant unicorns that get exoticised or demonised by turns. Look at the media shitfest over the gender-free baby Storm. Look at how many publications misgender Chaz Bono when they talk about him. Would have that entire carriage of silent passengers stood up in my defence if it was overt racism being displayed instead of transphobia? It’s just not taken as seriously, at all.
I appreciate that there aren’t many of us. If there was a march of trans* people in London tomorrow, there’d be about three people there. 2010’s Brighton TransDOR was woefully under-attended, and the only cisgender people there were friends and family – people who were directly in contact with a trans* person. We’re invisible. But we’re here. And as the social atmosphere changes from hostility to acceptance, more of us will have the courage to live openly and come out.
Bring that on, say I. And that all starts with basic visibility and people giving a shit. So here I am, being as visible as I can be (without blogging continually about living trans* as there’s people that do it better than me!) and I’m asking you to start giving a shit about trans* people right now. Please.
Here are some of my favourite read-think links:
- Transwhat? – an up-and-coming resource for non-trans* friends of trans* people and allies
- Asher Bauer’s “Not Your Mum’s Trans* 101” – a 101 on what it means to be trans* that pulls none of its punches
- Ciscentrism Sucks! on Tumblr – a trans* space that makes good reading if you want to educate yourself on more in-depth trans* discourse ]]>
We were also better organised, having managed to create a proper banner and it was great running into other feminist and activist groups such as bloggers from The F Word and the Queer Resistance crew.
Look at our banner! It
Most importantly, we were also a little wiser, having learned to pack water, snacks (wholemeal scones with dried fruit have been designated the official protest food) and weather-suitable clothing, which in this case meant sunblock and waterproofs.
We gathered outside the tube station to co-ordinate ourselves and our outfits before filtering over to Hyde Park Corner where the marchers were being gently herded by stewards. It’s estimated that over 5,000 people marched on the day, far more than originally thought. The sun beat down on us as the air filled with a festival air of drumming, and SlutWalk London banners: “No Means No” and “My Dress Is Not A Yes”. Homemade banners told a range of stories, from the extremely personal (“I was wearing jeans and a jumper”) to the slightly Dadaist (a hand-drawn image of a breast crying black tears).
After a little longer in the sun than we might have liked, we eventually set off to a chorus of cheers, chanting “yes means yes and no means no”. The well-dressed folk outside the Ritz, combined with the builders digging up the road, added a slightly surreal quality to the proceedings.
Along the march we were able to look around at our fellow slut-walkers, who all seemed to have arrived from a wide variety of backgrounds, and many of them newly politicised and newly interested in feminist activism. The variety and number of people present was impressive. Men and women, cis and trans* people, old, young, queer and straight. But sadly, that hasn’t been precisely how Slutwalk has been addressed or represented.
The march has been depicted as a “women’s protest“, with most articles leading on the high volume of women and only skirting over the fact that there were plenty of men at the march. This attitude was sadly widespread on the day itself: we were referred to as “ladies” by other marchers despite the fact that we had men in our group.
Here at BadRep Towers, and partly hidden by the veil of the internet, we are often assumed to be a group of women, whereas we are in fact variously women, men and bugger-off with-your-gender-identification. Whilst on the march, we were very visible (especially with our amazing banner!) and yet we still faced the same problem. The men walking with us were either ignored, or even more tellingly, assumed to be women in later writeups altogether. And there was persistent misgendering going on too, even after people were set straight. It’s pretty awkward and upsetting to witness people being excluded on a march because of how they look, when you are marching to remove prejudice over how people look.
The other challenge here is that if SlutWalk is viewed as a man-excluding club then it falls too easily into the trap of accusations of man-hating, rather like common judgements of feminism itself. So, for the record, there were plently of chaps and not just the ones that write for this website. And hurrah for them!
Other media responses included criticisms of the reasoning behind the march itself. The blogosphere exploded into hackneyed analogies along the lines of “people who leave their front doors open should expect to get burgled”, and the media started to generate all sorts of ways to stir up other reasons why SlutWalk is a bad idea.
The Mail (of all places) criticised Slutwalk for being too middle class in its focus. We (much like the Mail) did not conduct an in-depth survey of the class background of all 5,000 protesters, so I’m going to let the image of women holding a Socialist Worker sign used in that very article attest to the class conscious values of those present. Irony points, indeed.
And, as was sadly bound to happen, some members of the press completely missed the point or just concentrated on the titilation aspect.
Media response aside, the general mood on the day was very positive and there are plenty of articles out there that are just as upbeat, just as expressive of the wide range of people who support Slutwalk: lesbilicious offers an eyewitness account, or if you don’t feel like doing any more reading, there’s a huge collection of photos that show the range of people at the Slutwalk over at Urban75.
