BOSTON, May 8 (UPI) -- Proclaiming their right to dress as they please without being assaulted, 200 scantily clad women marched through downtown Boston.
Saturday's "Boston Slutwalk" was part of an international campaign responding to a Toronto police officer's reported statement that students should avoid rape by not dressing like "sluts."
The group on the Boston Common chanted, "However we dress, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no," the Boston Herald reported.
"Just because I want to go out and have a good time doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with me," said Natalie Olbrych, 21, of Brownsville, Vt., who said she was raped in 2007 during high school.
Jaclyn Friedman of Medford, Mass., co-author of the book "Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape," called the word "slut" a "vicious weapon" designed to "keep us in line. ... To make us police each other, turn on each other and turn each other in so that we can prove we're not 'like that.'"
She cited the case of Phoebe Prince, the Massachusetts teenager who committed suicide last year after a boy she broke up with goaded girls to call her an "Irish slut" and a "whore."
