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If you checked out the Jose Antonio Vargas documentary about White people, aptly titled White People, you'll know that many White people struggle to discuss race (not that some of you needed a documentary to confirm this fact).

Throw "White Privilege" into the discussion, and the awkwardness-and defensiveness-can multiply astronomically.

What is White Privilege? The reality that a White person's whiteness has come-and continues to come-with an array of benefits and advantages not shared by many people of color.

It doesn't mean that I, as a White person, don't work hard (I do) or that I haven't suffered (well, I have known struggle), but simply that I receive help, often unacknowledged assistance, because I am White.

Or, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, I "believe [I am] White." I've yet to get a DNA test, which led to a surprising result for a White supremacist who thought himself 100% White.

Perhaps most indicative of the power and prevalence of White Privilege is that, though people of color have been fighting racism since its invention, those who are most associated with White Privilege education tend to be White people: Tim Wise, Robin DiAngelo, Paul Gorski, and, of course, Peggy McIntosh, author of the 1989 article, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack."

And I understand why Peggy McIntosh's "Knapsack" article continues to fill anti-racist syllabuses 26 years later. Her list of privileges makes the concept readable and digestible-heck, the success of Everyday Feminism is largely because of this listing format.

For example: "I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group" or "If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones."

Taken together, McIntosh's list reveals a privilege she never explicitly states: the privilege to feel normal. But how odd is it that White people are the ones who so often disproportionately get the credit for educating about White privilege?

Think of it this way: Because I have always had full use of my legs, I'd be the last person you'd turn to to learn about life in a wheelchair. In fact, navigating a tour of the state capital with a student in a wheelchair for 30 minutes taught me more about life in a wheelchair than my previous 30+ years had taught me.
Yet, when it comes to White Privilege, White people somehow become the authority.
While I have indeed learned important lessons from prominent White anti-racist educators (like the above ability-privilege analogy that I pulled from Tim Wise), here are lessons people of color have taught me that have changed my life-and they could change yours as well.

1. I Have the Privilege of Having a Positive Relationship with the Police, Generally

Sure, the police who patrolled the affluent neighborhoods of my youth were an inconvenience to a few keggers, and I maintain that a traffic violation from the late 90s was unfair, but I grew up thinking of the police officers as a source of safety if I were ever in danger; I certainly never viewed them as the source of danger.

In 1999, Amadou Diallo -and the 41 bullets that police officers in plainclothes discharged at this unarmed Black man with no criminal record-taught me that not all share this privilege. Diallo was for me what Michael Brown has been to some White people. Too many Black and brown people are not safe with the police.

Not even if you are child, a lesson Tamir Rice and Dajerria Becton taught me.

Not even if you are seeking medical help, a lesson Jonathan Ferrell taught me.

Not even if you call the police for help with your mentally ill son, a lesson Paul Castaway's mother taught me.

Not even if your back is turned, a lesson Rekia Boyd and Walter Scott taught me.

Not even if you tell the police you "can't breathe," a lesson Eric Garner taught me.

Not even if you have your hands up, a lesson Antonio Zambrano-Montes and Michael Brown (according to sixteen witnesses) taught me.

Not even if you are "safe" in custody, a lesson Tanisha Anderson, Natasha McKenna, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland taught me. Not even if you plead for help while in custody, a lesson Sarah Lee Circle Bear taught me.

These are just a fraction of my teachers, those whose names reached the media, which too often neglect reporting police killings of women of color and Indigenous people.

Of course, I might not have learned any of these lessons if not for the efforts of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that is changing White perceptions of racist policing, not to mention our entire political landscape.

2. I Have the Privilege of Being Favored by School Authorities

Kiera Wilmot and Ahmed Mohamed, both of whom were arrested for bringing science projects to school while Black or brown, helped teach me this lesson.

Recently, one Black 12-year-old was suspended for intimidating a White girl through his staring-staring that took place during a staring contest. Huh?

Studies confirm such mistreatment of Black and brown students. In one, White students who reported that they committed 40 crimes in a year were "as likely to be imprisoned as black and Hispanic students who reported committing just five offenses."

In my hometown of Seattle, Black middle school students are nearly four times as likely to be suspended as White students, a reality that has attracted an investigation by the federal government.

One federal study found similar disparities start as early has preschool. Preschool.

As a parent of a White 4-year-old, I can't fathom how such heavy-handed practices would ever help my child (who recently smacked my face because he didn't want me to leave his room at bedtime).

