Read full blog here

Sunday Herald Sun, March 25, 2012

This month at Melbourne Westfield Fountain Gate, Elodie Russell beat 500 other teens to be named Victorian state finalist in the new Dolly Model Search.

The Geelong student and 500 other girls competed in the model search resurrected after 10 years.

Elodie is 14. But girls as young as 13 can enter. The winner will receive a modelling contract, fashion shoot and cover shoot for Dolly, and be a “Dolly ambassador.”

The would-be models, many just in high school, are told they can be the next Miranda Kerr. The month’s Dolly has the Victoria Secret model in a red dress with words and arrow: ‘This could be you!’

Kerr is touted as an “inspiration” for young girls. (I’m not sure it’s just girls who find online images of Kerr semi-naked inspiring).

I asked editor Tiffany Dunk why the original search was shut down. She said: “I understand it was over concerns about negative body imaging”.

Things are even worse now. In an age of rampant body hatred and eating disorders, the timing seems off.  In a video of the scouting session in Sydney, girls are asked why Kerr is an inspiration. “She’s got a great body!” is one of a number of similar responses.

Which shows us, no matter how many times words like “role model” and “inspiration” are thrown around, it’s still all about bodies. Even now girls will be comparing themselves to Elodie and thinking they are just not good enough.

Body image and eating disorder specialists I spoke to are concerned about the ability of a 13- year-old to navigate the world of modelling. Why is Dolly including such young girls when globally there is a move away from younger models?

In 2005 there was a storm over having a 12-year-old as the face of Gold Coast Fashion Week. Three years later Australian Fashion Week organisers bowed to pressure and dropped a 14- year-year-old Polish girl as the face of the event.

Australia’s Body Image Code of Conduct recommends only using those over 16 to model adult clothes or work or model in fashion shows targeting an adult audience.

The idea that 13 or 14 is too young to model is often met with “But Miranda Kerr started at that age and she’s doing great!”

But how many girls fell by the wayside, how many were damaged due to the harmful consequences of internalizing the message that their value as a person is in how others view and judge their bodies?

The revamped comp has a special spin. “Become a Model Citizen”. Dolly wants “more than a pretty face”, it wants a “great role model for Dolly readers.” It wants girls to “Have fun, don’t let looks rule your life!” (at the same time Chadwick’s judge lists ‘looks” first in what he’s seeking).

Dolly has enlisted the help of The Butterfly Foundation. They’ve prepared “an awesome body image tip sheet”  and will also conduct a workshop with finalists. Dolly also says it will have strict rules on how its winner can be used.

But while I support Butterfly’s goals, I’m not sure telling yourself to be beautiful on the inside and the rest is enough to deal with a message dominant in the modelling and fashion industries that you have to be hot to matter.

Thrusting any girl into an industry where they are taught that what matters most is that they fit some cookie-cutter mould of what women should look like, is troubling.

Jess Hart, Dolly’s 1998 model search winner, posed with Jen Hawkins on a 2010 Grazia cover last year headed: “Jen & Jess: how to get their $5M bodies!”

Hart told Grazia she gets “super strict about her diet” prior to a photoshoot.

It is difficult to see how a Dolly Model search winner will deviate from the standard beauty ideal.

It would be one thing to pluck a girl out of a crowd and offer her a contract. But Dolly (with the apparent support of Butterfly) is enabling competition between teen girls on the basis (primarily) of physical appearance.

Dunk says readers want a “relatable teen role model.” “We have endless research that girls respond best to seeing “someone like me” in the media,” she told me.

But couldn’t Dolly give readers a great role model outside a competitive appearance-focussed event in which girls are compared and judged and learn life is just one big beauty pageant?

What about a role model who is an awesome athlete, or musician, or campaigner against violence against women? A teen anti-bullying ‘hero’ writing advice columns – ‘someone like me’ doing amazing things in the world.

It seems to me girls who are truly role models for other girls would be the least likely to enter, because their goals in life are beyond physical appearance. So the true role models may never be discovered.

Rather than introduce them to an industry which glorifies the cult of celebrity and fashion – and contributes to body image despair – why not foster more meaningful values and aspirations in girls? Now that would be inspiring.

