The Quilmes TV ad "La igualdad" shows men and women as equals in the end

In a recent Quilmes advertisement by advertisement agency Young & Rubicam, a battle is staged between the sexes, with male and female leaders spurring on their respective flag-bearing, animated ‘tribes’. The woman shouts to her clan “We’ve come a long way…do you want to return to not having the vote?”, while her male counterpart retorts “men have reached the moon and now we can’t even get to 10pm” without having to deal with female issues.

Tired of losing his male ‘authenticity’, he rallies his troops with a vengeance. Sticks are waved, chests are bared, hair braids are shed and tribal marks are daubed on with lipstick, in preparation for battle. But in the ultimate of bathetic moments, the battle dissipates into passionate embraces with the tagline “when machismo and feminism meet (later adjusted to ‘men and women’), equality is born.”

Aside from the tangentiality of Argentina’s iconic brand in the staged reconciliation of these age-old social movements, the advertisement serves to reinscribe essential notions of gender, all too common in the advertising industry in Latin America. Rather than reaching a compromise between alternative agendas, as one would conjecture from the tagline, the implicit conclusion of the advert is that when women are put back in their place – in the sanctioned world of domesticity – society, and by extension, one is lead to assume, consumerism thrives.

An Imported Ideal 

A well-known perfum label ad at a bus stop (Photo: Agus Carini)

In a country which generates myriad cultural myths, and which remains in thrall to European ideals, according to Sharon Haywood, founder of Any-Body Argentina, it comes as no surprise that advertising is thriving in Argentina. With a 20% increase in the last five years alone, Argentina currently holds claim to have the fastest growing advertising industry worldwide, according to statistics from MagnaGlobal.

The Argentine internet is, accordingly, an assault cause of prurient pop-up boxes, which require so much clicking and manoeuvring

that, by the time the viewer reaches any pertinent information, their attention span is already besieged by commercial plugs, multiplying their needs exponentially.

As print editions of newspapers continue to decline, overtaken by the web’s ceaseless wellspring of information, the media has become more dependent than ever on the revenue of an industry whose intrusive techniques and subliminal messages are in direct

contradiction to the seemingly transparent agenda they uphold.

According to Haywood, the predominance of advertising in this country is intimately related to the propensity of Argentines to look to Europe as its cultural mirror.

“We in the west have exported this perfect image of beauty….and Argentina is a prime example of how that image has been imported and manipulated to an extreme.”

Take the recent L’Oreal advertisement which sets up the old-style glamour of Cannes with the tagline “All that, Argentine women have it too.” According to Haywood, this imported ideal serves as an indicator of allegiance to European models and as a determinant of social status.

For the sociologist and historian Dora Barrancos, exporting western images is an integral tool in the mechanics of globalisation, obsessively drawing attention to alternative, stylised worlds.

The white, fair-haired, western figures which confront the passerby from magazine stand and advertising billboard alike, argues Haywood, have few natural counterparts on the capital’s ethnically diverse streets. It is perhaps unsurprising that the world’s first store dedicated to Barbie, frequently held up as the Trojan horse of western influence, was launched in Buenos Aires in 2007. And that plastic surgery, often included in personal health plans, has become a national phenomenon.

Insistently, the message propagated by the press is that “the key to happiness lies in reproducing this aesthetic ideal and in successfully nailing down a man.”

The demand for beauty in Argentina is insatiable (Photo: Agus Carini)

The demand for beauty in Argentina is insatiable. As in Catherine Hakim’s mantra of erotic capital, beauty – in its marketised form – is all too often equated with instant success.

Images of women baring-it-all in suggestive poses are the currency of television, advertising and the printed press. The country has imported the western world’s fixation with Andy Warhol’s ready-made celebrity culture and transformed it into something more unsettling. Television dancing contests are morphed into prurient, titillating strip tease, with a camera that obsessively zooms in on silicone-enhanced assets.

The whole notion of personality, individuality and uniqueness are subsumed within a standardised maxim that the body is an asset to be exploited. Women are, accordingly, expected not only to emulate, but to exhibit a model-like physique, air-brushed to perfection.

