Collective Shout’s list of Corporate offenders for 2013

As published at Collective Shout

The festive season is here. You only need to look at the latest shopping centre catalogues, online stores and even your facebook news feed to see that companies are working hard to compete for your Xmas dollar.

But lets not forget which of these companies have used sexploitation to flog their products in 2013! Before you buy gifts for friends and family, check our list. Vote with your dollar and boycott companies that have sexualised children and objectified women for profit in 2013.

City Beach

City Beach – looks like a surf shop right? Take another look. City Beach has a long history of selling products with sexist, violent and porn inspired imagery to its youth market.

Images of objectified, naked women can be found on T-shirts, shorts, wallets, thongs and even pencil cases. Read more about City Beach.

 Target

Target sexes up violence against women with its  “50 shades of grey” branded Lingerie, based on the “erotic” BDSM novel of the same name.

Porn inspired billboard advertising for the brand included  a woman posed submissively in suspender stockings and another woman pictured in lingerie with BDSM wrist restraints. Read more.

Bookworld

Bookworld, the online retailer formerly known as Borders was called out for selling hundreds of incest themed novels, typically eroticising rape of children by a father figure.

Bookworld put the issue down to a computer glitch and promised to resolve the issue. At the time of writing, these titles are still listed for sale online.   Details may be distressing, but you can read more here.

Best and Less

Best and Less were selling matching “bra” and underpants sets for girls as young as two.

When asked why they thought a two year old girl needed a “bra” Best and Less agreed to remove the garments, referring to a store policy prohibiting the sale of “bra-like” products for children under 8.   But they didn’t keep their word. Read more about Best and Less here.

Roxy

Roxy released a trailer for the Roxy Pro Biarritz 2013 Women’s surf competition. The promo featured a topless woman writhing around in a bed and no actual surfing.

We supported a petition created by pro-surfer Cori Schumacher who called on Roxy to stop their “all sex no surf” advertising. Roxy responded by complaining about “mischaracterisations” of their brand. Read more here.

Cafepress

Cafepress has been exposed for selling baby “onesies” with slogans such as “SL_T all I need is U” and “No gag reflex”. Despite repeated reassurances by Cafepress that this content would be removed, similar items remain on sale. Read more about Cafepress.

Foxtel

Got Foxtel? Thinking of getting Foxtel? Give it a miss! The network produces the toxic “Australia’s next top model” program and this year it promoted the show with its “Next best selfie” promotion, which involved soliciting images from underage girls on social media.

An outdoor ad campaign for a Foxtel channel featured a man sodomising a pig. No joke. Read more here.

Bonds

A Bonds “Boobs” outdoor advertising campaign to launch a new range of bras reinforced a dominant cultural message that “Boobs” are what is most important about a woman. Worse still, the ad campaign was justified as marking a renewed partnership with the National Breast Cancer Foundation.

Breast cancer survivor Rachel Lonergan described the campaign as “peurile.” Read more here. 

Cotton On 

We’ve challenged Cotton On before for their sexualised baby bodysuits and their pornified t-shirts. The Cotton On group also owns Typo. Read more here.

Typo

 Typo came under fire for its Back To School sale selling items such as coffee mugs, drink bottles, notebooks and i-phone covers with porn inspired images. Read more here.

 AFL

Despite their Respect and Responsibility policy, the AFL have continued to remain silent while ex-Hawks player Lance ‘Buddy’ Franklin used his status as an AFL player to flog his pornographic Nena and Pasadena clothing line. Read more here.

Buddy Ball

Lance Franklin owns and promotes Nena and Pasadena pornified fashion brand yet also markets his Buddy Ball to children, presenting himself as a role model for young boys.

He is not. Read more here.

Lynx

Lynx, men’s deodorant, marketed towards teenage boys,  produces advertising campaigns that objectify and degrade women.

Read more here.

General Pants Co

General Pants has a history of explicit, sexist, and degrading advertising campaigns including sex industry inspired stunts. Read more here.

Roger David

Roger David glamorises violence against women to sell men’s clothing. Read more here.

 American Apparel

American Apparel uses porn-inspired sexually exploitative advertising.

Read more here.

Mossimo

Mossimo advertised its range of underwear with a promotion called “Mossimo Peepshow.” The Facebook “peepshow” competition invited entrants to upload images and compete for votes. We decided to submit an entry of our own.

Why would we do that?  Read more here.

Supre

Supre are guilty of sexualising their tween market with ads featuring a topless young woman, as well as selling t-shirts with sexualised slogans.

Read more here.