Dolly continues to promote appearance over substance

Read entire blog at Generation Next

Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global porn industry (Spinifex Press, edited by Dr Abigail Bray and me) is now appearing on bookstore shelves in the UK and North America. Host and producer of The F Word radio show and the executive editor of feminisms.org, Meghan Murphy interviewed me recently. It was good to talk to Meghan because I’d re-run her work a few times on my blog but we hadn’t spoken before. (If you want to get a taste of her writing, check out this thoughtful and detailed analysis of Slutwalk ).

You can listen to Meghan’s interview with me here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I’m very pleased to be speaking here today on this historic occasion.

It has been customary for the west to bemoan and critique the appalling forms of violence practiced against girls and women in the rest of the world – FGM, rape as a tactic of war, forced marriage.

In this focus what has been overlooked have been the vicious body practices that girls and women have come to take on themselves in the west in the mistaken belief that they are doing good for themselves.

These include:

Self-starvation and the often bulimic response–compulsive eating and vomiting.
The surgical transformation of breasts, legs, stomachs, cheek bones to conform to the latest beauty ideal
The use of diet and pharmaceutical products to suppress appetite
The botoxing of 5 year olds
The west congratulates itself on its distance from Eastern practices of foot binding which constrained and limited women. It fails to see the links between toe operations carried out now to enable women to fit into the latest 4 inch high heels.

The west smugly criticises FGM while sanctioning labiaplasty and the remaking of the genital lips which has become a growth area for cosmetic surgeons. Read more>

Last month I asked you to ‘Vote against Mossimo’s Peep Show Sexism’ and support women who were subverting Mossimo’s sex industry theme.

I’m delighted to announce that our very own ‘Naughty Nicole’ has taken out the prize for most popular entry. She wins a camera! Here’s a post from Collective Shout’s website about Nicole’s victory over sexist promotions.

Update: ASB says no to Mossimo peep show

Not only did Nicole turn Mossimo’s campaign upside down in a radical act of subversion, now the Advertising Standards Board has upheld complaints against Mossimo’s peepshow ad campaign. Open this link  for extracts of complaints against Mossimo’s peep show promo, Mossimo’s response (Collective Shout gets a mention – thanks for that!) and the ASB’s decision.

MTR on Channel 7′s Morning Show today with adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg and dance studio teacher Nikki Webster, commenting on an episode of US reality TV show ‘Dance Moms’ in which little girls are taught sexually provocative dance routines.

Girlfriend magazine seems to have forgotten what its ‘Self Respect REALITY CHECK’ was intended for. A recap – it was designed to be an upfront disclosure about the use of digital enhancement, airbrushing or other alterations to an image. But it seems to have become a farce.

On the cover below an image of Lily Collins “The fairest of them all” (apparently), the teen reader is informed “Lily’s brows are so awesome that a Twitter account has been made in honour of them. Impressive, much?!” A second dumb use of the ‘Reality check’ appears on p. 89 – because of rain they had to change locations three times (!). But we have no idea whether models images were altered. Why bother having the symbol at all if it is meaningless?

For a magazine which claims to want to help girls accept themselves and avoid comparison, to vote emerging young actress “Miss Collins’ as “the prettiest of them all” seems oddly out of place. Read more>

Just the latest example of the mainstreaming of pornography

‘The “Telstra Babes” content is just a few clicks away from the “Women at Telstra” recruitment website, which describes the company’s “inclusive working environment” for women and its culture that “celebrates the success of women at every level”’.

This piece by James Frost in The Australian last week provides further evidence of the encroaching of pornography into the mainstream. Our major telecommunications company is now in the porn business, offering and profiting from Playboy and Girls Gone Wild.

If you are a Telstra shareholder why not let the company know that you didn’t buy shares to invest in the company’s porn-for-profit venture? And if you’re a Telstra customer, let the company know that this isn’t your idea of corporate social responsibility. You can contact Telstra here.

Telstra’s soft-porn site under fire

byJames Frost

IN another sign that Telstra is not the boring government-owned phone utility it once was, the company now offers softcore pornography over video-capable mobile phones.