But because we're White, I'm unlikely to ever receive the call from school officials that Tunette Powell recounts in her article, " My son has been suspended five times. He's 3."

3. I Have the Privilege of Attending Segregated Schools of Affluence

That's true, even if I'm White and poor, a demographic rarely forced to live in " concentrated poverty." If you are Black and poor, however, you are nearly 19 times more likely to live in concentrated poverty than poor White Americans.

When I was growing up, Brown v. The Board of Education was more than history; it was a value. Civil Rights icon Thurgood Marshall taught me this lesson. And research shows that both people of color and White people benefit from integrated schools.

Even though we "ended" segregation in 1954, segregation is the norm in 2015; integration has long ago been forced from the table of education reform.

Using fear tactics and coded language, White people continue to be the barrier to any attempt at integration, a fact that This American Life reminded us of last summer with its must-listen, two-part series " The Problem We All Live With."

In Seattle, it was a White parent, unhappy she couldn't get her daughter into a nearby (recently renovated) high school, who shut down a district's efforts to integrate its public schools -which, not ironically, many White families had already fled because of previous integration efforts.

Even in " progressive" Seattle, people of color can't even find a safe yoga class for people of color without a White person crying discrimination.

4. I Have the Privilege of Learning about My Race in School

In response to White politicians' outrageous shutting down of Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American Studies program- a program that dramatically reduced educational disparities for Latinx students- a movement to increase ethnic studies is growing, winning victories in districts that are predominately of Color, such as Los Angeles Unified and most recently Oakland Unified.

Until White America joins the fight, the lesson that educator and activist Jose Del Barrio teaches below will continue to hold true:

Unfortunately, in too many schools and districts, ethnic studies is not even an elective.

5. I Have the Privilege of Finding Children's Books that Overwhelmingly Represent My Race

And the whitewashing of curriculum extends into bookstores (less so into libraries) where I live. And it's not because I'm a bad shopper (though I am).

In a New York Times op-ed, Walter Dean Myers taught me that "of 3,200 children's books published in 2013, just 93 were about Black people." And that doesn't mean the remaining 3,107 are filled with people of color of various races.

In 2013, only 8 percent of children's books were written by or about people of color.

On my many trips to Seattle bookstores, I find the few such stories that do exist tell the stories of Civil Rights icons and trailblazers, such as Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks.

And while these stories are important and inspirational, I have not yet been ready to teach my 4-year-old that people of color have been normally oppressed; I just want him to view the faces of people of color as normal.

Fortunately, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign we can join has emerged to take on this privilege, which is actually a curse if we want our children to interact with others based on reality, not stereotypes.

6. I Have the Privilege of Soaking in Media Blatantly Biased Toward My Race

Everyday Feminism writer Maisha Z. Johnson deepened my understanding of this bias that rears its unwelcome, White-loving head, for example, in pictures that humanize White killers while simultaneously dehumanizing victims of Color:

Two sets of pictures, one with and one without mugshots- for the same crime, covered by the same reporter (on the same day) -further illustrate this bias:

And these biases are besides a media that, according to Vanity Fair, continue to be overwhelmingly whitewashed (not to mentioned malewashed, straightwashed, and youthwashed).

If you are still not convinced, check out actor Dylan Marron's website, Every Single Word, through which the Venezuelan American has edited mainstream movies so that only the characters of color speak. Even the two-hour-and-19 minute-movie, Noah -set in a region filled with Brown people-is reduced to just eleven seconds.

More proof is just one Google image search away. Google "beauty" and count the people of color. Here's what my search found (and notice the glaring lack of Idris Elba images):

And if the media are not blatantly biased, remember that they are covering a blatantly biased country, one that views the epidemic of heroin, used overwhelmingly by White people, as a "health problem" instead of a "crime problem."

Apparently, the addictions of White people merit a " gentler war on drugs," not the three-strikes laws and mandatory minimums that have devastated Black and brown communities.

7. I Have the Privilege of Escaping Violent Stereotypes Associated with My Race

Given that, throughout this country's history, White people have been responsible for unspeakable atrocities against people of color-genocide, forced migrations, lynchings-what a set up that violent stereotypes attach to people of color and not to White males like me. Or the three White males recently charged with plotting to bomb " black churches and synagogues as part of a race and hate war."

Or these two, pictured above, who were arrested for threatening the lives of Black students at the University of Missouri, students who had dared to protest rampant racism on campus.

