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.’

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

 [Warning. May be triggering for survivors of sexual assault] 

Last week I commented on the case of a 12-year-old girl pimped then raped by 120 men over a six week period. The media reporting said the men had “had sex with” the girl. I questioned this language, believing it minimised what had actually been done to this child. Jackie posted a comment about her own experience, in which she also felt her abuse was minimised by the language used to describe it. I asked her to elaborate, and give us an insight into the experience of a young woman who has survived not only “a violent, soul-destroying act” but a demoralising court process as well. Thanks Jackie for your bravery. Can you relate to Jackie’s story? I’d like to hear from you. 

 As a teenager, I was raped repeatedly over a period of two months, by a trusted family member. I was 16-years-old at the time. My abuser was 50. When the police took my statement and later when I started work with a sexual assault counsellor, they both agreed that it was a “textbook case”. The police officer handling my case said there was no doubt in her mind that my abuser had done this before. Both she and my counsellor talked to me about the grooming process. “He groomed you. He knew exactly what he was doing. I have no doubt that he’s done this before.” 

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, another example of  how rape is not named as rape.

The Australian reports today on a 51-year-old Hobart man found  guilty of  prostituting a 12-year-old girl. Men were charged $100 for half an hour, with $50 extra for ‘no condom’. One man used her to make pornography. The report states that 120 men were alleged  “to have had sex with the girl…” between August and September last year.

“Had sex with”?

No, they didn’t have sex with her. They raped her. One hundred and twenty men raped a child for six weeks. One perpetrator used her to make child sexual assault images. Now she has sexually transmitted diseases. And unspeakable trauma.

I’ve written about this before. It’s time to update the language and name these acts for what they are.

Plus: Grand Theft auto gamer’s instruction video for best way to murder prostituted women

And Calvin Klein’s new men’s underwear ad: No, we don’t want to see your d—k.

Elizabeth at My Milk Spilt, whose piece on Facebook and violence against women I published here the other day, has now written about an experience she had in the Melbourne school where she is a teacher. The discussion with her students revealed just how de-sensitized young people have become about violence – and their lack of empathy. One girl is “shocked” that Bowling for Columbine attracted so much attention. Why? Because only 15 people died.  The murder of a mother and her two young daughters wasn’t that brutal, because “they were only shot in the head” said another girl.

This is what a daily diet of depictions of violence, torture and brutality is doing to kids. Where will it take us?

How to kill prostitutes

On her site, Elizabeth has also posted a Grand Theft Auto clip. It features a male gamer describing his preferred method for killing prostituted women and instructing fellow gamers on the best strategies and methods for doing so. GTA is played by young boys around the globe. Given that it incites violence against women, why is this game and this clip allowed?

We Don’t Buy It

Calvin Klein has come up with a nasty add to promote its new underwear line for men. The language is aggressive and threatening. “Do you want to see my dick?”, “Do you want some f—ing more?”  I like Happy Bodies take on it. Don’t buy Calvin Klein.

Nastier by the minute

A friend and colleague emailed me yesterday. She said: “All this is getting harder, faster, nastier by the minute. Maybe it’s me. But it does feel like this culture is growing exponentially.” No, it’s not just you T. Violence against women is colonising every available space. 

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.

The Federal Government is moving to strengthen the nation’s child sex exploitation laws.

Until now it hasn’t been an offence to be a member of a child pornography network. If the bills are passed by Parliament that will change and the offence will attract a maximum penalty of 25 years in jail. >more

About time. Will be very interesting to see if any MP votes against this.

A young woman known as Amy is seeking payment from consumers of pornographic videos and pictures that depicted her abuse.  >more

I hope she -and others like her – extract millions from the men who fuel the demand for  the creation of child sexual assault images.

It was a remarkable case of playing fast and loose with the truth – even by the standards of the Australian Sex Party (ASP).  Kids Free 2B Kids expose on ‘pseudo’ child pornography flooding corner stores, milkbars and petrol stations (including 7-Eleven and McDonald’s-Fuelzone) was turned into a claim that Australia had banned small breasted women in pornography.

This attempt to turn a very serious examination of ‘teen porn’ magazines promoting sex with little girls, rape and incest into a joke, made its way around the world before you could say ‘what the…?’ Australia was sent up for having problems with ‘itty bitty boobs’ and slammed for discriminating against women with small breasts.

Crikey was first to blow the lid of the ASP charade. It seemed no one else bothered to check the ASP’s claims against reality.

What is true is that those with small or no breasts (or with breasts airbrushed out) are deliberately used in ‘teen porn’ titles to show that young girls are desperate to be penetrated by older men. But it’s not only that they are depicted as ‘flatties’ or ‘tiny’.  While unverified claims are made that the women are over 18, even if true, they are posed as children – surrounded by soft toys, holding hand puppets, wearing pig tails, braces, bobby socks, sucking lollypops etc.

Here’s an example (deliberately cropped). This is from a magazine imported by a company owned by David Watt, an office bearer with the Eros Association, which launched the ASP.

I have written about this before in this blog, in Unleashed and On Line Opinion

These images – which the sex party wants to protect so much it flicks the spin switch to overdrive -  arouse men to sexualised images of ‘children’. Where’s the media/blogger/twitterverse concern about that?  Buried under a mound of small breasts.

Julie Gale of Kids Free 2B Kids has documented the facts that stacks of these magazines are wrongly classified by the Classification Board or never go through the classification system, in a detailed submission to the Compliance and Enforcement Working Party of the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General. Ironically, the October submission hasn’t been forwarded to any members of the working party, apparently because the secretariat doesn’t want to be seen to be distributing child porn.

Relates links: see Kids Free 2B Kids statement Australian Sex Party Fakes It

Underage p-on sold in corner milk bars article- The Australian April 3, 2009