Telstra mobile users can watch videos with titles such as Dirty Housewife and Hot Asian Gets Wet for between $3.50 and $4.95 per viewing.

“We have a range of web pages offering different content for the many niche interest groups that make up our customer base,” a Telstra spokeswoman said.

The “Telstra Babes” content is just a few clicks away from the “Women at Telstra” recruitment website, which describes the company’s “inclusive working environment” for women and its culture that “celebrates the success of women at every level”.

Author and anti-pornography campaigner Melinda Tankard-Reist said Telstra’s attitude was disappointing and raised serious questions.

“This is a mainstream communications company,” she said. “When did they make a decision to go down this path? Was it at a corporate level?”

Telstra won’t reveal whether it pays for the content or whether it is paid for referring any of its 12 million mobile users to material produced by Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. The telco said warnings were displayed and that the content was relatively tame.

“We have stringent guidelines pertaining to all content across our sites and in particular, the ‘glamour’ pages, which are among the mildest in the category among industry providers,” the spokeswoman said.

Ms Tankard-Reist rejected that defence and said the companies supplying content to Telstra had disturbing associations.

“Playboy isn’t just your father’s magazine under the bed any more,” she said. “Playboy hosts a range of hardcore, explicit, triple-X content across a range of cable television channels. You couldn’t even print the names of the titles they show.

“The Girls Gone Wild genre is harmful to women and girls and there have been allegations that girls have been made drunk to coerce them into filming sex acts or simulated sex acts for the camera.

“Shareholders would be surprised to know the company is hosting and distributing pornographic content. It’s a significant issue for its reputation.”

ACT committee misses opportunity to address harms: ‘normalises prostitution, cuts back on regulation, waters down health safeguards’

Caroline Norma

The chair of a committee appointed to review the ACT’s Prostitution Act took the significant step last week of attaching a 9-page appendix to the committee’s final report outlining her ‘dissent’ to its findings.

In this appendix, the Shadow Attorney General Vicki Dunne criticises her colleagues for ‘trying to depict prostitution as normal and inevitable’, and so missing an ‘opportunity to take a fresh look at the harms of prostitution and innovative ways to ameliorate those harms’.

Dunne notes her Committee colleagues held ‘media events’ with respondents to the inquiry who were supportive of the government’s current approach to prostitution, and she is critical of the fact they ‘chose not to seriously consider alternative approaches’ for the ACT.

Dunne’s exasperation with her colleagues’ inability to perceive of prostitution as anything other than ‘work’ for poor women is vividly apparent in her remark that ‘[i]t may come as a surprise to some that it is not a universally held view that prostitution has always been with us and there is nothing we can do as a society to address the apparently insatiable demands of, mainly, men for sex with, mainly, women’.

The ‘alternative approach’ that Dunne wanted Committee members to consider was the ‘Swedish model’ of legislation, which she describes as ‘an innovative, woman-centred approach‘ that is ‘demand’ focused in its criminalising of the purchasers of sex.

Dunne notes that Committee members ‘did not want to engage in…discussion’ about the Swedish model, despite the fact information about its successful implementation in Sweden, Norway, Iceland and South Korea was made available to them.

The Committee, she says, ‘specifically rejected any information campaigns targeting the purchasers of sex’, and instead took the opposite approach of making recommendations that would further ‘normalise prostitution; cut back on regulation; [and] water down health safeguards’.

It looks like members of the Committee approached their task of examining prostitution policy in the ACT with some lack of seriousness. The only recommendation they made on sex trafficking was to suggest posting multi-lingual warning signs in brothels. They heard from ACT Police that no check was done on any brothel in the ACT for a period of five years, but didn’t think to question the government’s ability to oversee the legal sex industry it created in 1992.

Dunne notes that Committee members ‘played down’ the ‘significant human rights problems’ that arise in relation to prostitution. They refused, for example, to recognise any criminality in the ACT sex industry, and were ‘unwilling to support…[an] extension of police powers’, even with the death of a 17-year-old girl in a legal Fyshwick brothel in 2008, and a sex trafficking case involving Thai women before the ACT courts.

