How do you know when a teenage girl singer is now all grown up?

What are the tell-tale signs that she has left  the foolishness of her immature girly days behind and become a real woman?

Her coming-of-age is easy to detect.

She will launch a sexy new look and a song that tells us how hot she is. She will tell us she is unique and different and breaking all the rules. In reality, she’s following the same script as others before her. It’s part of the music machine. Strip off, writhe around on the floor, do a photo shoot for a lad’s mag and tell the world: I’m a big girl now.

The music clip that goes with her metamorphosis usually involves one or all of the following elements:

Sex, poles, fetishised clothing, lingerie, some black leather and killer heels for good measure, lots of groping and grinding against men – and women of course, because ‘bi’ is just so in right now  and our big girl doesn’t want to be locked in to any rigid form of sexuality. There will be intimations of group sex, including simulated oral and anal acts and her newly outed breasts (proving she’s a woman) will be groped.

Ah, our little girl is all grown up.

Gabriella Cilmi, 18, cast off her unique, authentic style for sexualised coming-of-age same old same old with her clip for ‘On a Mission’.  She informs us: “I’m on fire, there’s no competition” and that she’s a woman and nothing can stop her, in various breast accentuating moves.

Nikki Webster, 22, tried desperately to cast off her pig tails and Olympic swings with a group grope fest  for ‘Devilicious’, a video so cringe worthy I just can’t bring myself to host it here. This one image is bad enough  [confession: artistic licence taken with speech bubble].

It all feels to try-hard: truckloads of makeup, bleach blond hair extensions and hotpants. No matter how hard she tries, she still looks like the under-age kid who snuck out the window to go the rave party with her big brother and his mates. I know she wants to grow up, but it is unbearable hearing her tell us she “tastes so delicious”.

Seventeen year old Disney star Miley Cyrus has gotten into the act now. Of course she did that photo shoot with the post-coital feel,  flirted with poles at the Teen Choice Awards last August . But now, in a $US25,000 silver scale corset, she’s taking her new sexual personal to a new level with her latest video clip for her new song ‘Can’t Be Tamed’ released Tuesday on the E! Network.

According to Celebrity Mania:

On her new sexy side of her in “Can’t Be Tamed” music video, Miley Cyrus said that it isn’t about the new her but more about putting a story to the track. “The video isn’t about being sexy or about who can wear less clothes. It’s about explaining the song and living the lyrics… I don’t want to be in a cage. I want to be free and do what I love,” she explained…

Miley further shared about what she expects from the clip, stating “The reason I loved doing this video is because I wanted it to be something different for a female artist.” She added, “It’s not a new Miley; it’s just a new part of me.”

I’m not sure how many female artists she’s seen lately, but if this is “different” I wonder how she defines “same”?

The lyrics to the Britneyesque song are so try-hard they are embarrassing. And the girl-in-cage-needs-to-get-out-and-be-herself-theme – this is original?

For those who don’t know me, I can get a bit crazy
Have to get my way, 24 hours a day
‘Cause I’m hot like that
Every guy everywhere just gives me mad attention
Like I’m under inspection, I always get the 10s
‘Cause I’m built like that—

(Chorus)
I can’t be tamed, I can’t be saved
I can’t be blamed, I can’t, can’t
I can’t be tamed, I can’t be changed
I can’t be saved, I can’t be (can’t be)
I can’t be tamed—

I wanna fly I wanna drive I wanna go
I wanna be a part of something I don’t know
And if you try to hold me back I might explode
Baby by now you should know

The real tragedy is that this conformity to the dictates and predetermined scripts of the music industry are presented as pushing boundaries and original. It seems girls who start out with a unique style are put in a giant homogenising machine where they come out looking and acting and singing the same. While making out they are just so different  and empowered.

As one 14-year-old I know (I can neither confirm nor deny if this child belongs to me) said “as Miley gets older and more into the celeb life, she gets faker”.

Speaking of  the death of originality,  what’s with the Gagafication of  Christina Aguilera?

