SlutWalk, Auckland, New Zealand, June 2011. Hannah Johnston, Getty Images.
As Feministing founder Jessica Valenti noted in the summer of 2011, “In just a few months, SlutWalks
have become the most successful feminist action of the past 20 years.” What made this action so
successful, said Valenti, is that it “translated online enthusiasm into in-person action in a way that hasn’t
been done before in feminism on this scale.”^82 The SlutWalk movement proved that traditional forms of
protest, such as marching in the streets en masse, are still vitally useful, while also demonstrating how
twenty-first-century technology, like Facebook and Twitter, can be used to mobilize people into action. It
built on earlier feminist activism against violence, most notably the Take Back the Night movement that
has brought women into the streets to march against sexual assault since the 1970s, proving that sexual
freedom and an end to rape are feminist issues that transcend time and generations. The movement was
also quintessentially grassroots, organized in individual communities by local activists.
The SlutWalks have not been without criticism, however. A group of black feminists in the United
States publicly criticized the movement for its attempt to reclaim the word “slut,” noting that the
organizers’ desire to redeem this word ignored the long history of how race has shaped sexual stereotypes
about women. As the signers of the 2011 “An Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk” argued:
“As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating
the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black
woman is.”^83 This document echoed many of the points made twenty years earlier in the 1991 statement
“African American Women in Defense of Ourselves” in response to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and it
served as an important reminder of how gender, race, class, and sexuality are intertwined such that the
discussion of one concept is inextricably bound with the discussion of another.
Other feminists have been critical of how the SlutWalk movement relied on a very narrow view of
female liberation—put bluntly, the right to be a slut—that does little to challenge patriarchal norms
around female sexuality. This critique stressed that the term “slut” comes from a misogynist view of
female sexuality and “is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal ‘madonna/whore’ view of women’s sexuality
that it is beyond redemption.”^84 Yet this view was challenged by still other feminists, including Alice
Walker, who argued that “I’ve always understood the word ‘slut’ to mean a woman who freely enjoys her
own sexuality in any way she wants to; undisturbed by other people’s wishes for her behavior. Sexual
desire originates in her and is directed by her. In that sense it is a word well worth retaining.”^85