Since when did it become okay to hate women and girls so publicly and to judge them so mercilessly? 

There’s a new page on Facebook. It’s only two weeks old but already has more than a million members. I’m not going to post the link but of course it is easy to find. You don’t have to go far to find online domains where women are held up for ridicule and contempt. 

This is a site for anyone who wants to post pictures of girls they have judged to be sluts.

Some girls appear in overtly sexual poses. 

Others are doing that common tween pouty thing with their lips and surprised eyes. Which apparently means they are sluts. 

Then there’s the young girls of 13, 14 or 15 having fun with their friends, smiling and fooling around as young girls often do and somehow ending up on this site. Because even innocent mucking around with your besties is to be interpreted as sluttish behaviour. 

One average normal young woman is standing in a front yard looking relaxed and happy in a long blue summery dress. This girl cops a torrent of abuse on the site. Because girls can’t just look or actually be relaxed and happy. They must be covering up for the fact that they’re really sluts. 

Other images are of larger sized girls posted purely to be ridiculed. And they are. Condemned for being alive, though some men comment that despite their obvious hideousness, they could still manage to find some use for them. 

There is even a picture of a woman with a bashed face. 

It is revealing that the girls whose images have been put up here are either condemned for their whorish ways  - or condemned for not deserving the slut title. So they can’t win. Either they are too slutty or not slutty enough. 

Each girl or woman is analysed based on her body parts and what she is wearing. The text includes allegations of their prostitute-like ways, describing multiple STD’s, multiple pregnancies to multiple fathers, and all the sexual acts they have ever allegedly performed on multiple men. 

Some images are clearly posted for revenge. Often full names are used. What means do these women and girls have to defend themselves? How do they deal with it? What does it mean for them in their daily lives at school or work or at home or anywhere, to be identified to the whole world as a slut? 

By allowing this site, Facebook is a conduit for bullying, harassment and abuse. 

These are some of the comments. I’ve left out the pornographic ones which means I won’t be citing most of them. 

“Tripple ew”, “She’s so ugly”, “Meat”, “Pig”, “Dog”, “Vomit bucket anyone?” 

This site is a temple to human cruelty. 

One of the pictures of a larger girl looking depressed provokes special attack. 

Just yesterday a man calling himself ‘D.j.Stack’ labelled her a “baarbarian” [Sic. But you get the idea]. He also questions whether she really qualifies as slut material: 

“and i doute thats slut material because i wouldnt even look at that, nor do i think many would.” 

She is a ‘that’, not a real person. 

Who is the real barbarian in this picture? 

Another image of a larger bodied girl at the beach attracts the comment: 

“It looks like someone threw pancake batter against a wall and it slid down”. 

So the women whose images are posted on this virtual dartboard are insulted with the label slut. But they are equally insulted if they are seen as slut imposters: pretenders to the slut title. 

For example: “She couldn’t be a slut if she wanted to be”. 

And:  “She’s too f***ing ugly to be a slut. who would f***k that? 

Again, she is a that. 

In the image of the bashed woman, her eye is swollen and black. Why is she here?  Because she’s a slut too and she deserved what she got. That’s what one of the commenters said. 

A couple of images of men have been posted on the site. One male helpfully points out that men can’t be sluts “cos only the bitches are sluts”. 

And there you have it. 

The creator of the site, in a display of faux concern, writes: “’Lots of people have uploaded fan pics of people they know. That’s not cool guys that’s bullying.” 

So why have you left them there?
Images of young girls stripped and performing for a webcam have been removed in the last 24 hours.  As has an image of a 10-year-old girl. 

But it’s not enough. The whole site remains harmful to the mental health of girls whose images have been posted – in many cases most likely against their will or without their prior knowledge. 

Its presence is also harmful to girls who may fear their faces could soon appear there any day, meaning they too will wear the virtual scarlet letter.

This site facilitates cyber bullying, cyber stalking and harassment.  It puts girls and women in significant danger. 