My friend Tania has helpfully provided this post modern literary criticism:

I actually believe this is an entirely new form of media, transcending cultural, psychosocial and stereotypical sexual boundaries, invoking the spirit of post-feminist icons, subverting the ironic post-modernist dilemma of the liberated female versus the subjugated, boudoir-bound male and poking fun at the latent homo-erotic tendencies of nanny-state do-gooder fundamentalist agitators…

Yawn.

Hot cup of Milo, anyone?

And now a more positive and affirming story about breasts than the one before it.

The Australian Breast Cancer Network’s Field of Women Live fundraiser event takes place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground tomorrow.

The event will see 14,000 women and men standing together in pink ponchos to form the Pink Lady silhouette on the MCG, reflecting the number of women expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. The event aims to raise awareness and much needed funds to support women diagnosed with breast cancer.

You may not be able to stand in person at the MCG, but perhaps consider a donation and forwarding the link to others. The ABCN is a non-profit organisation supporting women with breast cancer, and their families.

Remission Possible!

Last year I met young Melbourne woman Amanda Ghirardello, through a mutual friend. Amanda is a breast cancer survivor who recently finished her last found of chemo. She is full of life and enthusiasm. Meeting her makes you want to live life more fully.

Amanda has decided to climb to the base camp of Mt Everest in October to raise money for the Australian Cancer Research Foundation.

She is postponing further surgery until after her Everest climb so she can get on with her goal of raising $1million for the ARCF.

She has also begun studies to become a paramedic.

You might like to support Amanda’s efforts, through the wonderfully named ‘Remission Possible’, a name she came up with.

Read more about Amanda and her quest here .

“Hooters” is a euphemism for breasts in common parlance

Hooters  is an American restaurant chain specialising in beer, wings and “beautiful girls”.

Beautiful girls with beautiful Hooters, of course.

In its latest move to further market its brand and help the “desperate” club,  Hooters has hooked up with an under 16 boys football team on the Gold Coast, with sponsorship in the form of money and two cheerleaders in tight Hooters tops and shorts, to cheer the boys on.

I was on Sunrise yesterday on the issue. I argued that embedding busty mascots in with 15 and 16 year old boys taught them that women are really part of the entertainment and rewards of playing the game. Why can’t boys just get on with the game without the dancing girls? We have seen so many times, evidence of  demeaning views about women by too many sportsmen in this country. And too often, abusive behaviour has been made possible through a culture of collusion within male dominated sporting bodies.  I’ve written about this before .

I’d be very interested to know if Australian Hooter employees have to agree to the conditions in the Hooters employment handbook as revealed in 2006.

Female employees are required to sign that they “acknowledge and affirm” the following:

1. My job duties require I wear the designated Hooters Girl uniform.
2. My job duties require that I interact with and entertain the customers.
3. The Hooters concept is based on female sex appeal and the work environment is one in which joking and entertaining conversations are commonplace.
4. I do not find my job duties, uniform requirements, or work environment to be offensive, intimidating, hostile, or unwelcome.

Reading these conditions, it’s like the girls are to be seen as some kind of  Western chicken wing chain version of  geishas. But what if they do find this demeaning? What if ‘joking and entertaining conversation’ becomes code for sexual jokes and harassment? What happens then?

Reducing women to their breasts can never advance equality and fair treatment for women. And that’s something Hooters will never be able to teach 15 and 16 year old boys – or any man.

Lindsay Lohan goes with the (blood) flow

[Trigger warning. Images of violence, self-harm]

It seems nothing is off limits to be sexified for the purposes of grabbing attention and flogging stuff, whether it be a company’s products, a music video,  or reviving a celebrity’s flagging  career.

Glamourising violence against women as sexy is the latest trend. Blood has become the new black.

Violence.  Fear. Threat. Torture. Scenes depicting rape.  Women murdering each other. Women who want to die. Suicide porn. It seems the world just can’t get enough of women made submissive by fear, battered women, women seeking self-annihilation, dead women. Nothing like a hot female corpse (and so much less trouble than the real thing, don’t you think?).

