Let’s say I was a man.

Being a man, if I walked out of my house tonight wearing boxers, most people would think it was funny. Sure, some people would be confused. Others would laugh, maybe give me some high-fives.

In comedy movies, men in underpants is a punchline.

But I’m not a man, and the sight of female flesh is almost never a punchline — at least, not so long as it fits our culture’s definition of what is sexually desirable. So if I were to walk outside my house in underpants and a bra, people wouldn’t think it was funny.

They might, however, think it was “trashy,” “skanky,” “slutty” or just plain demeaning. Pick a word, there are certainly enough of them. And they all mean the same thing.

The primary weapon our culture uses against women is sexual devaluation. And once women are seen as sexually devalued, we are seen as fair game for whatever may befall us.

“If you dress like a slut, you’ll get treated like a slut.”

Or however you want to put it.

Culture reminds us, every day, that in order to retain sexual valuation and thus be defended from sexual violence, we have to keep our flesh in check — shown just enough to make us visually appealing, but hidden enough that we aren’t “giving it away” or “degrading ourselves.” (Even if violence does not happen, we are held responsible for the gaze of others.)

Here’s my central issue (among many) with this icky little double-standard: it is based on the assumption that women’s bodies are inherently sexual objects, that naked female flesh defaults to sexual whereas naked male flesh does not, and that it is thus inevitable and necessary that women take precautions to hide this sexual bait from men who would do them violence.

False. Wrong. Totally and completely wrong.

Confront someone with this double-standard, and they’ll often assert that it is biological inevitability, an immutable fact of the species that human women are to be looked at, and human men are the ones to do the looking.

But that is demonstrably false.

In fact, how sexually we perceive the female body is entirely cultural. We don’t have to look far to identify numerous indigenous cultures where the sight of any naked female flesh is wholly unremarkable, and certainly not titillating; on the other end, there are cultures which view a naked female ankle as be sexually inciting. In the middle, there are many cultures in which varying levels and occasions of non-sexualized nudity are tolerated.

Treating women’s bodies as sexual objects is not part of our biology. It is part of our culture. And the culture, if you permit the profanity, is fucked-up.

Especially when it comes to victim-blaming.

Let me make this clear: in the context of sexual assault, victim blaming is a manifestation of sexualized hate against women.

Just world theory is bad enough without the misogyny. But what is most dramatic about victim blaming in rape cases is that it is reserved, almost exclusively, for victims that fit our society’s definition of sexually desirable, or at least sexually available.

For instance, while victim blaming can and does happen in almost any case of sexual assault, it is far more prevalent when the victim falls loosely into a category of women who are deemed sexually available to men.

If an 80-year-old woman is raped, people are generally disgusted. If a woman with cognitive or severe physical disabilities is raped, people are most likely to be horrified. If a young child is raped, people are shocked and furious.

But if the survivor of sexual violence is post-pubescent but pre-menopausal, if she is apparently able-bodied and neurotypical, the amount of sympathy observers have for her begins to drop precipitously.

There’s the sexual devaluation weapon again: if she is a chaste mother of three who is raped by a stranger in her own home, she may avoid the worst of it. But if she is a young woman who was raped when she was socializing, she will be met with every possible reason in the book about why she should have known better.

And if she is a woman of any kind who is raped by a friend, partner or spouse — far and away the most common profile of a rapist — then it is assumed that she is not smart enough to know the difference between regret and rape.

Because a sexually available woman, our culture says, is a sexually devalued woman. And sexually devalued women are not considered worthy of our society’s empathy or protection. They are not even considered worthy of feeling the same pain, fear and trauma as women who are “really raped.”

Read these comments again.

Read them, and remember this: victim-blaming, all victim-blaming, is an act of making excuses for rapists and criminals. If you have ever said anything remotely similar to the comments linked above, then you have made our culture a friendlier place to be for rapists.

And most rapists rape more than once.

They rape more than once, because they know they will probably get away with it. Because they know that so long as they rape an acceptable target, cops, culture and courts will scrutinize the victim first — beginning with the headline.

You want to talk about being soft on crime?

Exhibit A: these people who, whether they admit it or not, treat rape against certain broad categories of women as an understandable crime, one committed by a red-blooded man against a woman who failed to properly cover and protect herself from an inevitably sexual gaze.

This is what Slutwalk is about, by the way.

We can debate if Slutwalk is the most effective way to share this message. We can discuss the impact of the word, the logistics of reclaiming it, and the ways in which Slutwalk struggled as a movement of inclusion.

But if you are debating that Slutwalk is bad because women should learn to cover themselves up and “take responsibility” for themselves, then you are not expressing an “honest” or “realistic” or “responsible” opinion.

All you’re doing is defending a violent status quo, and protecting the rapists who make it so.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.*

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* Terrible, awful, harmful, hateful work.