Worldwide fame may come once in a while, but perhaps it is not such a good idea to wish for it. I doubt if the Canadian policeman who asked women not to dress like sluts is actually enjoying his fame. Some policeman in Toronto — and we all know his name. And may actually be irritated enough by his crass stupidity to want to leave it out of discussions. His remark expressed an extraordinary muddle of notions: that it was fine to address women with a term of gender-abuse, that slut means sex worker and all sex workers dress skimpily, that slut also means promiscuous and promiscuity is bad, that promiscuous women are undiscriminating and they advertise their sexuality by dressing in a particular way, that men are helpless victims of women’s exposed skin, that women in loose, long-sleeved, full-length attire are never raped — and so on and so forth. In short, the remark was an astonishing vestige, in the sense of an archaeological trace, of an ancient attitude that smells of worse than mothballs.

That such an attitude can still be expressed as a safeguard against rape by the very institution that is meant to protect all citizens may lead us to question whether the West is at all different, as is often claimed, from places like India when the woman’s body is the crux of the issue. Perhaps even more revealing was the explosion of protest all over the world, from Toronto and London to Bhopal and Delhi. Such worldwide anger is certainly impressive, and is being seen by many as a landmark in the global women’s movement. There are many questions too, for example, whether the word slut can or should be ‘reclaimed’.

Yet there is something that the angry protestors share with their hated policeman — and all of his kind: a special awareness of the female body. Making sexual assault the victim’s fault, and that only if the victim is a woman, is older than the hills, as is damning the ‘slut’ after exploiting her. So the parade of anger may also raise a tentative question about the strength of the wisdom accumulated by years of the women’s movement, with its processions, protests, anniversaries, lobbying, changes in law, its huge academic funding, its teachers and researchers, its seminars, books and papers, its real struggles and occasional triumphs.

The man should have been punished for using abuse in public and for abusing his position by giving completely erroneous — and potentially damaging — instructions. That is, suggesting that women covered like sacks are safe. Or the students could have protested then and there and turned him out in disgrace. End of matter. Why lose it? Are women sure about how they perceive their own bodies? Or how they position themselves in matters of their own sexualities? Are they clear about the ways in which their sexuality relates to their bodies? When a man rapes or sexually assaults a woman, it is the man’s problem, it is not a ‘women’s issue’. Women must surely know that; in this day and age, there is no need to let a stupid man get under our skin.

Bhaswati Chakravorty