The Huffington Post's Julia Craven recently taught me that, since September 11, White supremacists (who tend to be White) have perpetuated more terrorism in the United States than any foreign threat.

The Southern Poverty Law Center connects nearly 100 killings to a single White supremacist website, Stormfront (whose users also tend to be White).

And though I share a similar skin color as these violent White people, I move about free from violent stereotypes-and I haven't even brought up all the famous White serial killers!

Meanwhile, Homeland Security misdirects its resources on the surveillance of the Black Lives Matter activists who dare to protest rampant racism in our country.

8. I Have the Privilege of Playing the Colorblind Card, Wiping the Slate Clean of Centuries of Racism

Another set up that benefits White people. And I don't mean to sound judgmental. If we have espoused colorblindness, it's because we have been taught to do so.

However, countless students of color have taught me a different lesson: Race is a fundamental part of their identities and deserves to be acknowledged and appreciated.

Yes, race is a social construction based on physical differences that, genetically speaking, make as much sense as classifying people by fingerprint pattern and blood type.
Nevertheless, White people have been using the invention of race, through policy and legislation , to systematically benefit White people from as early as the colonial era.
And when overt racism (finally) became socially unacceptable-after, of course, vast inequality had become deeply entrenched in every aspect of political, social, and economic life-we switched to colorblindness, making it virtually impossible to address this societal inequality.

It also makes it very difficult for White people to examine their implicit biases, like the ones that associate lighter skin with intelligence. Or the ones that prescribe less pain medication for Black and Latinx children than White children in "severe" pain. Or the ones that prefer White-sounding names when it comes to school discipline, job applications, and government inquiries.

And, of course, who pays the heaviest price?

Again, what a setup, one that clearly benefits White people, though it does lead to some hypocrisy:

9. I Have the Privilege of Being Insulated from the Daily Toll of Racism

Then I watched Color of Fear, and Victor Lee Lewis taught me a new reality (as did Lee Mun Wah, who made the film).

And while it's not the job of people of color to educate White people on racism, it's no longer difficult to find useful resources that teach about the toll Victor Lee Lewis powerfully describes above.

10. I Have the Privilege of Living Ignorant of the Dire State of Racism Today

Shaun King, a prominent voice of the Black Lives Matter movement, set me straight on November 10, 2015.

We are living during a "Civil Rights Movement." Will you spend it enjoying the privilege to ignore the movement- or will you join it?

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10 Examples That Prove White Privilege Exists in Every Aspect Imaginable

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If you checked out the Jose Antonio Vargas documentary about White people, aptly titled White People , you'll know that many White people struggle to discuss race (not that some of you needed a documentary to confirm this fact). Throw "White Privilege" into the discussion, and the awkwardness-and defensiveness-can multiply astronomically.

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A young girl paints the face of a doll. (REUTERS/Michaela Rehle )

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, while women in the U.S. were closing the gap in education and employment and breaking into the top ranks of politics and industry, one sector was moving in the wrong direction. "The world of toys looks a lot more like 1952 than 2012," Elizabeth Sweet, a sociologist studying children and gender inequality at the University of California, Davis wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed a few years ago. In the 1970s, according to Sweet, few children's toys were targeted specifically at boys or girls; nearly 70 percent of toys had no gender-specific labels at all. Many toy ads seemed to deliberately flout gender stereotypes-depicting girls driving toy cars and airplanes and boys playing with kitchen sets and dolls.

By the mid-1990s, however, gendered advertising had returned to 1950s-levels, and it continued to grow in the 2000s. Critics blame the backlash on second-wave feminism, the nostalgia of gift-giving grandparents and shrewd marketers, who realized they could convince parents of boys and girls to buy two versions of the same product.

In the past couple of years, the tide has finally begun to turn. WalMart and Toys R Us have recently agreed to tone down their gender-specific children's marketing strategies, and in a blog post on the company's website last week, Target announced plans to get rid of gender-based labeling in the children's bedding and toy aisles: they'll phase out explicit references to gender as well as the use of pink and blue colored paper on the shelves. "As guests have pointed out, in some departments like Toys, Home or Entertainment, suggesting products by gender is unnecessary," Target said in the post. "We heard you, and we agree."

Pressure from customers, as well as the example set by its competitors, seems to have played a role in the retail giant's decision. In June, an Ohio woman tweeted a picture of a sign advertising "Building sets" and "Girls' building sets," with the caption, "Don't do this, @target"; it's been retweeted more than 3,000 times.