Digitally or surgically enhanced, this ideal exists solely as a construct, a profitable commodity exploited by the supremely powerful fashion, beauty and diet industries.

“This is a society that is constantly telling you that you need to fix something physically about yourself,” says Haywood. The hypersexualisation of images of women in the media serves not only to objectify the fairer sex, but to systematically discredit their sexuality.

Media Straitjackets 

In The World Conference of Women in Beijing in 1995, attended by representatives from 189 countries, communication was considered to be a fundamental area in the advancement of gender equality.

The media, it was decided, should “develop, in terms that do not conflict with freedom of expression, professional directives and codes of conduct, and other forms of self-regulation, to promote unstereotypical images of women and increase the participation of women involved in decision making in the media.”

Ethics do not yet appear to have entered the media agenda in Argentina. Whilst European adverts have at least registered the need to address the ethnically and physically diverse characteristics of 99.9% of its consumers, albeit it in often self-congratulatory guises, Argentina still remains culturally enthralled by an exclusive, exclusionary ideal of beauty.

“All countries, and Latin American countries in particular, are profoundly contradictory,” says Barrancos. “Argentina remains backward in its representation of women, whilst in the legislative field, it has become very dynamic.”

39 per cent of the Senate Chamber is female

According to Barrancos, since the restoration of democracy in the 1980s, Argentina has made significant advances in achieving a certain level of parity between the sexes. A number of critical laws have been passed in Congress in recent years, safeguarding and sanctioning female rights. Law 26,485, passed in November 2009, includes several critical  clauses prohibiting the publication and dissemination of images and messages in the media which “naturalise the subordination of women.”

But, Barrancos argues, there has “not been a strong, concerted effort to address the treatment of women in the media” on a social level.

“Second-wave feminism never happened in Argentina because we were too occupied with social revolution… As a result female objectification and the marketisation of the body has not come into focus.”

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner famously sought to distance herself from the term feminism during her 2007 election campaign, declaring that she was “feminine, not feminist,” with the implicit suggestion that the two attributes were incompatible.

More recently, following a bombardment of media scrutiny, she has at least conceded that women face significant discrimination in the press on a daily basis.

For academic Carolina Escudero, the election of a female president and the significant increase in female deputies (41%) is a significant step in motivating Argentine women with the belief that they too can attain positions of power.

The ‘quota law’, a positive discrimination bill to promote female representation in legislative offices, was passed in 1991, making Argentina the first country to require a minimum number of female candidates in political parties. The law stipulates that for every two male parliamentary candidates, there has to be at least one female, thus affirming women as active agents in public policy.

But, Escudero argues, “there is a tendency to treat women in positions of power as celebrities.” By focusing on their physical attributes, the media systematically demeans and disqualifies these women from occupying the same status accorded to their male counterparts.

Margarita Stolbizer, leader of the GEN party (Photo: Agus Carini)

Haywood concurs. Having been dubbed the “queen of botox” by the opposition, “if anything, [the portrayal of] the president reinforces the standard.”

According to statistics from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), a biannual study which analyses gender inequality in mass media, only 24% of news stories feature a woman as the protagonist. And when women do feature in news stories, most frequently they are represented as victims (36%), according to a study conducted by ELA.

“Developed and undeveloped countries are both faced with the same problem” of under- or mis-represented women in the media, says Escudero.

“Women are frequently treated as pure decoration, as accessories to male protagonists. Only very rarely does a woman make a televised appearance in which she is consulted or asked to impart knowledge.”

The media is still a man’s world. “The fact that more women are visible in the workforce,” says Escudero, “does not necessarily correlate to a change in the quality and content of those media. When you do find women in managerial positions, they have often adopted a masculine perspective.”

“We need women who are prepared to bring a gender perspective to bear in terms of image and content, if we are to change that.”

The A la PAR network and the recently closed Artemisa Noticias have been collectively instrumental in providing alternative gender-based forums to the male-dominated mass media.

