Of Sluts & Stereotyping

Now I wasn't really surprised a little bit when the Indian Version of "SLUTWALK" or Besharmi campaign or whatever it was took place, but it looked more like aping the west one more time on taking an issue in a nonsensical way. Now don't get me wrong, even I feel that women's rights should be in place and that a woman, no matter how she dresses up like can face sexual harassment and that the society in large is wrong to portray the fact that women dressed scantily face it. However,from the general responses by women given to all sorts of media I got the feeling that the message was lost in translation.
Here's what I think the slutwalk was intended to say : All women can be the subject of Sexual Harassment no matter how they dress up.


Here's what the message sounded like in India: We should be given the freedom to dress up how we choose without anyone trying to harass us.
Clearly that may exist in an utopia, but this situation can never be in the real world, and no I'm not trying to protect rapist but people have a mindset that can't change on this no matter how hard they try. By the way did it ever occur to anyone that even if men tried the skin show thing, they'll face criticism. So ladies dress up and do it however you want to but just be sure that if you dress to get attention you'll get it, don't complain whether it's good or bad.
Women don't need to organise protests to tell people that they'll dress how the want, they need to get bold, giving a tight slap to an offender in public, or other forms of public humiliation will be a better deterrent than a slutwalk.

The author personally feels that it's high time for men to get together and ask for their rights to dress up in leather pants, dangling jewellery and no shirt and women need to grow up and tackle this issue in a better way than to ape their counterparts in the west who aren't left with too many issues to deal with. Furthermore there exist more impending issues than how a woman should dress.