And now it’s actress Lindsay Lohan’s turn. In a photo shoot and video clip, just released, Lohan is dressed in dominatrix style lingerie, black stocking and boots. Lohan is smeared in fake blood.  In one scene she holds a gun to her mouth. In another a man standing over her points a gun at her as she lies on the floor.

Deeply disturbing are what could be read as indications of self-harm on her arms, especially around her wrists. There is a trickle of blood at the side of her mouth. The photo  and video shoot take place in front of a blood spattered wall: a mural of sliding red. Though about to be killed, or about to kill herself, Lohan is also shown as sexy, prone, arching her body, breasts pushed out, legs spread.  Lindsay, do you not care about the message this sends?

Even murder and  suicide are sexy.

This is just the latest in a towering monument to the celebration of violence against women.

I’ve written here before about how violence is being made sexy.  I’ve highlighted t.shirts celebrating brutality against women with slogans like “It’s not rape if you yell surprise” and “It’s not rape, it’s surprise sex”.  Another t.shirt says “I like my women battered”.

In March 2008 I wrote about a shoe company, Loula, which ran a full page colour ad campaign in Harper’s Bazaar, featuring a murdered woman trussed up  in the boot of a car. Just in time for International Women’s Day. For a store opening just blocks from where exactly that happened to a real woman, Maria Korp.

Fortunately, thanks to a campaign against the ad by a number of anti-violence women’s groups, it was pulled.

But of course, this wasn’t a one off.

We’ve seen Vogue Italia’s ‘terror porn’ fashion shoot which showed women being terrorised by security guards and German Shepherds.

And Dolce and Gabbana’s ads depicting a woman pinned to the ground by a bare-chested man while other men who look like they are waiting their turn, look on  (the ad was banned in Italy).

Then there was America’s Next Top Model’s ‘Crime Scenes’ episode in which the aim was to look at sexy as possible – dead. To add to the appeal, the models were depicted as having murdered each other.  Electrocuted, poisoned, stabbed, drowned, organs harvested, decapitated.  Ooohh, cat fight – to the death!

All this at 6.30pm on a Sunday night, just before Australian Idol.

And then there’s these taken from Jean Kilbourne’s Killing Me Softly 3. The caption on the second says ‘Great hair never dies’.

And now Lindsay Lohan, soaked in blood, showing us you can still sell yourself as a sex object while threatening to kill yourself. Self harm is the highest cause of hospital admission for girls aged 13 to 19 in Australia. Should it be treated so lightly? Should it be seen as something you do if you want to be seen as hot and sexy? Branding yourself with blood as some kind of artistic statement?

All these images and messages make a mockery of global campaigns to stop the abuse of women. They feed violence, fuel violence and contribute to an environment which every day becomes more dangerous for women and girls.

Lifeline: 131114

Last month I briefly mentioned a Tasmanian case in which a father, a registered sex offender convicted of possessing child pornography, was given visitation right to his two daughters. I thought the story warranted a more in-depth examination, so I asked Caroline Norma to take a closer look. Caroline is a PhD candidate with the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. She is a member of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women in Australia, and works part-time with the Policing Just Outcomes Project.

[Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault and inter-familial rape]

Justice Robert Benjamin in the Robins v Ruddock case of 22 January this year awarded a registered sex offender access rights to his two daughters. This was despite the fact that, in his judgment, Justice Benjamin said he believed one of the daughters, a ten year old, who told the court she was scared of spending time alone at night with her father. She had reason to be scared. Her father had been convicted for possessing child pornography, and was listed on the state’s sex offender register. Justice Benjamin believed the girl’s mother who told the court she had seen her ex-husband sexually abusing his stepdaughter. He believed a forensic psychologist who told the court the ten-year-old daughter had also been sexually abused at some point. Justice Benjamin believed the ‘mother was truthful in giving evidence’ (p. 22), and that she was unable to intervene in her husband’s abuse of her daughters because of his violent and controlling behaviour. Justice Benjamin described her ex-husband as having poor impulse control, as being ‘manipulative and disingenuous’ (p. 23), as opportunistic, as engaging in inappropriate ‘communication’ with his daughter, and as acting in self-serving ways. However, despite fully understanding and acknowledging the sexual threat the father posed, Justice Benjamin ignored the pleas of the girls’ mother and awarded a sex offender fortnightly access to his daughters.

