You know who she is. That thick, caramel chick that everybody is constantly talking about. The only chick that shits on you and your friends with and without hair. That top notch bitch that has been with your favorite rapper. That chick that always has on a bad ass pair of shades. That vixen that takes no shit. Welcome rosebuds to Hell Yeah Amber Rose..
1. I hate the title of this video. Out of everything she spoke of, this is what the media focuses on. Ugh.
2. Context: The basis of Amber Rose’s Slut Walk was to empower women, to offer a space for healing and necessary discussion on the issues of gender inequality, slut-shaming, victim shaming/blaming, and much more.
[Brief background of slutwalks: Formed in Toronto after a police officer told a rape victim that maybe she would not have been raped if she was not “dressed like a slut”, hence the term “slut-shaming”. The titles of such walks have since been changed and do not use the term “slut” in their titles.]
3. This speaks to the double standard women still face. A man can be as sexually open and indulgent as he wants, and not be shamed for it. Still women are expected to be virginal and covered up, sexy, but not too sexy, and cannot OWN their sexuality and personhood.
Amber Rose's SlutWalk changed the game for women of color.
On Oct. 3, model and entrepreneur Amber Rose held her first SlutWalk in LA, and led hundreds of supporters through the city streets to protest rape culture, victim-blaming, and slut-shaming.
Like SlutWalks before it, women marched in revealing clothes, some of them topless, all in an effort to emphasize that they deserve respect, regardless of the way they dress or their sexual history. SlutWalks are meant to reclaim the word “slut,” to redefine what it means to be called one.
But a question that’s emerged since the very first SlutWalk in 2011 is this: Can black womenreally take back the word slut?
For women of color and particularly black women, reclaiming “slut” is tricky. A writer at Crunk Feminist Collective argued that a historical context in which black women have always “been understood to be lascivious, hypersexed, and always ready and willing,” makes it difficult to fully embrace the word. Embracing it, it seems, has the potential to do more harm than good, reinforcing a stereotype rather than dispelling it.
Other black feminist thinkers have called the SlutWalk movement out for its lack of diversity among organizers, a lack of diversity echoed in the kinds of women who generally attend marches – a sprinkling here and there of black, Latina, and other women of color, but for the most part there is a high concentration of cis white women.
For starters, there was an incident at the 2011 SlutWalk NYC, where a white female protestor held up a sign that read “Woman Is The N***R of the World.” The sign – and the fact that none of the white women marching with the sign-holder took immediate offense to it – is emblematic of an inherent problem within the SlutWalk movement, and a problem with white feminism on the whole: a lack of intersectionality.
While the organizers of SlutWalk NYC later apologized for the incident and acknowledged the need to become more inclusive, the debate about whether there is any place for black women in SlutWalk raged on.
Amber Rose’s SlutWalk marked a turning point in that debate. How does Rose, a mixed-race woman of Bajan and Cape Verdean descent, a fixture of black/hip-hop culture, change this conversation by hosting her own SlutWalk? For one thing, she proves that there can be space made for women of color in the SlutWalk movement, and that bringing women of color into the movement is vital…
Amber Rose is just beautiful to me. She is not a singer or rapper but her name has been on everyone lips this year. She has been getting a lot of attention for her twerk videos on instagram (X) and with her and Wiz calling it quits, I’m excited to see the next trick up her sleeve. #TeamAmber All Day!
