Professor Dines, a fierce critic of raunch culture who is touring Australia this month to promote her book Pornland, said that protest marches that aim to reclaim the word "slut" would only reinforce stereotypes.

"By having a slutwalk, you have turned the focus onto what women are wearing," Professor Dines said. "The men who are responding to this message are not getting the irony at all." By dressing in fishnets and push-up bras and brandishing 'slut" signs, she said, the organisers are playing into the hands of raunch culture. "Men want women to be sluts and now they're buying in."

The day before before Australia's first slutwalk sets off from the front steps of Melbourne's State Library on Saturday May 28, the professor will be speaking at the library's Wheeler Centre on the pressure young women feel to live up to the images available on internet porn.

"Young women today have two choices," she said, "to be f***able or invisible. If the only choice is to be hypersexual, you cannot call it a meaningful choice. In the US, even women who read the news, even politicians have to be [sexy]".

The dozens of slutwalk protests being organised in North America, Europe and Australia were inspired by a Canadian policeman's advice to college students that they should not "dress like sluts" if they didn't want to be sexually assaulted. In response, women have been marching to reclaim the word "slut" in the same way that gay rights activists have reclaimed the word "queer".

But the professor has been speaking out against the reclaiming campaign in The Guardian, on the BBC and in the Huffington Post. "'Slut' is an irredeemable word" she said, adding that as a Jewish woman, she had no desire to go on a "kike walk" — "some words come out of situations that are intolerable".

While slutwalk organisers believed they were empowering women by embracing the word "slut", Professor Dines said they were sending the wrong message to adolescent girls in a culture that takes its cues from pornography. "Do you think that a young women is going to be helped if she looks in the mirror and thinks the word 'slut'?"

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/slutwalk-may-damage-womens-rights-cause-professor-says-20110513-1elq5.html#ixzz1MCudHkoB