Companies that promote Playboy porn brand

Retailers and brands that sell ‘porn t-shirts’

Venues that hosted pro-rape rapper “Tyler the Creator” in 2013

Earlier this year we campaigned against ‘rape-is-fun’ rapper Tyler the Creator. Surely venues hosting the events would cancel once they learned of his violent and degrading lyrics?

Wrong.

We haven’t forgotten about the weak response from these venues. Particularly, the Eatons Hill Hotel which still refused to cancel the final show in Brisbane after reports that a young woman had being raped at Tyler’s Sydney gig the night before.

If you’re looking at organising a function for your end of year festivities, think twice before booking at these venues. Read more about the Tyler the Creator campaign. 

Eatons Hill Hotel Brisbane

Amplifier Capitol Perth

Palace Theatre Melbourne

Enmore Theatre Sydney

Over to you!

Do you have anything to add to our list? Let us know what brands you will be boycotting in the lead up to Christmas. Better still, tell us about some positive alternatives. Which brands do you support and why? Post details in the comments below – together we can create a list of positive options!

To get things started, check out these two online sellers.

Toward the Stars

Toward the Stars – a safe haven from the commercialisation and sexualisation of girlhood, from the toxic gender stereotypes that dominate the marketing, media, and products targeted to children and young adults.

Visit site.

Gifted Hands

Gifted Hands – a not for profit organisation raising awareness and funding to help charities and organisations who support the widow, needy and homeless both here in Australia and overseas. Visit site.

Girlfriend and Dolly can be commended this year for taking strong stands on alcohol and drugs. This issue of GF is no exception, with ‘The High Life’ exploring the harms of smoking marijuana. When celebs boast about it – such as Miley Cyrus posting a photo of herself smoking pot with the caption “High as f—“ and Rihanna posting a marijuana plant she received for Valentine’s Day, this celeb endorsement gives the drug a big tick. GF points out however that the drug is “more harmful than most people realise.” “Short-term marijuana usage increases your risk of heart attack by five times in the first hour of smoking it and the risk of impaired judgment can lead to impulsive decision making, injury, or even death,” says Jan Copeland, director of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre. It also doubles your risk of having a car accident. Girls who have smoked the drug describe a lack of motivation to deal with what was stressing them out, which contributes to feeling more stressed later. Fifty percent of long-term users develop a dependency. Users are more likely to suffer from anxiety attacks, psychosis and schizophrenia as well as lower IQ’s.

‘Is someone else directing your life?’ encourages girls to take control of their destiny, rather than be driven by others. “…if you find yourself increasingly frustrated with your life and/or where you’re headed, or feeling jealous of someone else’s success, it may be that your people-pleasing habits are getting the best of you. You also haven’t been true to what you really want, deep down,” says psychologist Dr Pene Schmidt. You can tell if someone has too much influence over you by the way they make you feel. “If you find yourself feeling worried, anxious, uncomfortable, or resentful, these can be great warning signs to let us know that we need to stop and reassess the situation,” she says. If friends continue to dictate the terms of a relationship, then perhaps it’s time to find new ones Girls are also given advice on communicating with parents who may be putting them under pressure. “Assertive communication is one of the most valuable tools teens can use if they’re experiencing conflict with their parents”, says Dr Schmidt. All good, but perhaps could have done without the half page illustration of a mother shouting through a megaphone with the words ‘Bla’, ‘Bla’, ‘Bla’ coming out of it maybe implying mothers yell but have nothing important to say which may not facilitate the positive and calm communication encouraged in the article. (Yes, I know, I’m a mother). Read entire post here.

As published on Generation Next blog

‘Misogyny Reloaded’ by Abigail Bray

In 2011 Dr Abigail Bray, a researcher and writer now living in the South of France, joined with me in co-editing Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry published in 2011 by Spinifex Press. Spinifex has just released Abigail’s new book Misogyny Reloaded . This is an extract from Chapter 3, published with permission. [*Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault]. 

 Rape Becomes Lulz

A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe, for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness born of harmful intent … Rather than society’s aberrants or ‘spoilers of purity’, men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest battle the world has ever known.

—Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975, p. 15)

Living in a rape culture means adjusting to being hyper-vigilant about male violence to the point where risk management becomes second nature. It means living with the continuum of male sexual violence on a daily basis, from creepy and threatening looks and comments in the street, home and workplace, to online rape threats, attempted assault and actual assault. It means inhabiting a paradoxical space where the rape and murder of women is prohibited but everywhere eroticised and the object of laughter.