How did Justice Benjamin arrive at this decision? The reason he was able to believe the girls, while still deciding to grant a sex offender access to them, seems to rest in an implicit belief in a biologically determinist ‘hydraulic model’ of male sexuality. This is a term coined by the head of the International Center for Research on Women, Geeta Rao Gupta. Gupta argues that even in the 21^st century, some men still think their penises operate like hydraulic systems. In technical terms, a hydraulic system operates ‘by the pressure created by forcing water, oil, or another liquid through a comparatively narrow pipe or orifice’.  So some men justify their raping behaviour on the basis of an unsuppressible and explosive biological need for sexual release. They imagine their penises function in a similar way to a hydraulic system operating with semen under pressure. They worry about their hydraulic systems breaking down if a vagina (or indeed any hole!) is not found to trigger the release valve.

The comedic quality of this bizarre ‘hydraulic model’ idea of male sexuality fades quickly into tragedy when the model is applied by judges in familial sexual assault cases. In Justice Benjamin’s case, an implicit belief in a hydraulic idea of male sexuality appears to have led him to think the father would rape the girls only if certain conditions prevailed. Specifically, three circumstances had to be guarded against if the father’s hydraulically-operated sexuality wasn’t going to explode:

• First, the father must not come across the girls at night-time when they are less alert and wearing fewer clothes;
• Second, he must not come across one of them alone, but only together in a pair (Justice Benjamin explains that he sees ‘the risk of the father acting inappropriately with the children [a]s significantly diminished when they are awake and alert and when the children are together’, at p. 23); and
• Third, the girls must not be in the father’s bed.

Justice Benjamin’s judgment expresses a clear idea about what triggers the operation of the father’s hydraulic penis: provided the father doesn’t see his kids in darkness, sleepiness, or alone, there will be no risk of his sexually assaulting them. So Justice Benjamin made court orders designed to prevent these three conditions arising. First, he orders the two sisters to sleep in the same room, and the father to have another adult stay overnight at his house when the girls sleep over each fortnight. This person must be in the house between the hours of 8pm and 7am. Second, Justice Benjamin ordered that there be a ‘door on the children’s bedroom which is capable of being shut at the request of the children’ (p. 19). Third, he ordered that the father must not ‘invite’ the girls into his bed.

Justice Benjamin’s implicit acceptance of this myth of the male hydraulic penis in his reasoning means that the two girls now face real danger. The reality of men’s sexually abusive behaviour is very different from the view crystallised in the biologically determinist ‘hydraulic penis theory’. In reality, abusers go to great lengths to gain sexual access to girls at all times of the day, and often even look for employment that allows them to work with children. They put a lot of time and effort into grooming girls for sexual abuse, often using pornography and animals to instruct them. They document and share with other men techniques of sexual abuse. They go to great lengths to cover up the abuses they perpetrate, and will threaten and harass girls who attempt to speak out against them. To sexual predators, custody rights can seem like manna from heaven, allowing them to abuse their victims in the privacy and convenience of their own homes. In the Robins v Ruddock case, the father now has enough time and space to properly groom his daughters away from their mother so they will never again speak out against him.

The safety of children is endangered when people who appear to believe in hydraulic penises hear court cases involving children. Hydraulic penises are just a myth, and have no basis in reality. Biological determinist myths about male sexuality are dangerous because it looks like they render influential people like Justice Benjamin incapable of taking proper action to protect children’s safety and wellbeing. There are very few powerful people on whom children can call to protect them, and as long as myths about male sexuality permeate the Australian court system, judges will threaten, rather than armour, the human rights of the weakest members of our society.