Adherence to ideas about ‘harm minimisation’ in relation to prostitution appear to have led Committee members to believe any form of sex industry regulation to be injurious to women’s ‘right’ to become prostitutes. This line of thinking seriously underestimates the threat posed by the sex industry to the status of women and children, especially when government endorses a business sector that makes profits through organising society’s most vulnerable people to sexually serve men with money.

Dunne’s decision to stand up to the ACT government and its continuing legalisation of pimps has earned her international praise. Well-known anti-prostitution campaigner and researcher Melissa Farley has spoken publicly in support of Dunne, and the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Asia-Pacific, Jean Enriquez, has also endorsed her stand.

On the world stage, Dunne finds herself in good company in opposing legalised prostitution and advocating the Swedish model. A model of the Swedish legislation recently passed a first reading in the Israeli Knesset,  and a similar bill is currently before the French parliament. Boston has also recently implemented a version of the law.

These developments come after successes in Sweden, South Korea, Norway and Iceland in reduced trafficking, and raising public awareness of the harms of prostitution.

Dunne’s dissenting comments represent a rare moment in having endorsement of the Swedish model in a parliamentary report.

Australian governments are generally hostile to any suggestion that prostitution might constitute a human rights problem. Advocates of the Swedish model are currently locked in battle with the Western Australian, South Australian, and Tasmanian governments over proposals to legalise the sex industries of those states. Most other Australian state governments have already given their endorsement to pimps.

This propensity of Australian governments to resign themselves to the ‘inevitability’ of prostitution contrasts starkly with the stance taken by governments in Europe. In December last year all political parties in the French National Assembly signed a resolution reaffirming ‘the abolitionist position of France, the objective of which is ultimately a society without prostitution’.

Different from Australia, France does not recognise prostitution as ‘sex work’, nor does it advocate legalising brothels and pimping. French legislators resolved that legal acceptance of prostitution is incompatible with French policies that promote gender equality.

The example set by Vicki Dunne last week affords the Australian government a similar opportunity to cast aside its former politics of resignation on prostitution, and begin to move towards a human rights-based approach to the world’s oldest oppression.

Dr Caroline Norma is a lecturer in the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University. 

See also:  ‘Adding Insult to the Injury of Prostitution’, Caroline Norma, Tasmanian Times

A young man taking the lead

Now and then I stumble on a brave man passionate about the issues taken up here on the MTR blog.

Recently I’ve made the acquaintance of  Matthew Holloway. Only 26, Matthew’s written some compelling pieces in recent months on pornography, prostitution and rape-permission giving in men’s magazines. I thought you should get to know him too and in doing so be encouraged that more men seem to be willing to risk criticism and step up to the plate on these issues.

Matthew Holloway is a freelance writer and social justice advocate from Tasmania, where he stood for state and federal parliament and co-founded Tasmanians for Transparency. Matthew now lives in Melbourne where he works as a Counsellor in Aboriginal Health. I asked Matthew what motivated him to engage on these issues. He responded:

To be honest I have had a broad upbringing which included exposure to many of the feminist writings from the old school, specifically Andrea Dworkin.

On a personal level ‘not myself’ but males I have known, I have seen how destructive things like pornography can be and the conflict this can cause for many men. The way it can change their perceptions, the way that their thinking can become so warped, but also the way that their sexual urges have become so perverted that they have also become victims of a society which has normalized the material which has created these attitudes including the sexualisation and commodification of not only women but children.

For a brief period on moving to Victoria I worked for a councillor on Yarra City Council, Stephen Jolly, who worked hard uncovering trafficking in the area.

Aside from this I worked for a few years as a social worker on Grey Street in St Kilda. My client group included sex workers both male and female. I heard the stories of abuse, the way that every one of them felt they had no other options, the way they felt worthless and without skills. The other truly sad aspect was hearing how many had suffered abuse. In so many ways these people had become conditioned to using sex for survival. To hear how many had also suffered physical, verbal and sexual abuse through their work was also tragic and heart breaking.