We met a lot of cool people and heard a range of inspiring, heartfelt and amazing stories from speakers when we landed in a jam-packed Trafalgar Square. In the bustle, it was hard to see the speakers, so we let a wave of different voices wash over us. We listened to plummy, stately tones deride the idea that only working class women get raped, then the quiet voice of “Just Jo” deliver her life story about the experiences of being a trans woman subject to verbal and physical abuse. We heard the shocking facts about abysmal treatment of sex workers in instances of rape, delivered by Sheila Farmer of the English Collective of Prostitutes and activist Sanum Ghafoor angrily berated the catch-22 situation of living in a society that criticises women and dubs them “terrorists” in the street when they don the hijab and “wear too much”, yet casts them as “slags” when they wear too little. She was ably supported in this by the presence of Counterfire’s Hijabs, Hoodies and Hotpants block.
Personal stories told by all kinds of people, but all pointing to the same conclusion. Rape happens to people regardless of what they are wearing. Rapists, not those who are raped, and certainly not the clothes of those who are raped, are to blame.
SlutWalk London still need some extra cash – organising protests costs a lot of money. You can help them by donating here.
]]>AND NOW, THE LINKS.
- NURSE, THE SCREENS! Comics artist Cliff Chiang appears to be deliberately trying to incite a Fansplosion of Joy at BadRep Towers. Check out this artwork, in which a bunch of DC superheroines have a “Tonight, Matthew…” moment, and rock out as The Runaways. Ah, hell, let’s stick it up here:
He’s even titled it I Don’t Give A Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation. Particularly digging the way Joan Jett/Wonder Woman’s lasso doubles as a guitar cable. Shiny. The folks at Comics Alliance also felt the urge to shout about it, and their piece is worth a read for its comparison to another bit of cool punk/superhero mashup art. Anyway, as a result of all this excitement we’re now restraining the urge to cosplay as superheroes cosplaying as rockstars. Too much meta. Much, much too complicated for a Friday morning. BUT WE THOUGHT ABOUT IT. - Crunk Feminist Collective talks language, race, and assumptions within feminist and press coverage of the SlutWalk phenomenon. Much as we’re behind the march itself, this post raises issues – unraised in any other coverage we’ve seen – well worth contemplating, whether you’re a marcher or not.
- electronic doll of adult (and therefore NSFW) blog Post Modern Sleaze talks consent, clothes, sexism and SlutWalking.
- After the folks who run the Imperial War Museum‘s twitter account read and linked to our post on their Women War Artists exhibition this week, we got chatting and ended up spending quite a bit of time browsing the extensive online archive of propaganda posters – the history of this one is pretty interesting. Thought this teaching resource, titled “War Babes”, was pretty cool – it encourages the class to unpick gender stereotypes and challenge their own assumptions just a little bit. More than we were expecting, anyway.
That’s it! See you on SlutWalk London!
- Assuming the bloody thing arrives from the printers in time. We may just have to yell the lyrics to Bad Reputation in unison. Won’t that be great! We’re all classically trained at Grade 8 in caterwauling, I promise you.
You have been emailing us! Demanding to know where the linkposts have gone! AND RIGHTLY SO.
- So, to kick off, Slutwalk London comes to the capital! And the date has been changed to June 11th! Previously on Found Feminism when it marched through Birmingham, now it’s blown up majorly. Oars of all colours have been stuck in. Us? We’ll be there. If you spot us (we’re contemplating a banner), come say hello. We’re a friendly bunch, promise.
- Also on June the 11th, Ladyfest Essex – a one day celebration of women and creativity, with the proceeds going to Refuge. Go to Slutwalk, and then head out to Southend!
- The lovely people at For Books’ Sake will be at Bromley Literary Festival on the 3rd of July. Go along and say hello!
- The also-lovely Maegan from TaraBooks, which we are great fans of talks to the Guardian and says things that are well worth reading.
- TreasuryIslands is a badass blog. (You will already know this if you were reading us a couple of days ago, as writer Libby was guestposting. Scroll down. Read that too. It’s Friday.) Particular favourites: Libby versus teen vampire fiction and the posts on feminist-friendly picture books aimed at boys and at girls.
- Comics writer Kelly-Sue DeConnick is on a mission, and needs your support. Go sponsor her as she raises money for Women for Women International to help women in the Congo.
Have a great weekend!
]]>So it saddened me a little to find out that victim blaming is as rife on that side of the Atlantic as over here. Fortunately, there’s also a healthy culture of individuality and protest. Thus arose today’s Found Feminism: Toronto’s SlutWalk.
Have a look at the clip below which explains everything (well, not everything everything; the creation of the universe or where the other sock went is not covered):
I love inversions and subversions alike, which is why this linguistic reclamation project is placing “slut” alongside the word “queer” in my heart. Our very own wordsmith Hodge is probably better placed to go into the history of the word, although my wiki-fu tells me that Chaucer used it to apply to lazy men before it became an insult for sexually promiscuous women.
Now whilst I am the first person to get all mumsy and worry over scantily clad people gadding about, I will fight to defend their right to do so without being blamed if they are harrassed or assaulted. Because that is absurd and I’m not going to go into it here – let’s focus on the positive.
And the positive action.
There’s a UK-based sister group planning a SlutWalk in Birmingham (Facebook page is here) so sign up, click “like” or even get your boob tube out and go for a walk in Brum. I may well see you there!
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!