It’s not sex it’s rape

I’ve written before about how rape is too often minimised in reporting of sexual crimes, reduced to “had sex with” and other lesser depictions.

Lauredhel from W.A,  in a piece titled ‘A forensic semanticist on sex and rape’ published on the Hoyden About Town blog, makes the same point. Here’s an extract:

In Trenton, N.J., a group of up to seven guys—a mix of adults and minors—paid a teenager for her 7-year-old sister. They allegedly gang-raped the girl as the rest of the partygoers looked on.

Yet, the lead in the Web site story began, “Police in New Jersey’s capital say a 15-year-old sold her 7-year-old sister to have sex with as many as seven men and boys.”

Breaking news: The 7-year-old girl from Trenton didn’t “have sex with” up to seven men. If there was sexual contact, she was gang-raped. Read story here.

Why isn’t incest rape?

In an older but still vitally significant piece, Caroline Taylor discusses the courts’ refusal to use the word ‘rape’ in incest trials:

In one case, after complaints from the defence barrister, the survivor was threatened with contempt of court charges if they did not refrain from using the term rape when they described repeated acts of sexual penetration by their father. In a discussion between the trial judge and defence lawyer the judge declared that since ‘incest was consensual’ it could not therefore be rape, and so the survivor was wrong to make such a claim. To add insult to injury the defence barrister added that using the term rape suggested some kind of violence was used! Two other cases from the same sample involved legal discussions involving the inappropriateness of survivors or police using the term rape in ‘incest’ trials.’

In ‘Girl Slavery in America’, a recent post published on Huffington Post, Executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, Malika Saada Saar, highlights (like this earlier piece I published) that there is a marketplace for the bodies of girls in the West as well as other parts of the world.  She also makes the very important point that it is not the girls who are victims of the prostitution trade who should be penalised, but the men who fuel demand for them in the first place.

…Unfortunately, in both urban and rural regions of the nation, American-born girls are being trafficked and sold. An estimated 100,000-300,000 American children are at risk for becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation. According to the Department of Justice, the average age of a prostituted girl in the U.S. is 12-14 years. These sexually exploited girls are routinely raped, beaten into submission, and even tattooed like cattle by their pimps.

…we must …stem the demand for buying and selling girls for sex.

Men who purchase girls for sex are committing child abuse. They are not simply paying for sex; they are instead perpetrating brutal acts of rape against vulnerable children who do not choose to sell their bodies. No child wants to be sold for sex.

It is time to prosecute those who sell and purchase girls. If they are subject to punishment for their criminal acts against children, pimps and “johns” will be less interested in the marketplace of very young girls. The laws already exist—but there is minimal political will, at the state or federal level, to prosecute them–especially the “johns”. Despite all the political jingoism about being tough on crime or protecting our children, lawmakers are remarkably indifferent to prosecuting these child abusers.

How is it that in our nation, in the 21st century, any one of our daughters can be bought and sold for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and without the severe threat of punishment? What is happening that girls’ lives are worth so little? In the context of a civilized society, this level of tolerated violence against girls is an irreconcilable contradiction. No girl in America should be purchased, sold, raped, abused or exploited — and with impunity. Read article here.

Anne Summers review of Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism was published in the Australian’s Review section on the weekend.

In the review, titled ‘The tyranny of self-perfection’, the long-time Australian feminist campaigner for women’s equality admits she had “no idea” about how bad things were for girls in a hypersexualised culture:

…This reviewer has to confess a comparable ignorance….I had no idea.

For feminists such as me who have been preoccupied with statistics and watching public indicators of progress such as women breaking barriers in politics, in business and other public domains, the cultural revolution that has enveloped girls and young women during the past decade or so was completely off my radar.

I kept fobbing off questions about whether I thought raunch culture was incompatible with feminism: how relevant was that, I thought, compared with the important stuff….?