Will Facebook leave it there for ever, until every girl and every woman is labelled a slut?

Fancy some violence on Valentine’s Day?

Came across this, which is doing the rounds on some Facebook sites:

“I’ve got a Valentines poem that has never yet failed to get me into a girls knickers. . .  Here we go then . . .  Roses are red, Violets are blue, I’ve got a knife now get in the f—ing van !!!!” 

Some illegal porn perhaps? 

Then I received this press statement from “Operation Titstorm”: 

“The Australian Government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.”

For three days this past week, hackers calling themselves “Anonymous”, disabled the Australian Parliament House computer system. 

They also hacked the PM’s site, plastering it with porn in a protest against the Government’s internet filtering plans. Parliament House staff also received porn spam emails. 

So now we have porn vigilantes demanding their entitlement to every form of pornography – which would include child sexual assault images – by wrecking the computer operating systems of a democratic parliament and declaring cyber war on Australia. So great is their desire for violent porn and child porn, by overwhelming the system with pornography they also force others to view it against their will. This is how the porn lobby views freedom? Unleashing a form of cyber terrorism to get its way?

Speaking of illegal, Senate Estimates hearings of the Legal and Constitution Legislation Committee last week heard that Classification Board Director Donald McDonald had issued called-in notices for 37 unclassified porn magazines between July 1 and December 21, 2009. In the 12 months before ,he called-in 127 magazines. The called-in titles included ‘Live Young Girls’ and others imported by Namda/Windsor Wholesale, whose General Manager is David Watt of the Eros Foundation which launched the Australian Sex Party. 

Many of the recalled titles endorse rape and incest and represent very young girls as desperate for sex with older males. The magazines have been illegally distributed in corner stores, milkbars and petrol stations including McDonald’s Fuelzone for who knows how long. See earlier blog 

In addition, in the six months to December 31, 2009, McDonald had called in 440 pornographic films, including incest titles. From 2008 to July 2009 he had called in 386 titles. Under our laws, distributors who fail to put their publications through the classification system have three days to respond to these notices. So, guess how many distributors have responded? 

None.

While the Classification Board notifies police about illegal publications and films, there is no reporting back on enforcement. It is possible nothing happens. No one seems to know. And bear in mind, these are only the titles that were found. How many more are out there?

Porn distributors have demonstrated that they think they can do what they want and get away with it. It seems they are right. The system is broke. It needs fixing. 

Maybe take up the whole day with it? 

“Viewing porn online becomes a major problem only when people become so preoccupied that they spend 16 to 18 hours a day doing nothing else but watching porn, with serious impacts on relationships, work, studies, and finance,” Dr Sitharthan said. 

So it’s only a problem if every waking moment is taken up with it? What about 10 hours a day?  Or eight? Or three or four?  Is porn use now so normalised that anything under 16 hours of viewing on-line porn is considered unproblematic? 

If you or someone you know is a compulsive porn user, I’d like your thoughts on when you think porn use is a problem. 

Throw in some dead prostituted women perhaps? 

In another example of pimp culture gone mainstream , a Queensland schoolboy set up a Facebook page called “Kill my hooker so you don’t have to pay her”. The site was taken down by Facebook – but not before it attracted 18,000 members. 

The principal of the school where the boy was disciplined said that education was needed about the “dangers of the internet”. 

How about starting with educating boys that violence against women is wrong? 

President of the Australian Sex Workers Association, Elena Jeffreys, took the opportunity to offer to get prostituted women into schools and educate students about the “reality of prostitution”. 

Given that the association thinks prostitution is a good career choice for women and given their moves to loosen up our visa system so that more Asian women can be prostituted here, I’m not sure how much reality the school kids would get.

For some actual reality, see Making Sex Work: A Failed Experiment with Legalised Prostitution in Victoria

Oh and by the way, the Facebook site is up again, just under a different name.