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Search______________ Go * (*) Entire Site * ( ) Magazine * ( ) Blogs Search Listings: * ( ) Restaurants * ( ) Bars & Clubs * ( ) Events * ( ) Hotels * ( ) Movies * ( ) Museums & Attractions * ( ) Spas & Beauty Services * ( ) Stores Features The Rebirth of the Feminist Manifesto Come for the Lady Gaga, stay for the empowerment. * Add Comment * By Emily Nussbaum * Published Oct 30, 2011 ShareThis [fembloggers111107_btn_560.jpg] Photographs by Andreas Laszlo Konrath __________________________________________________________________ It's the first day of October and I'm at SlutWalk NYC, a rally in Union Square. Nearly 1,000 women surround me, jubilant, most in their twenties. Some wear bras or corsets, but most are in T-shirts, a few with marker scrawled on their arms: WHORE; PUTA; CAN'T TOUCH THIS. A few feet away, a woman in jeans stands frozen, arms by her sides. A circle of bystanders raise their cell phones to collect images of the signs taped to her in front and back, which read, What my best friend was wearing / When she was raped. SlutWalk launched in April, sparked by the outrage of Canadian activists after a cop told female students to avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized. The idea was to take the sting out of the insult with a Spartacus-like display of solidarity, to put blame back on the attackers. Since April, there have been marches all over the world, including in Mexico, Germany, and South Africa, but this Manhattan march feels fired up with local frustration, the climax of a year of scandals, from the acquittal of the rape cops to the DSK case to a series of unsolved assaults in Brooklyn's South Slopejust the day before, there was a news report of a policeman warning women that skirts might suggest easy access. Every one of these cases had returned obsessively to the enraging fantasy of the perfect victim, that ideal woman who is sober and chaste and white and middle class, whose testimony would be believed. We march down University Place, chanting all the old familiar hey, ho alternatives, plus some new ones like Rapists! Go fuck yourselves. (Marchers lock eyes and grin; it's so percussive and playful.) In college in the eighties, I'd gone to my share of rallies, but this reminds me more of ones I've read about: the 1970 sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal; the Atlantic City zap at the Miss America Pageant, when activists crowned a sheep; and my personal favorite, the 1968 hex cast on Wall Street by the collective WITCHWomen's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hellwhen women in pointy hats spooked the brokers so badly they reportedly made the Dow drop. See Also: An Oral History of Ms. Magazine These events weren't polite demands for legislative change; they were raw and sloppy theatrical displays, ecstatic bonding experiences that managed to be at once satirical and celebratory, alienating and illuminating. Not coincidentally, they were also the kind of protest that was hard to ignore, since they were designed to capture the camera's (and the media's, a.k.a. my) eye. And SlutWalk is more public still: Even as we march, it is being tweeted and filmed and Tumblr'd, a way of alerting the press and a way of bypassing the press. I am surrounded by the same bloggers I've been reading for weeks. And though bystanders cheer us on (two gray-haired women dance topless in a window), this is very much a march for young women, that demographic that has been chastised throughout history for seeking attentionand ever more so in recent years, as if publicity itself were a venereal disease, one made more resistant by technology. But then again, who is going to hear your voice if you can't get their attention? Ms. magazine was a crucial publication, and I read every issue of it up until 1994, when its out-of-touch porn-debate issue irritated me sufficiently that I put it down forever. But as many women as Ms. spoke to and for, it rarely featured the kind of swashbuckling manifestos that supercharged so much of seventies feminismthe sort that were published in The Village Voice (Jill Johnston) and in small-press journals (Audre Lorde) and in slightly bananas but also kind of brilliant books like Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and in writing I disagreed with entirely but found spellbinding. (Say what you will about Valerie Solanas, she was never boring.) It's the stuff that for many years you could find only in the file drawers of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, rarely in mainstream magazines, and certainly not in women's magazines, which over time became blandly liberal-feminist by default, but never wild, let alone capable of pushing an argument so hard that everyone had to talk about it. For too long, it was the anti-feminists who owned that brand: Katie Roiphe, Camille Paglia, Caitlin Flanagan. And this bold style might have been lost forever, if it weren't for the web. Lacking editors (whose intolerance for insanity tends to sand off pointy edges), lacking balance (as any self-publishing platform tends to), laced with humor and fury (emotions intensified by the web's spontaneity), the blogosphere has transformed feminist conversation, reviving in the process an older style of activism among young women. It's a renaissance that began around 2004, when feminist blogs were rare. Left-wing blogging was on the rise, a phenomenon that was strikingly male. As writer Amanda Marcotte says, laughing in recollection, We had a running joke about how every three months, another guy would publish a post about Why don't women blog?' And we would all comment, We're out here; fuck you!' Next: The new terminology of modern feminism. 1 2 3 4 Next * Share this story... * Facebook * Twitter * Digg * ShareThis Counter * Email * Print Join the Discussion Read All Comments | Add Yours Recent Comments On This Article Comments Add Comment * Newest * Oldest * Picks * Most Replies * [X] Threaded See All | Add Yours Related: * Archive: "Features" * Articles by Emily Nussbaum * Table of Contents: Nov 7, 2011 issue of New York | Subscribe! Advertising Most Popular Stories * Most Commented * Most Viewed * Most Emailed Most Commented Last 24 Hours Most Viewed Last 24 Hours 1. Rick Perry Wants You to Know He's Against Gays in the Boy Scouts 2. 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The Self in Self-Help The Current Issue Current Issue Subscribe to New York * View Contents * Order Issue * Cover Gallery * Customer Service Subscribe Your Full Name______ Your Email Address__ [btn-continue.gif] Give a Gift Your Full Name______ Your Email Address__ [btn-continue.gif] [09_streeteasy_300x125.gif] * Art Hollywood's Working Vacation * Vulture * My Bloody Valentine Released Their First Album in Two Decades, and People Want You to Know They're Listening to It * Girls Recap: The Monday Blues * Ben Affleck Wins DGA Award * art Matisse in the Afternoon * Opener David Edelstein on The Gatekeepers * TV Review The Last Girlie Show' * Look Book: Kim Doggett, Architect * Grub Street * Nitehawk's Oscar Menu; Marea's Now Serving Saturday Lunch * Miller's Tavern Has a New Chef * Hebrew National Wieners Are Probably-Maybe Kosher * The Smarter Apartment * Platt on Humm's Eleven Madison Park * The Urbanist's Hong Kong * RTL Hanging Out With Christine Quinn * Rich In Conversation: Steven Soderbergh * Daily Intelligencer * Fox News's Chris Wallace Takes a Couple Jabs at NRA's Wayne LaPierre * The Totally Serious Guide to Obama Skeet Shooting Photo Conspiracy Theories [Updated] * American Sniper Author Fatally Shot at Texas Gun Range * Midtown The Precarious Tappan Zee Bridge * Leitch Did the Brooklyn Nets Just Need a New Coach? 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