A guest post from Linda Hirshman:
In responding to my column, ” The Trouble With Jezebel ,” Jaclyn Friedman writes that I “said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts.”
Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: “to rephrase, summarize, reword, interpret, translate, restate.” Only problem: Something like the words used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never used the word slut in anything I have ever written, and, after a lifetime of advocating and defending feminism, hope I never would. And far from accepting the possibility of rape, I urge all women to resist it, including by invoking the power of criminal law enforcement to punish rape and protect other women. I understand that it is not feel-good news to point out the vulnerability of freedom and the ineluctable fact of nature that women are, on the whole, smaller, weaker, and vulnerable in the course of childbirth and nursing and therefore vulnerable to larger, stronger men, much less that they have a responsibility to one another’s safety. I am prepared to defend what I say. But not what I don’t say. No matter how angry you are, there is no reason to groundlessly accuse a woman with 40 years in the feminist movement of calling a whole group of women sluts.
