SLUTWALK TO: It Rocked!

Posted by: MetAnotherFrog Admin Tags: features, feminist, sluts, women Posted date: April 3, 2011 | No comment

April 3, 2011

I was lucky enough to be able to attend SlutWalkTO with my girl Mel today and we had an absolute blast! I’m not generally one to go out and protest anything, but heading out onto the streets of TO to support the fight for women’s equality and sexual freedom was something I felt compelled to do, and I’m so glad I did.

From the moment we got to Queen’s Park and saw the crowd of people, many of them holding placards and signs, listening in rapt attention to the opening words of the organizers we knew it was going to be a great event.

There were men and women of all ages, races, and sexual orientations in the large and very peaceful crowd. I saw parents carrying their babes in their arms; young girls with their mothers and grandmothers; armies of young men carrying placards that had slogans like “End Slut-Shaming” scrawled across them; and former hippies spreading the message of peace as we walked, biked, and/or rolled along the protest route, chanting, clapping and laughing together.

When we got the Toronto Police Headquarters, the massive crowd listened attentively as speaker after speaker highlighted the many reasons why fighting to end violence against women is so important. Reasons including the fact that:

Every 17 minutes, a woman is raped.
1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted.
51% of Canadian women report having experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of sixteen.
4 out of 5 female undergraduates surveyed at Canadian universities said they had been victims of violence in a dating relationship.
83% of women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime.
Date rape accounts for 60% of reported rapes.
80% of sexual assaults occur at home; 49% in broad daylight.
93% of sexual assault survivors do not report to the police due to humiliation or fear of revictimization in the legal process. For women of colour, that fear is worsened by the experience of racism.
In a Canadian study 1 in 5 male students surveyed said that forced intercourse was all right “if he spends money on her”, “if he is stoned or drunk”, or “if

they had been dating for a long time”.

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And right up until the end of the final speech of the day by Heather Jarvis, one of the co-founders of SlutWalk, the energy of the event was beautiful, empowering, unifying and a whole lot of fun. Just take a look at the pictures below and you’ll see what I mean.

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Just a few of the many beautiful, fierce and proud ‘sluts’, and their placard wielding supporters who came out today…