Some psychologists are applauding Target's move. "The decision to remove gender labels is a big first step in reducing gender stereotypes," says Lisa Dinella, a psychologist at Monmouth University. Several studies show that children prefer toys they believe are intended for their gender. Just last year, a paper co-authored by Dinella suggested that color can also be used to manipulate children's perceptions of what toys they should play with; Dinella and her co-authors, Erica Weisgram and Megan Fulcher, showed that girls were much more likely to opt for traditionally male toys, like airplanes, if they were pink.

Girls' preference for pink is learned, not innate; cognitive research suggests that all babies actually prefer blue. (According to Jo Paoletti, author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, the association of boys with blue and girls with pink dates to the 1940s.) In 2011, Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache undertook a study of a group of boys and girls between the ages of seven months and five years. Each child was tasked with choosing between two similar objects, one of which was pink, the other blue. It was around the age of two that girls began to select the pink toy more often than the blue one; at two and a half, the preference for pink became even more pronounced. Boys developed an aversion to the pink toy along the same timeline.

The impact of sex-specific toy choice has implications for children's learning and attitudes far beyond the playground. "Play with masculine toys is associated with large motor development and spatial skills and play with feminine toys is associated with fine motor development, language development and social skills," says Megan Fulcher, associate professor of psychology at Washington and Lee University.

"Children may then extend this perspective from toys and clothes into future roles, occupations, and characteristics," she adds. In 2008, she was part of a team of researchers who found that children with gender-stereotyped decorations in their bedrooms also held more stereotypical attitudes towards boys and girls.

Research suggests, too, that kids pay more attention to - and form more lasting memories of - the toys they believe are meant for their gender. In 1986, psychologist Marilyn Bradbard presented children ages four to nine with unfamiliar toys in gender-specific boxes, and gave them six minutes to play. One week later, she and her team administered memory tests and found that the girls had more detailed recollections of the objects in the "girly" box and vice versa.

"Organizing merchandise by gender also acts as a barrier that prevents children from exploring the wide array of toys and activities available," says Dinella. "Target is on the right track, but we still need marketing campaigns to stop gender labeling their products via color."

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How gender-specific toys can negatively impact a child's development

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A young girl paints the face of a doll. (REUTERS/Michaela Rehle ) Between the 1970s and the 1990s, while women in the U.S. were closing the gap in education and employment and breaking into the top ranks of politics and industry, one sector was moving in the wrong direction.

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The march took off from College Green. Credit: Sophia Dai

More than 100 Penn and Drexel students marched to protest sexual assault and relationship violence on Penn's campus Thursday night as part of Take Back the Night, an annual event hosted by the Penn chapter of Abuse and Sexual Assault Prevention.

The event consisted of a rally on College Green, a march around campus, a survivor speak-out at Houston Hall, and a debrief at the Penn Women's Center at the end of the night. It is one of hundreds of protests that take place around the world each year through the Take Back the Night Foundation, which works to eliminate violence against women.

The rally began with a performance by the Drexel African Fusion Dance Team, followed by opening remarks from ASAP Chair and College senior Kara Hardie and speeches from leaders of campus organizations such as Penn Women's Center, Counseling and Psychological Services, and Penn Violence Prevention.

Penn Women's Center Director Sherisse Laud-Hammond spoke about the resources available to survivors on campus, adding that these resources exist to "create and maintain safe spaces" for students. Laud-Hammond said she hoped students left the event feeling encouraged to raise their voices against sexual assault.

Sonalee Rashatwar, a sex therapist and grassroots organizer, gave a keynote speech at the event and said movements such as Take Back the Night too often focus on "thin, cisgender, heterosexual white women." She urged students to consider the needs of indigenous women, incarcerated women, men who are survivors, and other groups that are less represented in discussions of sexual violence to "take back the night for all of us."

After the rally, students marched around campus holding signs and chanting phrases such as "UPenn unite! Take back the night!" and "No more silence! No more violence!"

"Sexual harassment and sexual assault is a conversation that has come up a lot among my classmates and my peers," College freshman Zareen Khan said. "It was really nice to hear that this event is doing something in a positive way to combat it."

The march was followed by a survivor speak-out in Houston Hall. Hardie said she hoped the event would "provide a space where survivors feel heard, believed, and supported."

The event came amid student criticism of Penn President Amy Gutmann for declining to attend Take Back the Night for the past four years. This year, Gutmann did not attend due to a scheduling conflict, and instead sent a written statement of support. Hardie said Gutmann's statements have been read aloud in the past, but this year the statement was printed on the first page of the program instead.

