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.
Dannielle Miller from Enlighten Education, who I’ve run here before, has blogged on Channel 10 and its allegedly PG-rated show ‘So you think you can dance’. It brought to mind a clip I saw last week of Pamela Anderson on ‘Dancing With the Stars’. The male judge , totally beside himself, shouted: “All I could think about was sex, sex and more sex!” I don’t recall him saying anything about her dancing ability. Maybe that’s irrelevant. Maybe she’ll win.
“I was startled by what some young women were saying to me about their inability to access dissent; their inability to hear voices that were presenting an alternative” – Natasha Walter
I’m half way through Natasha Walter’s new book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is a compelling read, laying bare the forces of sexualisation, objectification and raunch culture and their destructive influence on the health and wellbeing of women and girls everywhere. So much of the book echoes the findings of Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls. It is encouraging to see a coalescing of global concern around the pornification of culture and it’s wrecking ball impact on girls’ lives.
In an interview in this month’s Playboy, John Mayer says he can’t keep his hands off himself. Giving new meaning to narcissism, Mayer says he prefers an intimate night in with his computer to a night out with a real live woman.
Even when he’s with a real woman, Mayer confesses he is just using her as a masturbatory aid while porn images and stories run through his head. To Mayer, women are only a means to an end: his own, self-assisted, big bang.
Here’s an extract:
MAYER: …pornography? It’s a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora’s box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 [naked girls] before I got out of bed.
The UK Home Office just released the Sexualisation of Young People: Review by 
Dr Linda Papadopoulos. It is a compelling, thorough and strongly evidence-based paper which should be read by anyone concerned about the impacts of the pornification of culture on girls and boys. Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls is cited a number of times (the quote above from the Executive Summary is taken from Betty McLellan’s chapter ‘Sexualised and Trivialised: Making Equality Impossible’). It’s good to see our work acknowledged in this significant report. Given that we share the UK’s cultural DNA, I hope this report will bolster efforts to address this issue here and add momentum to the push for a review of our own Senate Committee inquiry recommendations, which Emma Rush wrote about here earlier.
See also ‘Clamp down on lads’ mags to avoid ‘pornification’ of society, says study’. Also have a look at the following articles: ‘Review into sexualisation of young people published’ , ‘Fears over sexual images and children’, BBC, and the Guardian.
Transcript of ABC’s Q&A in which precious minutes are wasted as I try to explain the term ’skanky hos’Melinda Tankard Reist: What would have been controversial would have been if Tony Abbott had said: “I want my daughters to be skanky hos.” Then you might have had a controversy.
Satyajit Das: Sorry, what is a “scanty ho”?
Melinda Tankard Reist: Skanky ho. Whore.
Satyajit Das: What is that?
Rebecca Huntley: I’ll show you after.
Satyajit Das: You’re on.
Rebecca Huntley: We’ll just go out.
Barnaby Joyce: It’s a derivative.
Satyajit Das: It’s a derivative?
Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.
Satyajit Das: It’s a family show?
Lindsay Tanner: It’s a family show.
Melinda Tankard Reist: It’s a rough term for a loose woman. Skanky whore…
Satyajit Das: Oh, right…
Melinda Tankard Reist: You obviously don’t listen to enough rap music.
Came across this on Girl w/ Pen.
These tips put the responsibility where it should be:
1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.
2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!
3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!
4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.
5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!
6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.
8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.
9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!
10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.
Abuse is, like, so hot right now
Which brings me back to those t-shirts. Because abuse is, like, so hot right now (thanks Kelly, great line, so pleased you took on the pro-rape slogan apologists).
This one below is the featured rape chic t-shirt on Zazzle. I mentioned the slogan earlier, but somehow it’s worse seeing it on an actual body. And I’ve since found out it’s sold by an Australian online company hosted out of Los Angeles:
The text promoting it reads:
“Remember to yell! Now we know this is a little controversial, but you know you’re laughing. Just remember to let them know before you go for it. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the effort.”
In a stunning act of hypocrisy, Zazzle also has t-shirts alongside the rape-as-a-bit-of-a-lark line, that say “Real men don’t rape” and “I was raped and I won’t be silent”.
So why sell shirts with rape-proud slogans that mock probably the greatest human rights violation known to women? Why flog items that contribute to a rape-enabling environment which leads to more rape victims in the first place? (I wanted to say rape survivors, but not all do). Maybe Zazzle just sees that as market expansion for their full range of shirts for rapist and victim?
You know, I was really hoping to focus on something other than anti-women t-shirts this week and blog on a topic which might hopefully maintain the interest of the 13,000 people who visited this site in the past four days in response to global coverage of objectifying items of apparel.
But just as I was tossing around a few ideas for the next post, a young woman sent me photos of these t-shirts (thanks Jackie) which she found in a Supre store in Sydney’s CBD.
Now some of you will know that this isn’t the first time the pimps-r-us clothing store has come to the attention of this blog (Treating little girls as ho ho ho’s). As a result of a raft of complaints over its “Santa’s Bitch” and “North Pole Dancer” t-shirts, Supre’s Karen Hermann told us, in writing, that “Santa’s Bitch” would be removed. But Supre was playing fast and lose with the truth (Update: Looks like Supre was serving up untruths for Christmas).
And now they are flogging this “Pussy Power” tee for $7.50.
Supre, why would you use a porn inspired title for women’s genitals as the slogan for girl’s clothing? Will a 10,11 or 12-year-old girl, perhaps drawn to the image of the little black cat, understand how wearing such a shirt could be interpreted; the message it could send in a culture which already treats young girls as hot and sexy mini women?
Why would you put her at risk like this? And don’t tell us you had in mind soft cuddly kittens.
This isn’t a store where adults get their clothes. It’s a cheapie chain frequented by flocks of young girls who should be allowed to enjoy their few short years of girlhood without being targeted as walking billboards for pornified messages about who girls are and what they are good for.
This is what Jackie thought of Supre:
Flood Karen Hermann’s inbox.
MTR in the Media
Now in its second printing!