In Boston, a bunch of Neanderthals threatened to hold a “pimp walk” in response to the Slut Walk. Rebecca Mott, a former prostitute and activist who is horrified by the Slut Walks, told me, “The Australian Sex Party actually said we could hand out packs where men can hide their hands where they are wanking themselves at the Slut Walks.”

Mott, a Brit who barely survived the hellish nightmare of her life as a prostitute, tried to convince the feminist organizer of the London Slut Walk of the damage she was doing, only to be patronized and shushed. “For women who are forced to wear those clothes because they are sold and bought to see other people dressed up like that for laughs and to say it’s ‘liberating’ is really hard to take,” she says.

Aura Bogado, an Argentinean feminist and Yale student who took to her blog to blast the Slut Walk organizers, told me: “It’s like a minstrel show. They pretend to live the experience [Rebecca] lived.” As she blogged, the Slut Walk event “highlights its origins from a privileged position of relative power, replete with an entitlement of assumed safety that women of color [like] me would never even dream of. We do not come from communities in which it feels at all harmless to call ourselves ‘sluts.’”