"We respect [Gutmann's] support and we're glad that she stands by this event," Men Against Rape and Sexual Assault President and College junior Justin Iannacone said. "Hopefully, in the future, we'd like to see her come out to one Take Back the Night event."

"I think it's quite problematic," Khan said of Gutmann's absence. "But I think it's more of a reason to have more students come here and pressure for some sort of change."

Khan added that she hopes Take Back the Night allows students to empower themselves to create change without relying on top-down changes from administrators.

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Students rally at 'Take Back the Night' to protest sexual violence on campus

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More than 100 Penn and Drexel students marched to protest sexual assault and relationship violence on Penn's campus Thursday night as part of Take Back the Night, an annual event hosted by the Penn chapter of Abuse and Sexual Assault Prevention.

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More than 40 years after feminists tossed their bras and high heels into a trash can at the 1968 Miss America pageant - kicking off the bra-burning myth that will never die - some young women are taking to the streets to protest sexual assault, wearing not much more than what their foremothers once dubbed "objects of female oppression" in marches called SlutWalks.

It's a controversial name, which is in part why the organizers picked it. It's also why many of the SlutWalk protesters are wearing so little (though some are sweatpants-clad, too). Thousands of women - and men - are demonstrating to fight the idea that what women wear, what they drink or how they behave can make them a target for rape. SlutWalks started with a local march organized by five women in Toronto and have gone viral, with events planned in more than 75 cities in countries from the United States and Canada to Sweden and South Africa. In just a few months, SlutWalks have become the most successful feminist action of the past 20 years.

In a feminist movement that is often fighting simply to hold ground, SlutWalks stand out as a reminder of feminism's more grass-roots past and point to what the future could look like.

The marches are mostly organized by younger women who don't apologize for their in-your-face tactics, making the events much more effective in garnering media attention and participant interest than the actions of well-established (and better funded) feminist organizations. And while not every feminist may agree with the messaging of SlutWalks, the protests have translated online enthusiasm into in-person action in a way that hasn't been done before in feminism on this scale.

The protests began after a police officer told students at Toronto's York University in January that if women want to avoid rape, they shouldn't dress like "sluts." (If you thought the days of "she was asking for it" were long gone, guess again.)

Heather Jarvis, a student in Toronto and a co-founder of SlutWalk, explained that the officer's comments struck her and her co-organizers as so preposterous and damaging that they demanded action. "We were fed up and pissed off, and we wanted to do something other than just be angry," she said. Bucking the oft-repeated notion that young women are apathetic to feminism, they organized. What Jarvis hoped would be a march of at least 100 turned out to be a rally of more than 3,000 - some marchers with "slut" scrawled across their bodies, others with signs reading "My dress is not a yes" or "Slut pride."

The idea that women's clothing has some bearing on whether they will be raped is a dangerous myth feminists have tried to debunk for decades. Despite all the activism and research, however, the cultural misconception prevails. After an 11-year-old girl in Texas was gang-raped, the New York Times ran a widely criticized story this spring that included a description of how the girl dressed "older than her age" and wore makeup - as if either was relevant to the culpability of the 18 men accused of raping her. In Scotland, one secondary school is calling for uniforms to be baggier and longer in an attempt to dissuade pedophiles.

When I speak on college campuses, students will often say they don't believe that a woman's attire makes it justifiable for someone to rape her, but - and there almost always is a "but" - shouldn't women know better than to dress in a suggestive way?

What I try to explain to those students is part of what the SlutWalk protests are aiming to relay on a grander scale. That yes, some women dress in short, tight, "suggestive" clothing - maybe because it's hot outside, maybe because it's the style du jour or maybe just because they think they look sexy. And there's nothing wrong with that. Women deserve to be safe from violent assault, no matter what they wear. And the sad fact is, a miniskirt is no more likely to provoke a rapist than a potato sack is to deter one.

As one Toronto SlutWalk sign put it: "Don't tell us how to dress. Tell men not to rape." It's this - the proactive, fed-upness of SlutWalks - that makes me so hopeful for the future.

Feminism is frequently on the defensive. When women's activists fought the defunding of Planned Parenthood, for example, they didn't rally around the idea that abortion is legal and should be funded. Instead, advocates assured the public that Planned Parenthood clinics provide breast exams and cancer screenings. Those are crucial services, of course, but the message was far from the "free abortion on demand" rallying cry of the abortion rights movement's early days.

