A secretive Australia-based charity dedicated to hunting down sex traffickers has had a breakthrough in Cambodia.
The Grey Man organisation says it has rescued a 10-year-old girl and a 14-year-old girl being held in an illegal brothel.>more
First up, Lydia Turner (discovered here first!) in ABC’s The Drum Unleashed today about the failure of “weight-loss” dietary products and the death and injury they cause. Then Julie Bindel on men who use prostituted women and why, followed by a podcast with Diane Levin, co-author with Jean Kilbourne of So Sexy So Soon: The new sexualized childhood and what parents can do to protect their kids. Beth Doherty then blows the lid on the reality of the Summernats car festival held in Canberra recently.
Lydia Jade Turner
Australia’s disordered eating epidemic
“Prescribing diet pills and re-wiring people’s intestines doesn’t teach them how to live a healthily, it merely puts them at risk of disordered eating, weight cycling and irreversible medical complications” >more
Men who buy sex: Who they buy and what they know
A research study of 103 men who describe their use of trafficked and non-trafficked women in prostitution, and their awareness of coercion and violence. Melissa Farley, Julie Bindel and Jacqueline M. Golding
Read Julie Bindel’s article on the research in The Guardian, 15/1/10
So sexy so soon podcast with Diane Levin
Beth Doherty describes Summernats as:
‘a drunken porn fest where women become decorations and objects adorning the trays of souped-up holden utes; where “show us your tits” for four days becomes an acceptable banner to place on a promotional tent; where women who wear white T-shirts shouldn’t complain if they’re sprayed down with a hose; and where women who are sexually assaulted are ‘asking for it’ just by their attendance‘. >more
The try-hards at Roger David are promoting two new t-shirts for the boys, featuring women who are gagged, with strips across their eyes and semi-naked, as the latest fashion statement.
The woman in the ‘Annie Hollywood’ t-shirt (produced by ‘Blood Is The New Black’) looks as though she has been roughed up. She appears disheveled and exhausted, her image reminiscent of a crime scenes photo. The other two women have a strip across their eyes, suggesting a loss of identity and dehumanisation. Their semi-naked bodies are pimped through a t-shirt.
The designs are not iconic. They’re not retro (even if adapting a Roxy Music album cover). They’re not art.
What we are seeing here is the glamourising of abuse, the suggestion of sexual aggression, a hint that women want to be treated roughly.
The abuse is glamourised not just for the perpetrator, but for the victim too. As though it’s not only hot to be the pimp, but it’s sexy to be dominated, coerced, submissive, abused – possibly even raped.
It’s as though a little bit of the pimp cool that’s pushed by Hollywood, MTV, in hip hop and rap (see earlier post ) will rub off on the wearer, just like the wearer of a global brand hopes that some of the brand’s ‘personality’ and ‘cool’ will rub off on them.
Roger David really like their domination and abuse tees. They feature as first items on their home page and on their Facebook.
But it’s not just Roger David mainstreaming contempt for women wrapped up in a tee.
A mate came across this at the Birkenhead point Authentic outlet store in Sydney the other day.
What is this? A plug for trafficking? Bring ‘em over, the more exotic and servile the better!
Then there’s others available from online stores , treating rape as a joke and portraying little girls as little sluts.
“It’s not rape if you yell Surprise!” 
…to name but a few.
A sexual assault survivor told me that for her, the t-shirts are highly triggering of assault memories and she suspects that other survivors will find them so too. So as well as putting women and girls in physical danger, t-shirts like this serve as a form of mental torture too.
Women gagged, women who can’t see, women transported away from their homes to service men elsewhere. We have to ask why the demand for these shirts and why men’s stores are pimping these porn-industry inspired messages about what women are good for.
Let Roger David know what you think.
When we think of trafficking, we usually think of it as happening some-where-else, usually poor and desperate, and not in ‘enlightened’ Western countries. But that would be wrong: women and girls are traded everywhere. This forceful piece by Rachel Lloyd written for Human Trafficking Awareness Day in the US, highlights mainstream corporate support for the normalisation of prostitution through the sponsorship of men who romanticise pimping.
Corporate sponsored pimping plays role in US human trafficking
By Rachel Lloyd
January 11, 2010 
Don Magic Juan and Snoop Dogg arrive with his unnamed female companions on dog leashes for the MTV Video Music Awards in 2003. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day and President Obama recently proclaimed January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Yet when we think about trafficking, we think about it happening to children from Asia, women from the Ukraine, domestic servants brought in from Africa and Central America. All of these examples are real.
But rarely we do associate trafficking and slavery with the girls and young women that we see on HBO specials like ‘Hookers on the Point’, girls sold for sex on the streets, on Craigslist ads, girls on the pole in strip-clubs. The primary face of trafficking in this country looks like an adolescent girl of color trafficked for sex, sold by adult men to adult men.
See also :Women and popular culture: The pimp chic debate
The Wall Street Journal JANUARY 8, 2010
Rights Court Raises Sex-Trafficking Oversight
By PAULA PARK
The European Court of Human Rights ruled for the first time since it
was created in 1998 that sex trafficking is a violation of antislavery
conventions, in the case of a 20-year-old Russian woman who died two
weeks after she came to Cyprus to work in a cabaret where she was
sexually exploited.
MTR in the Media
Now in its second printing!