So Walter’s book was quite an eye-opener.

She documents a culture in which sexual allure is equated with empowerment and girls are driven to strive for an air-brushed perfection that is as artificial as it is unattainable. Every aspect of the culture seems to reinforce this message, from the normalisation of the sex industry via the explosion of lap-dancing clubs throughout Britain to magazines directed at girls that “relentlessly encourage their readers to measure up to a raft of celebrities whose doll-like looks are seen as iconic and whose punishing physical regimes are seen as aspirational.”

Girls today, says Walter, think sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having and will do anything to achieve the mandated appearance… the information I found most distressing was how young women feel obliged to shape themselves according to the expectations of the idealised female their boyfriends have acquired from pornography…

All this is especially germane because 10 years ago Walter wrote a book The New Feminism that argued that feminists should not be concerned about the growing sexual objectification of women…Walter has now changed her mind. Big time.

Summers goes on to say that she finds the material in Walter’s book “sobering” and “challenging”.

While I find it somewhat difficult to understand how so many prominent women actively working to raise the status of women failed to notice  the wrecking ball impacts of a pornified culture which constricts the freedom of women and girls by reducing them to sexy dolls while dressing it all up as ‘choice’, I am glad they see it now.

But while Summers started so well, her conclusion is unfortunate – and wrong.

She writes: “No one — not Walter, not me — wants to be thought a prude, so no one is going to actually take on the hypersexualised culture that is supposedly spoiling the life chances of girls today…”

Summers had “no idea”, as she says, about what was happening.  But is seems she also has “no idea” about the global movement against it.

No one is going to take on the hypersexualised culture? That’s a big call and contradicted by the facts.

There are many of us who have taken it on. Some key players appear in my book Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls (one of a number of books on the subject in recent years, including Living Dolls, The Sexualisation of Childhood, The Lolita Effect, So Sexy So Soon, Pornified, What’s Happening to Our Girls?, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Bodies, etc). Then there’s  Kids free 2B Kids, the Australian Council on Children and Media, The Australian Childhood Foundation, Choices for Children, and the dynamic new counter cultural agitator movement Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation (www.collectiveshout.org).

Then there are individuals who have come together to lobby for change, including Julie Gale, Maggie Hamilton, The Hon Alistair Nicholson, Steve Biddulph, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Noni Hazlehurst, Professor Clive Hamilton, Dr Emma Rush, Professor Louise Newman, Dr Cordelia Fine, Dr Renate Klein and others.  We are all part of a global movement against sexualisation/objectification, led overseas by activists, advocates and academics such as Dr. Jean Kilbourne, Dr Diane Levin, Professor Gail Dines, Professor Ros Gill, Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon, Dr Melissa Farley, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood in the US, Object and Pink Stinks in the UK, and many others. The American Psychological Association’s Taskforce on the sexualisation of girls took the issue on, with a major report, and more recently, the UK Home Office, with a compelling examination of the problem.

Propelled by evidence of harm, all have acted together to bring about change. They haven’t given a stuff about being labelled “prudes” or anything else, recognising the vested interests at play that would try to shut them down.

Given the major battles Summers has engaged in over decades, I would have thought she was made of sterner stuff.

Sexualisation, pressured sex, pornified music video clips, Kiely Williams PR campaign for the women-love-rape movement,  a little boy having his wish to go to a strip club granted, leg waxing for little girls, sexism in Christine Nixon reporting: a selection of articles from the last couple of weeks reflecting the status of women and girls. The bar is getting lower friends.

 The porn identity

Mary-Anne Toy, The Age/SMH, April 19, 2010

Are the sexually explicit images bombarding society shaping identities and mores?

