A poster recently tacked up by the librarian at Desert Ridge High School in Mesa, Arizona does a fine job of underscoring exactly what is wrong with the whole tendency towards victim-blaming and slut-shaming. If a girl dresses provocatively and gets raped, she was “asking for it.” And if high school girls dress that way and the boys become too distracted by them to study, it’s automatically the girls’ faults, not the boys. Yes, there are people who believe this, and those people are idiots. It’s a festering pustule on the ass of modern society that such thinking still exists. Some people really are just stupid.
As we’re talking about stereotyping, though, the poster likening girls to “meat” and the boys to slavering cartoon wolves also manages to bring an innocent animal into the mix. Wolves are majestic creatures, posing no threat to human beings, in fact much endangered BY humans. The use of the wolf as a metaphor for a sexually assertive, if not downright violent, male, has its roots in our collective folklore and our collective past. But the Big Bad Wolf that ate up Little Red Riding Hood was not a true wolf at all. It was something far uglier.