Over the past seven years, Artemisa has brought a gender perspective to bear on the mass media, drawing attention to the slant of the reportage, language usage and image selection. Besides training and sensitising more than 600 journalists and officials in Latin America, it held the first national conference on media coverage and access to abortion in 2008. A section of Artemisa’s team will continue to work under the newly launched organisation, Communication for Equality.

“It is undeniable that your culture or environment is going to affect your own perceptions,” says Haywood. Like her colleague, the British psychotherapist Susie Orbach, founder of Endangered Species, she argues that the monopoly of visual culture in contemporary society has resulted in a morphed, narrow concept of femininity.

"The roots are feminine" praise the sculpture built by Marie Orensanz (Photo: Agus Carini)

“Society, of all ages, learns more from the media than any other single source of information,” according to an Artemisa study. The paucity of real women, of identifiable role models, inevitably conditions social and behavioural mores.

For Haywood, our current warped model leads to a dysfunctional relationship with the body. Divesting it of its practical and creative function, it is reduced to a fetish, a cultural artefact subject to the whims of the marketplace.

A recent study conducted by the lingerie brand Triumph, revealed that 87% of Argentine women are not happy with their bodies. Far from democratising beauty, the objectification of the female body by the mass media results in a propensity to self-objectify in a radically disempowering process.

In a mediated culture, representation is everything. “There is a still a real backwardness in the press.” says Escudero. “All too often you see images of nude women which have no bearing on the story they accompany.”

“The decree to ban Rubro 59 was a critical step, but much remains to be done,” says Barrancos. “Our problem is cultural, not legislative. But there needs to be strong intervention by the state to raise consciousness and regulate the marketisation of our media.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges and Victoria Ocampo are all names you’d likely come across before arriving at the writing of the next author in our Beyond Borges series.

Perhaps better known for being the wife of the former, or the younger and less-famous sibling of the latter, Silvina Ocampo was herself a prolific writer who gained independent recognition as the author of several prize-winning poetry collections and compilations of fantastic fiction.

Portrait of Silvina Ocampo

Know Your Ocampos

Born in Buenos Aires in 1903, Silvina was the youngest of six sisters to bear the already influential family name. Not initially literary-inclined, she originally travelled to Paris to work under the direction of artists such as the Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico and the French forerunner to pop art, Fernand Léger.

In the early 30s, her eldest sister Victoria became the founding editor of the long-running, culturally-significant journal ‘Sur’. It was through this review that, in 1933, Silvina was introduced to both Borges and a much younger Bioy Casares. Despite an age difference of nine years, she controversially became Bioy’s lover when he was just 19. Seven years later, they embarked on a marriage that, although not always faithful, saw them joined as occasional collaborators and lifelong companions.

As a poet, short-story author, translator and one-time playwright, Ocampo wrote incessantly and almost always independently throughout her life, publishing as many as seven poetry collections and around the same number of short story compilations.

In 1940 she collaborated with both Bioy and Borges on an anthology of fantastic literature and later an anthology of Argentine poetry. Although she had already published her first collection of short fiction, ‘Viaje olvidado’, in 1937, critics cite her involvement in this first anthology as having had a visible influence on her style.

Her later collections, including ‘Autobiografía de Irene’, ‘La furia y otro cuentos’, ‘Las invitadas’, ‘Los días de la noche’, and the children’s story ‘La naranja maravillosa’, perhaps exhibit a more prototypical Ocampo.

Writing the Feminine into the Fantastic

Inspired by authors such as Lewis Carroll, the majority of Ocampo’s literary output falls into the category of the fantastic, exploring surrealist ideas such as the manipulation of space and time, memory, mirrors and metamorphosis.

Whilst many of her themes crossed over with those explored by other authors or the fantastic, Ocampo’s treatment of what might have essentially been the same ideas, has been noted for its ingenuity and, perhaps most commonly, for its unusual cruelty.

The murders and other violent acts contained in her writing might not have met with descriptions of such ‘cruel innocence’ had the majority of her stories not presented them through the eyes of children.

