Let's assume that I've made a pie, and I stick it on the window sill to cool. Some nefarious so-and-so comes along and pinches it. Now, it's wrong to steal, and the thief shouldn't have done it, but I also am an idiot for leaving it outside.
The organiser of a "slut-walk" in Boston, Mass., 20 year old Siobhan Connors explained to the Associated Press, "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to rape and sexual assault. It's to bring awareness to the shame and degradation women still face for expressing their sexuality... essentially for behaving in a healthy and sexual way".
Ms Connors doesn't get it, and aged 20 could perhaps could hardly be expected to. Sex is mens' achilles heel - it flicks a switch that bypasses our brains and diverts our energies, well, elsewhere. We see the signs that nature or nurture have implanted in us, and from then on we really are thinking about only one thing. Thinking may not actually be the right word. For millenia this weakness has acted as a cruel double-edged sword. While women have youth and beauty, the world is theirs to command. Women who exploit it draw men towards them, and some of that attention will be unwelcome. When those attractions have gone, society pushes women to the margins. Most women, the unlucky majority, do not make it beyond the margins in the first place.
That is the cruel law of sexual attraction, and most women who have lived a little longer than Ms Connors understand it only too well. Rather than criticising the policeman, Ms Connors should be saying, "Fine, let's be aware that showing a bit of leg could get us into trouble, but now let's make sure that our streets are properly policed and that sexual assaults - which happen to people modestly dressed too - are properly investigated and prosecuted."
Last night I watched with my daughters bits of Radio 1's big weekend (in Carlisle - someone at the BBC has a sense of humour). The headline act was Lady Gaga. The New York chanteuse did three or four anonymous Euro-disco numbers in rubber leggings; an incongruous trumpet solo followed while she changed costume, emerging in a rubber mini-dress and fishnets to sing an incongruous jazzy torch song (surprisingly well); she went to the piano (an instrument with which she showed prior acquaintance, even while standing on it in her spike heels) and sang something slow and passionate; she went off stage and emerged in a rubber crop top and hot pants with a crucifix on the front. More disco. We yawned, switched off and went to bed.
There was less sexual content to the material than I'd thought there would be. The fetish stylings were an add on. Ms Gaga came across as a Madonna for the new century, only more talented and more vulnerable (she threw herself into it with an uncontrolled passion which is unfakeable). But Gaga knows that sex sells, and of course I wondered what my daughters made of it and whether they should be watching at all. But the reality is that this stuff is out there on the internet, and short of shutting them in the house without computers and TV, there is nothing you can do to stop them watching it, or stop them coming to the conclusion that this is how women should be.
I think of myself as a feminist (my wife laughs a bitter laugh when I say it), but I sometimes think that all sexual liberation has done for women is to free them to be more like the way men would like them to be.
The slut-walkers of America, parading along in their bra and knickers, are marching to a man's tune that apparently they can't hear.
