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.’

 [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 »

This article in the Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend about Kick-Ass, a school holidays film starring an 11-year-old girl who shoots a man in the face, impales another and says things like:

“OK, you c—s, let’s see what you can do now.” The film is described as containing  “scenes of carnage and massacre played for laughs.” Read the article here.

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. 

Caroline Overington writes in The Australian today that the Family Court has ordered two girls aged 8 and 10 to have sleepovers with their child sex offender father. As long as there’s a lock on the bedroom door. This man has filmed child pornography and created links to child porn sites. He also previously invited one of his daughters into his bed.  In my opinion, this man has forfeited any right to have his daughters stay over. The 10-year-old sobbed that she didn’t want to stay with him. Too bad. And what about during the day, after the girls have unlocked the door that kept their father out of their room the night before? The Judge said the risk of sexual abuse was “diminished when they are awake and alert, and when the children are together”. So these very young girls have to be alert and vigilant about possible attack, and look out for each other? Who could possibly think that is a good environment for children?  This ruling must be re-examined.

Since my last piece on the cyberbullying taking place through Facebook, other sites targeting girls for their alleged flaws have been found.  One identifying young women not considered  “marriage material”.  Another naming and shaming ‘12-year-old sluts’.  Another for girls labelled “bitches”.  British girl Poppy Bracey recently took her life  as a result of a cyber bullying campaign against her.  Poppy was 13. She was harassed for being “too pretty”. (Some commenting on the story said girls like this just need to toughen up).  It seems no girl can ever be good enough. She must grow up trying to shield herself from virtual darts and real-life abuse, coming at her from every direction.

The piece below by Melbourne blogger Elizabeth (left) at My Spilt Milk  (whose comments I have valued on my  posts), is a passionate exploration of these online monuments to cruelty. Elizabeth nails the hypocrisy of Facebook in banning breastfeeding images while allowing sexualised depictions of women, harrassment and abuse to flourish on untold numbers of sites.

On the weekend – on the eve of International Women’s Day – I wrote about a Facebook slut page, arguing it enabled cyber bullying, stalking and harassment. On the page, photos were posted of girls and women who were labelled ’sluts’. One was 10-years-old. Another had been bashed (she deserved it, she was a slut). A later image showed a woman bound, with her head decapitated. Many were just smiling young women at home or having fun with girlfriends. And so it went on, image after image of girls and women branded with this virtual scarlet letter.

The piece got a run in On Line Opinion today.

It appears that Facebook has responded to criticism. The site has been removed. Thanks to all who reported it.

 Of course, that’s not the last of the bullies. Dannielle Miller from Enlighten Education blogged on bullying and social networking sites this week. You can read her piece here. 

 My friend Anita had her own experience with on-line abusers this week, who demanded their entitlement to child pornography. Anita set up a Facebook site to find 3 billion people willing to add their voice to a global campaign against child porn. The site was inundated with comments by men extolling the pleasures of child rape and posting links to child porn. (She has removed them). Please support Anita’s efforts against the production of and demand for child sexual assault images and sign up.  

Below is a comment on my original blog  by Merryn Smith. It’s so good I wanted to give it more prominence.  

“I think the problem with social networking sites and a great deal of internet is that people assume that it merely reflects socio/cultural reality. Actually it produces reality, as does all discourse. So it’s easy to reduce the meanings generated by groups like these as mere ‘words’. Hence men (and a small proportion of young naive girls) always call forth the freedom of speech argument to conceal one of purposes of this type of ‘othering’ discourse. Women are the largest group that are targeted as the ‘other’ inhuman ‘thing’ through this type of ancient discursive act. But of course ethnic groups and the working classes are also kept in place through these ‘othering’ discourses. This is of course about power. The power to dehumanise comes hand in hand with physical acts of violence. But we know that young women suffer terribly high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in our cultures. Yes these groups reflect that, but they also produce a cultural climate and language that condones, encourages and applauds the dehumanisation of half of the worlds population. Of course these groups hide behind notions of freedom and the separation of bodily acts and psychological acts, or body and mind, body and speech. But of course these young men and boys (mostly) are passing through their right of passage-their right to dehumanise woman and girls. This is how men bond. It is through the ‘othering’ process that makes them feel that they belong. We need to fight this by creating spaces for young women where they can ‘go’, real and virtual, where they are not used as a symbol of male belonging and bonding. We need to create spaces where woman and girls (especially girls) can create their own embodied and disembodied world realities. But it aint easy. Happy Women’s Day…”

 

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?

Abbi Marper is too shy to speak above a whisper, but she wants to be a policewoman or a nurse. Her friend Becky Billing is studying to be a plumber. Charlotte Wilson, the most chatty of the group, is having a problem narrowing her options. “I want to be a firefighter, but I also want to be a paramedic and a midwife,” she says. “The trouble is, there’s just too much choice.”

Slumped in the plastic chairs of a Sheffield community centre, shovelling fistfuls of free sweets from the coffee bar into their mouths, the group of girls are all members of Aim High, a dance troupe set up by Becky Billing and Charlotte Wilson’s sister, 17-year-old Lauren, two years ago after they got in trouble with the police. Read more…