Whether written for children or adults, her fiction often featured child protagonists in the recurrent setting of childhood homes and plots that appeared fairy-tale, at least in concept, if not in execution.

Many of Ocampo's stories were set in the childhood mansions of her protagonists. (This still, courtesy of 'Cornelia at her Mirror')

In ‘Biografia de Irene’ a marble statue of a winged horse speaks to a girl and promises to carry her into a fairytale land, and in ‘La torre sin fin’ a boy who makes fun of an artist who visits his house to display his paintings of a strange topless tower finds himself suddenly imprisoned there inside the painting, and although everything he paints comes to life it does not always take on the form he imagined.

Argentine author Julio Cortázar, whose own short stories run in a similar vein to Ocampo’s, commented upon the ‘strangeness of the everyday’ in her writing and her ability to infuse every day objects with a fantastic importance. Certainly, the disquieting nature of her short stories probably does stem from the fact that she wrote about such familiar every day circumstances the reader comes to doubt the occurrence of anything extraordinary.

Often written about alongside another Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, critics have suggested that an understanding of each writer’s attitude to childhood is fundamental to an appreciation of their work.

Claiming that female authors have historically leant towards the fantastic as a form of expression, some critics have also suggested Ocampo’s fantastic literature might have been a manifestation of feminine subversion, citing her treatment of metamorphosis by way of example.

Interestingly, her protagonists can be generally observed as responding differently to both the process of transformation and their new form, dependent on gender. Ocampo’s male characters are often reluctantly transformed to plants, whereas her female protagonists more often than not have an existing relationship with the object of their transformation appearing more welcoming of their transformation to either animal forms or objects that are essentially masculine.

Where her husband had prioritised plot over character, Ocampo favoured style above all else, tackling themes of love and infidelity or sin and forgiveness with an irony, dark humour and  lightness that otherwise might not have existed.

Later Life and Recognition

A poster for the 2010 film 'Cornelia at her Mirror', inspired by OCampo's last book of fantastic fiction

Besides authoring some of the most original and ingenious short fiction Argentina had seen between 1937 and 1988, Ocampo was also highly-regarded as a poet, publishing her first collection of poems, ‘Enumeracio de la patria’, in 1942, and her last, ‘Amarillo celeste’, in 1972. In the middle she was awarded the 1954 Premio Municipal de Literatura for ‘Espacios métricos’ and the 1962 Premio Nacional de Poesia for ‘Lo amargo por dulce’, having won second prize for ‘Los nombres’ nine years earlier in 1953.

In later life she reportedly suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, which seems especially cruel for a writer who had explored the theme of memory in such depth in her work. In her first book ‘Viaje olvidado’ a girl looks to remember the moment of her birth, and in a later story a woman recounts her life story backwards, beginning with the present and eventually dying when she reaches the beginning.

Bioy withheld news of his wife’s own death in 1993 so that a private funeral could be held in accordance with her wishes. Having been associated for more than 50 years with prominent literary and artistic personalities, Ocampo is often described as having lived in the shadow of her sister on the one hand and her husband on the other.

Perhaps content to live as a ‘famous unknown’, some argue that Ocampo was not necessarily subjected to living under these shadows but rather chose to remain there, shying away from the public life that Buenos Aires demanded of its great authors.

Although her sister Victoria probably still stands to be the most talked-about of the Ocampo siblings, Silvina’s impressive literary production at least equals that of her husband Bioy in terms of quantity and possibly even far exceeds him in terms of quality, linguistic ability and influence.

As recognition of Ocampo’s contribution to fantastic literature continues to grow, her influence on other surrealist authors is also becoming more recognisable. Whilst she might always be comparatively unknown, critics acknowledge the value of her writing as a jumping-off point for the works of Borges, Cortázar and other more-recognised masters of the short-story form.

Rarely left out of anthologies of Argentine writing or directories of modern female poets of South America, the next author in our Beyond Borges series is a writer who also finds herself among the stranger-sounding titles ‘Argentine people of Swiss descent’ and ‘Suicides of Argentina’.