A FEW years ago, Melbourne mother Julie Gale walked into a milk bar with her then 10-year-old son to buy him an icecream. Instead, she was horrified at seeing, in full view of her son, a magazine with the headline ”Tender Teenage Tw&t” above a picture of a girl in pigtails. ”I thought, that can’t possibly be legal…

Kindergarten teacher Dianne O’Dwyer has four-year-olds proudly showing off their ”little bras” and bringing make-up to school, a three-year-old who imitates pop singer Lady GaGa’s raunchy moves, and a little girl who boasts about being the skinniest in the class.

On television and billboards, and in shop windows, sex is a popular way to sell everything from the obvious – men’s clubs, brothels and treatments for erectile dysfunction – to an idealised, celebrity-based concept of success. Read article here.

Gen Y women facing pressure to have sex

Mary-Anne Toy, The Age/SMH, April 19, 2010

THE rise of raunch culture and the ”advanced consumerist” culture of Western countries are creating new pressures on young women to have sex early and against their will, experts say.

La Trobe University sociologist Anastasia Powell says the sexualisation or pornification of society – the preponderance of sexualised imagery in media, music and other popular culture – has done little to empower young women. Read article here.

Pornification of pop is bottom of the charts for children

Suzy Freeman-Greene , The Age, April 16, 2010

What must children make of videos in which nothing is left to the imagination? Read article here.

Sleazy song keeps rape myths alive

Judith Ireland, SMH, April 19, 2010

The latest film clip from American singer Kiely Williams is the musical equivalent of treason. Ordinarily the song’s over-reliance on cheesy synths and breathy vocals would be reason enough to can Spectacular. But its true crime lies in its portrayal of rape as a fun, crazy night out.

Dressed in a tube skirt and corset top, the former Disney star heads out for a big night, meets a guy in a bar, drinks a whole bunch of drinks and wakes up the next morning staring in horror at his naked butt.

She doesn’t remember the guy’s name or if he used a ”rubber”. She was so tanked (and possibly drugged) that she remembers just about nothing. Or, as she sings it, ”I was face down, ass up, clothes off, broke off, dozed off”. Read article here.

Watchdog bans Red Bull TV ad for ’sexualising children’

Mumbrella, April 14, 2010

An animated TV ad for Red Bull featuring a young boy who convinces his mother to let him go to a strip club has been banned by the Advertising Standards Bureau because it “normalises sexualising children”. Read article and watch video here.

Parents forcing girls, 9, to get legs waxed

Caroline Marcus, The Sunday Telegraph, April 18, 2010

PARENTS are sending girls as young as nine to have painful beauty treatments.

Beauticians say that young children are being brought into salons by parents to undergo painful hair removal treatments. Read article here.

Would a man be treated this way?

The bizarre case against Christine Nixon

Jeff Sparrow, The Drum Unleashed, April 20, 2010

Women buying men for sex is not equality

Women, we’ve arrived. We’re equal now with men. The conditions for equality have been met. Am I talking about political, social and financial equality? No.

Access to maternity leave, child care, the opportunity to balance work and family life? No. The ability to live free from harassment and sexual bullying. No.

We know we are empowered because now we can buy men like they buy women. Men can be prostituted to provide sexual services for women. Here is proof of our newly won freedom: we can participate in the sexual objectification of men in the same way we have been objectified through history.

Free from restriction, the sex industry is now open to all. And there’s lots of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to make us all feel good about it. It’s all there in a piece in The Age, which reads like a free plug for a new male escort service (”She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s”).

But just because it’s women doing the buying — and the pimping — doesn’t make it liberating. Being able to trade in human flesh doesn’t mean that emulating the sexual behaviour of men and their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, is progress.

This move is part of a capitalist celebration of the female sexual consumer who can choose to buy dildos, botox, pole-dancing classes, new breasts, Brazilians, surgically altered and coloured labias – and men. These are the tokens of our emancipation? This is what ”freedom of choice” has delivered?

This is a parody of liberation in which women become a mere participant in a mass-marketed orgy of so-called sexual freedom.

I do have some sympathy, however, with the argument that women cannot find men they want to be with intimately. In our pornified culture we are raising men who are callous and insensitive to the needs and desires of women. We knock tenderness out of them with a diet of brutality from the earliest of ages. Boys’ role models are celebrities and sporting figures who see women as conquests, there for the taking.

