When I was in college, there was this campaign against what was just beginning to be called “slut shaming.” I remember seeing flyers on campus that declared women should be able to wear anything we wanted, say anything we wanted and go anywhere we wanted without having to worry that we’d end up assaulted at the end of an evening. That was common sense, although a bit naive.
I remember thinking at the time that no one deserved to be a victim, but that accountability mattered. If you drank too much and hung out with guys you’d just met, you didn’t deserve to be assaulted. But forewarned, and completely sober, was forearmed.
But even with that Catholic sense of “be a good girl and nothing will happen to you,” at some gut level I understood that people should not be punished for bad judgment to a degree disproportionate with any social faux pas. In other words, there was no set number of inches above the knee that a skirt could be deemed to place a woman in the open target category. Of course, I also noted as I matured and became more politically aware that there were double standards, and they had nothing to do with gender.
When a liberal woman was the focus of some salacious attention from the public, the media, as a rule, responded with outrage. How dare they, “they” being conservative pundits, suggest that a woman who “owns” her sexuality be subjected to such offenses and disrespectful treatment? The nerve! Enter Sarah Palin, and the whole paradigm colla.
