Sunday night on SiriusXM Channel 125’s Breitbart News Sunday program, Breitbart Executive Chairman Steven K. Bannon interviewed Rebel Media videographer and Canadian Libertarian candidate for Parliament Lauren Southern about getting ejected from Saturday afternoon’s SlutWalk event in Los Angeles.
Southern and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos were escorted by police from the so-called Amber Rose SlutWalk event, which drew a few hundred attendees to Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles to protest against “rape culture” and “slut-shaming.”
“Essentially, it started out after a cop in Toronto, Canada said that if women don’t want to get raped, they should dress less like sluts, which, to be fair, was an offensive comment,” Southern explained of the origins of the SlutWalk event. “But statistically, he’s not wrong, that when women do dress more scantily-clad, they are more likely to get raped, based on police statistics.”
“But feminists got very angry with this, so they decided to have SlutWalk to end ‘slut shaming,'” Southern continued. “So it started out with somewhat of a purpose, but walking around in your underwear on the street to end it doesn’t really make much sense.”
“They also do the walk to fight something called ‘rape culture,’ where they believe that we live in a culture that promotes rape and a culture where our governments, our systems, our schools, everything promotes rapists, which is just, quite frankly, not true.”
“Aren’t they coming up with all these studies that 1 out of every 5 women on a college campus has been raped or sexually assaulted?” Bannon asked his guest. “I mean, these statistics are so off the chart and we understand the methodology is screwed up but isn’t that what they’re trying to use to promote this?”
It’s fear-mongering,” Southern explained. “They have notions of patriarchy, notions of rape culture, and the ridiculous campus rape statistics that they cite, and it really does incite fear in the women who follow these movements. They go to these Walks and they’re told that men are all rapists, or that society supports rape. If you go to college campuses, one in four or one in five – they use either statistic – will be raped: what father would send their daughter to a campus if they genuinely believed that 25 percent of women on campuses are being assaulted? All of these studies have been disproven, like you said, they’re nonsense, but these movements continue to bring in young girls, and men as well, and have them run around in their underwear to support fear-mongering statistics.
“And rape is a real problem, assault is a real problem, but fear-mongering and trivializing these issues by saying that cat-calling is rape culture, like they do at these SlutWalks, is quite frankly not helping anything,” Southern continued. “And walking around in your underwear to stop rape – I don’t know how many rapes SlutWalk has stopped, but I’m gonna say none.”
“So you had a sign, you’re there as an activist – First Amendment of the United States – and the sign I saw you had says, ‘Regret is not rape.’ What did that sign mean?” Bannon asked.
“I think SlutWalks and these feminist rallies, they really made a point of it to change the definition of consent and to change the definition of rape,” Southern explained. “So, for example, consent can be taken back in some cases, that if you regret having sex with a guy in the morning, you can then withdraw your consent and he is a rapist. Or rape is whenever a guy doesn’t tell you the full truth about his past.”
“This is what happened at Columbia, with the girl who carried the mattress around,” Bannon said. “When they looked at the details, when the University went after it, they had some sort of consensual contact, and it was afterwards, when she checked the guy out or he didn’t call her or whatever happened, she kind of said, ‘Well, I take my consent back,’ and then she carried a mattress around for nine months.”
And the past four major college campus rape cases have been found to be false, and exaggerations,” Southern said. “They’re all based off of this notion… and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these women genuinely believed that they were raped, because of this redefinition of the word ‘consent’ to be ‘regret is rape.’ The redefinition of the word ‘consent’ means if he touched you on the arm, that’s rape. It’s insane how much they’re trivializing the word ‘rape.’ And that’s why these campus cases keep popping up, why I’m so opposed to SlutWalk and why many people are opposed to the antics that are going on there, and what is being promoted there, the ideas and fear-mongering that is going on. You can see what happened with out signs there, we were shut down and kind of kicked out.
“It appeared to me that the hostility to you was far worse than Milo or the others, that they really wanted to tear your sign up, that they were offended personally that you were there,” Bannon said. “Was that because you’re libertarian, or because you’re a woman, because you’re going against the narrative? What was the hostility to you?”
“There’s this ridiculous idea that I’m a gender traitor because I’m not a feminist,” Southern answered. “I’m supposed to be part of a sisterhood, you’re automatically supposed to support all women just because you have the same genitals as them, which doesn’t make sense. I judge people based on merit, on personality. But feminism is more of a collectivist idea, this idea that we are a team, we are a group, we all share the same idea, and we all support all women. And because I don’t buy in to [that], they just hate it.
“Can you tell our audience what kind of hate has been directed your way?” Bannon asked Southern, noting that conservative politicians like Sarah Paling and Michele Bachmann have traditionally been recipients of hate campaigns by the institutional Left.
“It’s quite vulgar, so I don’t think I can say much of it on air,” Southern replied with a laugh, “but I’ve been getting tweet after tweet of ‘You’re scum, you’re trash.’ Milo and I have both gotten people saying we should die, we should have gotten run over by the truck behind us, we should drown ourselves… it’s insane, the hate that we’ve gotten, because this movement says they’re supposed to be helping and supporting and empowering women and the LGBT community as well, but apparently that only extends so far, to those who agree with them, and not those with different opinions.”