Renee Randazzo is a 31-year-old activist who serves as the Training Institute Manager for Hardy Girls Healthy Women in Maine.
I drove three hours south from Maine to attend the Boston Slutwalk. This was partially due to my enormous crush on Jaclyn Friedman. It was partially because I longed for in-person solidarity on a mission to move feminism forward as a reprieve from my usual feverish internet engagement. It was partially because at the very last minute, not knowing this would be my very first live reading, the organizers agreed to let me read a poem I had written called “Fuck Rape.” (That’s right, in case you didn’t know, that reading officially popped my cherry as a spoken word poet!)
For a Mainer, driving in Boston is scary. I may be fearless, but I am not stupid, so I stopped at my brother’s house to borrow his GPS. “I am going to the Slutwalk,” I explained to him, and he looked surprised and yet not surprised, like almost nothing I say can surprise him after coming out as queer a month ago. “Wow,” he said, “I’ll bet you’ll have plenty of guys checking out this march.”
Now I love my brother, and I don’t fault him for his thinking. He works hard to perform heterosexual normativity because his childhood diagnosis of autism makes fitting in hard, and it magnified his anxiety about the importance of performing masculinity. Like some others I’ve heard commenting about the idea of the Slutwalk, he thought a group of women flaunting their bodies and sexualities would be a great environment for male oogling.
He could not have been more wrong.
There were lots of men at the Slutwalk. In fact, as I shouted at the top of my lungs “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Misogyny has got to go!” while marching down the streets of Boston in a crowd of 2000, one of my greatest joys came from noticing just how many of the marchers were men. Yes!!! Thank you, men! Gay men, straight men, drag queens, transgender men, transgender women, beautiful people who needed no definition, ALL of them chanting in unison messages about ending sexual violence and respecting women’s bodies and sexualities! Who knew such a thing was possible!
There were men on the sidewalks looking at us too. But guess what? From what I observed they were nearly all respectful, and often even supportive with nods and pumped fists. And if they looked, their glances to exposed cleavage brought them to messages written across women’s chests: “Not an invitation” or “I am NOT asking for it.” What creativity, turning the male gaze into an opportunity to educate!
Among the speakers and performers, many were men. Men who spit rhymes about the man box and its ridiculous constraints, about being sassy and subversive, about loving consensual sex and taking NO for an answer.
Here are the only two exceptions from my experience of the day:
- While kneeling in the green grass with my sign that read “My body is a temple, not a target” a man asked if he could take my picture. I said yes, happy to represent my message. After he clicked he said, “I just raped you with my camera.” Ewww! Clearly this man was there for the spectacle and not the message. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he is illiterate to have said such garbage in response to the sign I was holding.
- While huddled in the gazebo because the sky had erupted in thunderous rain, performers shouted their rage and their conviction to end silence, and in walked two boys, no more than 11 years old. These boys, dressed in baseball caps and t-shirts, were completely conspicuous among a crowd of male and female sluts. For us it was refreshing to see “normalcy” as so ridiculously abnormal! Not so for them. They had come in to mock the gathering with sarcastic cheers, using humor to distance themselves from what’s real as boys often do. But one boy felt quickly alarmed as he heard our collective rage about rape culture and begged his buddy to join him in retreat. Interestingly enough, I thought to myself, those two boys are the people who REALLY need to hear what we’re saying. Food for thought.
I was honored to conclude the gazebo performances with my poem, and will forever have the feeling of screaming “Fuck rape!” into a bullhorn in a granite gazebo under stormy skies etched into my memory as definitive to my identity. That said, my own words, words about ending sexual violence of men against women as the test we must pass to evolve as a species, fell short of the complexity of the issues at hand. A woman bravely approached me and told me that she had been sexually assaulted by a woman. Oh shit. All I could say is, I am so sorry that I ignored you in my poem, and I am so thankful that you shared this with me for no reason other than to raise my consciousness. Thank you. If I knew your name, I would thank you personally. This information is still rolling around in my head wondering where to land. When a woman rapes, is it about misogyny?
Women and men and every gender in between can come together to call out the message that consensual sex is something to celebrate and perpetrating anything short of consensual sex is something to punish. We all (ME included, or perhaps most of all) need to let go of our assumptions about what defines men and what defines women. Thinking that the Slutwalk is an invitation for the male gaze not only reinforces stereotypes about men that we need to put to rest, it is also simply WRONG! I was there! Surrounded by breasts, midriffs, and asses galore, men shouted passionate zealous sincerely enthusiastic words of RESPECT!