A widely-known poet, lesser-known playwrite and unfaltering feminist, Alfonsina Storni was one of few women to move in the male dominated arenas of literature and theatre, and as such, developed a unique and valuable voice that holds particular relevance in Latin American women’s poetry.

Talk to me about Alfonsina Storni

Perhaps better known among the current generation for the way she chose to end her life than for her literature; her supposedly serene suicide, by walking out to sea at Mar del Plata, has rendered her an almost mythical figure.

The author of poetry that is at once painful, disturbing, and rewarding, her razor-sharp writing has been described as “poetry of fatal beauty that leads to an unavoidable death”. But to appreciate the significance of her work, she must be looked at in the context of early 20th century Argentina.

Portrat of Alfosina Storni. (courtesy of Wikipedia)

The daughter of an amateur actress and a beer industrialist, she was born in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland, in 1892, and moved to Argentina when she was only four years old. After living for some time in San Juan, her family settled in Santa Fe, where her life unravelled a course of constant obstacles that would inevitably become themes in her literature.

Having toured for little under a year with an amateur dramatics company, she returned to Rosario to graduate as a teacher in 1910. Sustaining herself with teaching and newspaper journalism, she moved to Buenos Aires in 1913 where the social and economical difficulties faced by Argentina’s growing middle classes were inspiring an emerging body of women’s rights activists.

Herself an unmarried mother, Storni turned to poetry to boldly confront the repression and denial she recognised, employing paradoxical verse that was rich in eroticism and passion while harbouring strongly feminist notes.

A Voice of Modern Feminism

Winner of the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize for her book ‘Languidez’, Storni wrote in several phases: the first from 1916-1920, a second from 1925-1926 and a third from 1934 until her death in 1938.

Belonging neither to modernism or the avant-garde, her writing did not align itself with either movement until they’d each begun to fade. Criticised for not slotting in to a style typical of the time, she comes bundled under the ill-defined label of postmodernism, whereas in truth she simply stood alone.

Writing on humanist thoughts and her responses to nature, as well as on the alienation of urban life and the pervasive presence of death, her poems return again and again to themes of family, sorrow and women’s issues, occasionally overshadowed by the spectre of violence.

Her first book of poetry, ‘La inquietud del rosal’, was published three years after her move to Buenos Aires and introduced the themes of love and feminism that although in their infancy, would come to dominate much of her work.

Developed along openly erotic lines, two further books were each divided in to two parts. At first amorous and passionate, then bitter and tempestuous, they showcased well Storni’s increasing preoccupation with the collective concerns of women. One of her most talked about poems, ‘Tú me quieres blanca’, famously denounced double standards and served as a literary indictment against male macho character.

By 1919 she seemed an unstoppable voice – authoring six short stories, two short novels, and a series of essays in a year of remarkable productivity. But with the publication of ‘Languidez’ the following year, she effectively closed the door on one creative period and opened a new one.

The arrival of ‘Ocre’, five years later, essentially heralded in a new phase without making much of a departure from the form and content of her earlier work. Described as a transitional text, it shifted in tone and ushered in the irony that would characterise her work from then on.

Whilst her early poetry might have been the most striking, it was marred with immaturity and the signs of a beginner. The ardent feminism and eroticism of her work at one time opened her up to accusations of publically ‘undressing’ herself, but as time passed she learned to temper her voice, which for critics, meant her writing matured.

After a book of love poems that slipped away unspoken of, and an almost eight-year absence from poetry, Storni returned with two books that together mark the height of her poetic maturity.

‘Mundo de siete pozos’, written in 1934 at a time when cancer had taken hold of her, and ‘Mascarill y trebol’, written in the year of her suicide, represented the most definite diversion from where she’d begun. In 52 unrhymed and sometimes obscure sonnets, Storni finally proved herself a ‘poetess’ as good as any poet of her time.

A Lone Woman in Theatre

Far from stepping down; during her apparent eight-year absence, Storni actually stepped up to the literary stage.

