We had turned the corner at U Street and were marching up 14th Street when the woman with the megaphone leading SlutWalk DC started a new chant: “We love consensual sex! We love consensual sex!” Well, OK, but who doesn’t? Is there any actual opposition to this agenda? Is there an Anti-Consensual Sex Movement that someone forgot to tell us about? Oblivious to the absurdity, about 400 women joined in shouting this slogan, which was at least better than their previous chants: “Blame the system, not the victim!” and “One! Two! Three! Four! We won’t take it anymore! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Stop the violence! Stop the hate!” The “violence” to which that chant referred is rape, and “hate” is any discussion of rape (or any other subject) that doesn’t conform to feminist ideology. To distill their rhetoric to its totalitarian essence: “Shut up, because rape.”
The SlutWalk movement is about rape in pretty much the same sense Nazism was about the Versailles Treaty -- it’s the legitimate grievance that empowers a movement of irrational hatred. We may laugh at the carnival sideshow aspect of women stripping down to their underwear to march down the street in broad daylight, carrying deliberately provocative posters and shouting nonsensical slogans. But the leaders of the movement have a radical ideology they take very seriously, and that ideology is sufficiently influential that anyone who criticizes it risks condemnation as being anti-woman, or even pro-rape. If you doubt the seriousness of feminism, you need only contemplate the bizarre firestorm of controversy ignited last year when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut.”