Since my ruminations on this subject a few weeks ago, I've been musing not just on the practical aspect of the furore (why it should be so unreasonable to suggest, in a world in which they have never been totally safe and never will be, that women might want to take steps which will make them safer), but on why women might want to dress in a sexually provocative way in public at all.
For millenia, attractive young women have used male/female inequality of desire - the only inequality that works in their favour - to advance their cause personally and economically. I get that. But why flaunt it in public? At the very worst, provocatively dressed women risk attack. Further down the scale of seriousness, they risk harassment in the street. They risk harassment in clubs and bars from men tripping over their own tongues. They get attention of men who are only interested in them for sex, and they are treated less seriously at work by men who can't disengage their libidos. In fact, for every man they might want to attract, there will be 99 whose attentions they cannot possibly want (including mine). What is in it for women?
I have been married long enough to know that women often dress to impress other women rather than to attract men, and I'm aware that a single woman wants to look attractive, but it genuinely baffles me as to why anyone would want the inconvenience of teetering along the high-street in a microdress, risking hypothermia as well as the ills detailed above. I also find it rather annoying. A picture in the paper yesterday showed a woman in fishnets and heels carrying a sign saying, "You can't touch this". Fair enough, I know I can't touch it. In which case, I want to shout, why make me want to touch it?
Women, the slut-walkers say, only want the right to express their sexuality. Leaving aside their confusion as to the meaning of the word, why on earth would they want to express it? We all know that most women like men, and vice versa. Why go on about it? (Thank God we men don't find the need to express our sexuality. I shudder to think what a male slut-walking march would look like, but my suggested name for it - gut-walking - might be an unpleasant clue).
The most hilarious people in the slut-marches are the earnest looking young men hanging around in the back of the photos. For all their right-on beardiness you just know that part of them is thinking, "Phwooar! Look at the enbonpoint on that! You would wouldn't you? Eh? Eh?" Surely some of them are fifth columnists, perhaps police informers along the lines of the chaps who infiltrated the environmental movement; but I guarantee that every heterosexual one of them is enjoying the view immensely. There are probably men taking a Wedding Crashers approach, marching to see if any of the participants wishes to express their sexuality in private afterwards. It says a lot about naivety of the slut-walkers that they allow men anywhere near them.
If I were a slut-walker I'd be thinking to myself, "Hang on. How is it that my view of how I should behave is shared by Hugh Hefner, Paul Raymond, Richard Desmond and Jeremy Clarkson?" (a list to which, being as prone to provocation as the next man, they might have added Nick Simpson).
It seems to me a very poor sort of feminism whose definition of edifying female conduct involves dressing in a way which appeals to mens' most basic instincts. The best place for dressing provocatively is behind closed-doors.
