Clothing Is Not Consent

Clothing Is Not Consent There is a certain kind of conversation you only have on a doorstep. No microphone, no agenda, no gallery watching. Just two people and whatever they actually believe. I was canvassing in Pickering, talking about the things residents raise most often when you give them the chance — safe streets, safe parks, human trafficking in Durham, and whether a woman can walk home at night without doing the arithmetic every woman learns to do. A man I was speaking with looked me in the eye and told me that women and girls bring rape upon themselves by the way they dress. That men have a right to act on those weaknesses. I have been called a great many things in the last four years, and I have learned to keep my composure through most of it. I did not keep it well that afternoon. I stood on a sidewalk in the city I have spent my adult life serving, and I felt something closer to grief than anger. So let me be clear, in the plainest words I own. No girl brings rape upon herself. No woman asks for it. A woman does not surrender her safety, her dignity, or her bodily autonomy because of what she chose to wear that morning. Clothing is not consent. Appearance is not permission. And rape is the responsibility of the rapist — full stop, no footnote, no context that softens it. I want to be careful here, because this is where these conversations usually go wrong. I am not talking about one man at one door. If it were one man, it would be a story and not a column. I am talking about an idea — an old, tired, cowardly idea that has outlived every civilization that ever indulged it, and that still finds a hearing in living rooms in this country. The idea that a man's impulses are a force of nature and a woman's clothing is the thing that provokes them. The idea that self-control is optional equipment. It is not optional. It is the price of admission to a free society. We do not build our laws, our streets, or our cities around the appetites of whoever refuses to govern himself. We build them around the rights of the people he would otherwise harm. And notice what that idea really asks of us. It asks us to lower our expectations of men. I decline. I have more respect for the men of this city than that — for the fathers who walk their daughters to the rink, for the sons who call their mothers, for the men who would put themselves between a stranger and harm without being asked twice. Those men are the rule here, not the exception, and they are insulted by the excuse-making more than anyone. Tell a good man that his character is a weakness he cannot help, and watch how quickly he corrects you. No belief, no culture, no tradition, and no supposed weakness in men excuses sexual violence. I say that knowing exactly how the sentence will be read by people who make a living reading sentences unkindly. I am not indicting anyone's faith or anyone's homeland. I am holding every man in this city to the same standard, which is precisely what equality means. A rule that bends for some men is not a rule at all — and the women it fails to protect are always the women with the least power to complain.Here is the part where a column like this usually asks government to do something, so let me tell you what a city actually can and cannot do. A city cannot legislate a man's character. What a city can do is refuse to be a comfortable place for the alternative. Lighting on the paths where our kids walk. Cameras and patrols where they are needed, not where they photograph well. Front-line training so the staff who deal with trafficking know exactly what they are looking at. Partnership with Durham Regional Police instead of turf war. Support for the shelters and the crisis lines that catch women when everything else has failed them. And a Council that will say the words out loud instead of routing them to a subcommittee.That last one matters more than people think. Silence is a policy. When leaders will not name a thing, residents conclude the thing is negotiable. It is not negotiable. And no woman in Pickering should have to wonder where her Mayor stands on whether she asked for it. I have knocked on thousands of doors in this city. The overwhelming majority open onto decent people. But I will not pretend I did not hear what I heard, and I will not soften it for the comfort of the record. Our daughters are not responsible for other people's self-control. They never were. Clothing is not consent. No man has the right. If we can still say that plainly in Pickering — and mean it, and hold to it — then we are the kind of city worth handing to our daughters. Lisa Robinson is a Pickering City Councillor and a candidate for Mayor. If you or someone you love needs help, 211 or 905-668-9200 - 24-hour Crisis and Support Line is available 24 hours a day.