But buying a man won’t fix that. It is a reflection of distance, disconnection, a lack of intimacy and a subtraction of emotion from sex.

And it’s dishonest to tell women who want something more than a quick $500 f— that they can have ”the whole boyfriend experience” — hair stroked, hand held and even a walk in the park with her, her kids and her dog. For a mere $1200-$1500 a day. That’s a lot of money for simulated intimacy. That’s a pretend boyfriend, not a real one. How does that ”make a woman feel special”?

Hiring prostitutes remains fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men. When women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. And there’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation.

The rise of male ”escort” services reflects a devaluation of sex because of the primacy of exchange and commodification of another person.

All we’re seeing with this new men-for-sale business is the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.

Published today online in the National Times.

Earlier in the year I was asked to take part in the Intelligence Squared debate on internet filtering organised by the St James Ethics Centre. I agreed. I have since changed my mind. In this letter to the producer, I explain why.

Ms Deb Richards

St James Ethics Centre, Sydney

Dear Ms Richards,

After significant consideration, I am writing to advise that I must pull out of the St James Ethics Centre Intelligence Squared Debate scheduled for May 11.

As mentioned in previous correspondence, it is hard enough going into this debate in the first place, given the level of misinformation and misrepresentation of the Government’s proposed mandatory filtering scheme.

But then, for you to include – without any consultation –  a Chinese speaker who defends the Chinese firewall, means that our side is doomed to fail before we’ve even started the debate.  His inclusion makes it a lost cause for us: the audience will have to vote against us because they won’t support political censorship –I don’t either.  I don’t support the Chinese firewall, I don’t support any filtering of political content, I don’t support filtering of the views of dissenters and minority groups. I have been publicly critical of China’s human rights violations, including the lack of freedom of expression.

If the format were something other than a “debate” – for example, the opportunity to express a range of views as individuals - I could view it differently. However, as it is a debate, in which the audience votes to determine the winning team, how can we possibly have a chance of winning (unless the audience is stacked with PRC supporters, even then, this would not be the support I’d be seeking).

I am not wishing to reflect on Kaiser Kuo personally. He may have some good arguments. He may be a nice man. He may have been educated in the West.  We may agree on “one or two points”. But that is hardly recommendation enough to have him on a team which doesn’t agree with his overall position and is therefore divided. Going into a debate like this requires unity of position and our side will not have that. The other side will. They will have opportunity to discuss their approach beforehand, to meet face to face if they wish, to hone their arguments amongst themselves. We, however will have none of these opportunities and would enter the debate at a disadvantage. We would also be essentially one person down.

In your email of March 27, you write, “If it is any consolation, the ABC’s Q&A program have leapt at the chance of having him on their panel”. This is irrelevant. Why wouldn’t they want to have him? He is interesting enough. But it is a completely different format. A panel discussion is not a debate in which the audience votes.

It has been important all through the porn filtering debate to distance the policy, and differentiate the argument, from the Chinese fire-wall. In other words, to make it very clear that the arguments for filtering illegal pornography (among other things) are completely distinct from those for political censorship, and that we are as opposed to political censorship as those who are against porn filtering. The national classification scheme that the Government’s policy is based on does not consider political content at all.

The decision to invite a defender of the Chinese Government’s political censorship – on the spurious grounds of “cultural relativism” – is very damaging for our side of the debate. We will be inescapably bracketed with arguments in favour of wider censorship which can only play strongly into the hands of the internet libertarians.

I cannot join a debating team that will include a member arguing that it is legitimate to censor from the internet material that a government finds objectionable on political grounds.

When the audience comes to vote on the proposition, those inclined to favour porn censorship would have to vote “no” because a “yes” vote means a vote for political censorship as well.

I apologise for any inconvenience my decision might cause.

Yours sincerely,

Melinda Tankard Reist

April 8, 2010