So although I know that there are many people out there who say that people like you and I have no idea about why people go into sex work. I honestly think they are defenders if the industry and have no idea of the continued psychological damage that the sex industry and those who support it, continue to inflict on people who are truly vulnerable and at risk. Also people who through life circumstances cannot see other options let alone a pathway out of the use and abuse.

Here’s a lengthy, detailed and evidence-based piece Matthew wrote for the Tasmanian Times on the true nature of the prostitution industry.

Working against the global sex industry

…Unfortunately evidence seems to show that legalisation still has many inherent safety risks and has often become an issue of governments wanting to derive profits from the sexual degradation and exploitation of some of society’s most vulnerable people. It should be noted that I am not the only one who is saying that the government is keen to get a slice of the sex industry pie. This claim is even made by the Eros foundation who stated that the sex industry has a combined turnover of over $1 billion and that government agencies were looking at ways to levy a slice of this revenue….

The issue of prostitution and the problems it raises have been addressed by many of the great feminists of our time; Germaine Greer once famously stated “Pornography is simply the advertising of prostitution” and this holds to the fact that there are many problems in our hyper sexualised culture which have promoted the expansion of sexual slavery. Prostitution is still a capitalistic and patriarchal structure and always will be, no matter how much Mr Cox tries to argue against the fact; women are always enslaved to sex work because of male demand for it. This is a key point which the Swedish model recognises and this is the reason for its success…Read full article here

And here’s strong piece on porn and exploitation – including of men – Matthew had published in Eureka Street:

Germaine Greer and Gay Exploitation

It is commonly thought that men represent the main producers and the main consumers of pornography. But earlier this year feminist firebrand Germaine Greer alluded to an important and often forgotten fact: men are also its victims.

‘Pornography’, Greer said on a September episode of ABC1′s Q&A, ‘also exploits boys, men and children, but most of all, it exploits the consumer of pornography.

‘The consumer’, she said, ‘doesn’t realise that because of the stage in your life at which you become aware of pornography, that his sexual responses are being altered by pornography, so that he is expecting a certain kind of mechanical sequence of events, which he’s learnt to manipulate in his own self-gratification. This then gets parked on a relationship, which prevents real intimacy from ever ensuing.

‘That’s pretty grim but it’s much grimmer, the fact that people are moving towards each other in a series of pre-programmed responses.’

Like women, men have fallen prey to the unrealistic expectations of a hyper-sexualised culture….

All elements lead to what Greer described as pornography’s ability to promote the acting out of pre-programmed responses devoid of intimacy. Ultimately we need a movement away from porn, and to re-assert a sexuality that is not based on images of actors from a specifically geared, targeted and manipulative industry.

For years the pro-porn lobby has tried to win the argument and take the ground from the left and right by portraying them as either censorship fascists or religious conservatives. The truth is that you cannot have exploitation in the name of liberalism. Read full article here

And this one in Online Opinion last year  on a British study on men’s magazines and rape apologism.

Re-assessing men’s magazines

A new study to be published in the British journal of Psychology is set to have massive ramifications and has already kick started a re-assessment of soft core pornography.

The study by Psychologists from Middlesex University and the University of Surrey, showed participants quotes from men’s magazines such as FHM, Loaded, and Zoo.

The participants were also shown quotes from convicted sex offenders which were taken from ‘The Rapist Files: Interviews with Convicted Rapists written by Sussman & Bordwell

Participants were not informed which source the quotes came from, they were asked to assess for themselves based on the content.

Most participants were unable to distinguish the source of the quotes; the study also revealed that most male participants identified more strongly with the language expressed by the convicted rapists.

Dr Miranda Horvath from Middlesex University said: “We were surprised that participants identified more with the rapists’ quotes, and we are concerned that the legitimisation strategies that rapists deploy when they talk about women are more familiar to these young men than we had anticipated.”

The study has already had an impact in the UK where retailers have agreed to move all men’s magazines to top shelves and censor front covers.Read full article here.

That’s just a sample. There’s lots more of Matthew’s work online. Have a look. And men, why not join Matthew and add your voices to his?