More human and restless in her writing than her contemporaries, what distinguished her from other female and even feminist authors in Chile and Uruguay was her foray in to theatre.

In four plays for adults and several more for children, her writing demonstrated the obvious yearning she felt for an alternative outlet of expression, and verged on dramatic poetry in terms of intensity and rhythm.

The Cervantes Theatre, where 'El amo del mundo' opened briefly in 1927 (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

Following much the same path as her poetry, her plays progressed from the confessional autobiographical to the more experimental, but despite combining political clarity with social subtlety, most never saw a stage.

Inspired by her encounters with Spain’s post-war artistic movements, ‘Dos farsas pirotécnicas’, brought together the genres of tragedy and farce in two plays that were especially acute in revealing the conflict between women’s public and private lives. Focusing squarely on the same themes of class and gender tensions as modern drama elsewhere, they contrasted sharply with the traditional repertoire of Argentine theatre at that time.

Straddling the breakthrough aesthetics of the avant-garde and the early activism for women’s rights, Storni stood as one of the most radical playwrights of the period, and had the absence of women playwrites and an unfavourable climate not sided against her, she would surely have developed in to one of the most important.

Honoured during her lifetime as Argentina’s foremost female poet and one of the three most prominent in South America, she is credited with authoring work that was not only of great value and originality, but which established the foundations of feminist discourse in Latin American literature.

In a small workshop in Boedo, Buenos Aires, a group of twenty-somethings are busy at work, the air thick with paint fumes and cigarette smoke. The atmosphere is one of excitement, as one by one, artful stencils writing ‘No Means No’ are hung out to dry, and T-shirts emblazoned with the same colourful phrase are tried on for size. With just three days to go, the Slutwalk team are pulling out all the stops to make today’s march as striking as its international counterparts.

“I’ve been told not to say this, however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not be victimised.”

Manchester Slutwalk (Photo: Man Alive!)

When Michael Sanguinetti took to the floor at a York University crime prevention forum in Toronto, little did he know these infamous words would reverbrate round the world, making headlines and triggering the largest feminist movement since the sixities. Nor did the organisers of ‘Slutwalk’ expect that a concept founded on a careless remark would snowball into a global phenomena. Except that this time round, no bras would be burning – they would be bared.

The founders of Slutwalk Toronto explain: “Using a pejorative term to rationalise inexcusable behaviour creates an environment in which it’s okay to blame the victim.” It is this environment that thousands have tried to dispel by brandishing pickets, taking to the streets and baring all. “Don’t tell us what to wear,” one says, “tell rapists not to rape.”

And just four months after its conception, the movement has crossed the border from North to South America, with three organised in Argentina alone – Rosario, Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires. Five young women, led by literature student Flavia Baca Hubeid from Córdoba, are responsible for mobilising the march, and are hoping today to make as great a stir as their Canadian allies. Historical homeland of machismo, the appeal and importance of the march here in Argentina is exciting, and the imminent reaction to it perhaps even more so.

And in a country where domestic violence and rape proves to be a great problem – it was reported by Amnesty International in 2008 that a woman died every two days as a result of domestic violence in Argentina, and that same year, a judicial department announced that a rape was reported every six hours – the move is welcome.

Although initially the movement demanded an apology alone from Sanguinetti, what began as an outcry against the culture of victim blaming has now widened as a concept, questioning the way women are perceived in general. Where sexual repression was the main bone of contention for sixties feminists, the hyper-sexualisation of women today is the main point of the movement modern women identify with. As the organiser of ‘Marcha de las Putas’ explains: “Every woman, regardless of age, race or city has been subject to verbal abuse in the street.” Puta, concha, zorra - a mere few of the charming array of vocabulary hurled without a second thought towards women going about their day to day business, so common they have been adopted by the umbrella term piropos, male comments to women that range from flirtatious compliments to sexual catcalls.