Established organizations have good reason to do their work in a way that's palatable to the mainstream. They need support on Capitol Hill and funding from foundations and donors. But a muted message will only get us so far.

"We called ourselves something controversial," Jarvis says. "Did we do it to get attention? Damn right we did!"

Nineteen year-old Miranda Mammen, who participated in SlutWalk at Stanford University, says the idea of "sluttiness" resonates with younger women in part because they are more likely than their older counterparts to be called sluts. "It's also loud, angry, sexy in a way that going to a community activist meeting often isn't," she says.

Emily May, the 30-year-old executive director of Hollaback, an organization that battles street harassment, plans to participate in SlutWalk in New York City in August. "Nonprofit mainstays like conferences, funding and strategic planning are essential to maintaining change - but they don't ignite change," she says. "It's easy to forget that change starts with anger, and that history has always been made by badasses."

Unlike protests put on by mainstream national women's organizations, which are carefully planned and fundraised for - even the signs are bulk-printed ahead of time - SlutWalks have cropped up organically, in city after city, fueled by the raw emotional and political energy of young women. And that's the real reason SlutWalks have struck me as the future of feminism. Not because an entire generation of women will organize under the word "slut" or because these marches will completely eradicate the damaging tendency of law enforcement and the media to blame sexual assault victims (though I think they'll certainly put a dent in it). But the success of SlutWalks does herald a new day in feminist organizing. One when women's anger begins online but takes to the street, when a local step makes global waves and when one feminist action can spark debate, controversy and activism that will have lasting effects on the movement.

Established feminist groups have had tremendous success organizing feminist action in recent years. The 2004 March for Women's Lives - put on by the National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Feminist Majority Foundation and others - brought out more than 1 million people protesting President George W. Bush's anti-woman, anti-choice policies. It was an incredible event, but the momentum of the protest largely stopped when the march did.

It's too early to tell whether SlutWalks will draw people on that scale, but they are different in a key respect. Instead of young women being organized by established groups, SlutWalks have young women organizing themselves - something I believe makes these women more likely to stay involved once the protest is over.

SlutWalks aren't a perfect form of activism. Some feminist critics think that by attempting to reclaim the word "slut," the organizers are turning a blind eye to the many women who don't want to salvage what they see as an irredeemable term. As Harsha Walia wrote at the Canadian site Rabble: "I personally don't feel the whole 'reclaim slut' thing. I find that the term disproportionately impacts women of color and poor women to reinforce their status as inherently dirty and second-class."

Anti-pornography activist Gail Dines argued, along with victims rights advocate Wendy Murphy, that the SlutWalk organizers are playing into patriarchal hands. They say the protesters "celebrating" the word "slut" and dressing in risque clothing are embracing a pornified consumer sexuality. Frankly, I don't think any of these women will be posing for the "Girls Gone Wild" cameras anytime soon. Yes, some protesters have worn lingerie, but others have worn jeans and T-shirts. Organizers encourage marchers to wear whatever they want because the point is that no matter what women wear, they have a right not to be raped. And if someone were to attack them, they have a right not to be blamed for it.

In the past, clothing designed to generate controversy has served to emphasize the message that women have a right to feel safe and participate fully in society. Suffragists wore pants called "bloomers," named for the women's rights activist Amelia Bloomer. They were meant to be more practical than the confining dresses of the times. But, echoing the criticism of SlutWalk participants today, the media did not take kindly to women wearing pants. The November 1851 issue of International Monthly called the outfits "ridiculous and indecent," deriding the suffragists as "vulgar women whose inordinate love of notoriety is apt to display itself in ways that induce their exclusion from respectable society."

The SlutWalkers, in outfits that could be grumpily labeled "ridiculous and indecent," are not inducing exclusion from respectable society. They're generating excitement, translating their anger into action and trying to change our supposedly respectable society into one that truly respects men, women and yes, even "sluts."

Jessica Valenti, the founder of Feministing.com, is the author of "The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession With Virginity Is Hurting Young Women" and the forthcoming "Why Have Kids?: The Truth About Parenting and Happiness."

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More than 40 years after feminists tossed their bras and high heels into a trash can at the 1968 Miss America pageant - kicking off the bra-burning myth that will never die - some young women are taking to the streets to protest sexual assault, wearing not much more than what their foremothers once dubbed "objects of female oppression" in marches called SlutWalks.

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Emma Watson Explains Why Some Men Have Trouble With Feminism | Entertainment Weekly