Freshly screened posters (Photo: Shane Korpisto)

Just this May in Buenos Aires, El Guardían journalist Juan Terranova was given the boot after addressing an activist, who complained about these catcalls, in a less than savoury manner. Arguing that piropos were innocent and flattering to the fairer sex, and including an imagined scenario in which he seduces said activist, he concluded with a phrase that has been translated optimistically as “I’d like to give her one”, and, less so, “I’d like to break her argument with my cock”. Nevertheless, neither goal was accomplished, and he was, very publicly, fired.

Feminism, or women’s rights, are terms that seem to inspire apathy or irritation in the modern psyche, and Terranova’s comments perhaps merely scrape the surface of an endemic problem – the casualisation of sexism. Though ostentible efforts have been made to bridge the pay gap, stem domestic violence and equalise education in Argentina, there is still a long way to go, and stereotypes to dislodge, as Flavia explains: “The greatest problem is that the media collaborates a lot with the objectification of women, and women themselves join in.”

Sterotypes are perpetuated on the most basic of levels; cleaning product brands use women alone, news anchors are suspiciously decorative and you would be hard pushed to find a girl’s magazine without a feature on how to be good at sex. Flavia sums it up saying “the profile of a woman that the media perpetuate  is something statuesque, lacking in substance, controlled by men around her.” No surprise then that flippant misconceptions are rife. “Society consumes what the media puts before it, and it’s not strange that we look for or apply this image to the reality of day to day life.”

And so, slutwalk looks to debunk the most prevalent stereotype – the puta. It is women, the founders explain, that have predominantly suffered under the burden of the term. And as Flavia adds, not only is it isolating, it is indelible: “Puta is a word that is aggressive because society charges it with a dark past – from a young age these are women isolated from a good way of life and advantages, because they sleep with men without marrying them.”

Newly printed posters (Photo: Shane Korpisto)

The movement hopes to turn the word on its head: “Whether dished out as a serious indictment of one’s character or merely as a flippant insult, the intent behind the word is always to wound, so we’re taking it back,” the slutwalkers state. “’Slut’ is being re-appropriated.” Marchers don’t have to dress like ‘sluts’, though many do, and it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, they who receive the most press coverage.

And so how effective can running about in a pair of pants be? Indeed, the irony of parading the label to make  a point is lost on some. Feminists Gail Dines and Melanie J Murphy think an attempt to reclaim the word at all is not about achieving sexual autonomy. The word, they write, is so far rooted into the “madonna / whore” dichotomy that referring to it at all bashes the nail further in to the coffin.

Growing up in a culture in which hypersexualised images of young women are common to the point of being banal, and in which “hardcore pornography is the major form of sex education for young men”, it is no wonder then that the pressure young women feel to be sexually available is immense. The identity that they must assume as a result is contradictory, add Dines and Murphy- taught that to be valued in this culture, they must “look and act like sluts”, while avoiding the label and it’s “dire consequences”. They believe then that adopting the term in any shape or form, misses the mark and only solidifies the negative stereotype.

How well the concept will be received in a country however whose values are far more traditional than Canada is to be seen. Flavia herself adds tentatively, “I don’t know if everyone will understand.” She hopes, in any case, that the march will open the floor for debate. She is optimistic too that the message is clear, and clearly ironic; “Our clothes, and use of the word are going to flatten excuses made by society to justify aggressions towards our bodies.”

She also hopes that the government will look up and take heed. As it stands, policies that really protect the victim and focus on the abusor are weak, or non-existent, she believes. A courtcase in April serves as a dire illustration of this; the jail sentence for an evangelical priest who has sexually abused two girls, of 14 and 18 years of age, was reduced because the victims “had already had sexual relations with other men”. As it stands, the government has not made an effort to support or even contact the movement.

It is, however, a an initiative that challenges society’s perceptions rather than the government. “Laws can come afterwards, politicians always get there, but as a society we need to be conciencious and start to look at other people as humans rather than objects.”

The march, organised by Verónica Lemi, Nadia Ferrari, Victoria Sandrini, Pamela Querejeta Leiva and Flavia Baca Hubeid, will be leaving from the Obelisk at 6pm and make it’s way towards the Plaza del Congreso today, Friday 12th August.