To take just one example of rape culture, the globally popular American fantasy series Game of Thrones features a blond child bride being continually raped by her warlord husband. “But it’s all ok because a prostitute slave teaches the thirteen-year-old princess super sexy sex skills, and she proceeds to blow the warlord’s mind so throughly [sic] that they fall in love,” notes feminist Laurie Penny (2012)

Many men, when asked a simple question about why male domination exists, reply that it is because men are stronger than women. This answer seems innocuously simple-minded, but the explanatory statement that ‘men have power over women because they are physically stronger than women’ also means ‘men can rape and kill women if they want to’. There is no point replying that it is illegal to rape and kill women. The law does not come into it at all. It is as though the legal prohibitions against male sexual violence are little more than the sales pitch of a corporation eager to hide its criminal intent behind images of satisfied customers.

The majority of victims do not report, and the majority of rapists walk free (Miller et al., 2011; Fayard and Rocheron, 2011; Belknap, 2010). As the title of a 2013 article by Nigel Morris in The Independent puts it: ‘100,000 assaults. 1,000 rapists sentenced. Shockingly low conviction rates revealed. Latest statistics also show difficulties in persuading victims to report attacks’. Although media attention on particular rapes occasionally stirs up public debate, these rapes are the exception to the norm simply because victims have broken their silence and the criminal justice system has been involved. One cannot but wonder how many people know of, or are friends with, men who have sexually assaulted women and children, and yet do nothing about it.

It has only been since the 1960s and 1970s that most western women have been able to work outside the home without needing permission from their husbands/owners. It is only in the last few decades that marital rape has been recognised in some nations as a human rights violation. In Australia marital rape was outlawed as late as 1991 (Temkin, 2002). As late as 1993 the United Nations published the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. In many countries young girls are still forced to marry their rapists.

Raping women and children continues to be a lethal form of oppression in advanced neo-liberal democracies. Victims of male sexual violence continue to be branded as ‘damaged goods’ and re-abused in the criminal justice system to such an extent that the majority of victims simply give up and opt out of the legal process (Fisher et al., 2000; Fisher et al., 2003). Lawyers are often reluctant to take on rape cases because they know they are difficult to win. Child victims of male sexual violence are subjected to ritualistic humiliation in courts (Taylor, 2004). Child pornography victims are subjected to malicious attacks by bourgeois academics in high-ranking American legal journals (Lollar, 2012).

Young women, who sustain the majority of sexual assaults, not only endure court-licensed abuse, but they are now also bullied online for daring to speak out. Raped girls are urged to kill themselves by pack verbal abuse that is all too often uttered as mocking jokes (Salek, 2013). Victim-blaming has become lethal.

In a novel by feminist academic Yvette Rocheron, Double Crossings (2009), a mother decides to commit suicide after she is brutally raped by a cousin, knowing that, if she lives, the crime will destroy her family and her life. “For her loved ones, a sublime act of love … She would go down knowingly … [T]he vitriolic defacement of women, the misguided abortions, the rapes. She was a thousand years old” (p. 271). There is no humour in this novel as the mother leaps to her death, merely a solemn awareness of the barbarism of a crime against women that leaves the murderous poison of social death in her body.

I have lost count of how many women—friends, students, colleagues, relatives, and acquaintances—have told me they have been raped. All of the rapists have gotten away with it while the women are burdened with years of unspeakable shame and self-hatred, or shunned by their families for daring to speak out about male relatives who raped them. The stories involve horrendous child sexual abuse, rape at knifepoint, abductions in vans, group rapes, women being drugged and raped, rapes by colleagues, partners and ex-partners. A woman who was raped by her grandfather told me recently that it took her 30 years to understand that her body belonged to her. Another woman, a feminist activist and journalist, after going public about being raped at knifepoint, was subjected to online abuse along the lines that she should be ‘raped with a box cutter’. When I read the comment about the box cutter it took a few moments to sink in that the man who had posted the comment was saying that he wanted to butcher her vagina with a knife. Not surprisingly, many women keep quiet about being sexually assaulted. And all of this occurs in a world in which women who speak out about male sexual violence, or any form of male domination, are routinely subjected to online rape threats (Lewis, 2011). Again, the majority of threats never result in prosecution and women are often told to ‘get over it’, ‘toughen up’ or ‘lighten up’ or have sex with a man. ‘She just needs a good fuck’, is how the all too familiar saying goes … Oddly, having sex with men is meant to dispel fear of being raped, as though women who have an accurate assessment of the dangers of rape culture are hysterics who just need sex. The idea that women enjoy being raped still persists (Suarez and Gadalla, 2010); and if women are assumed to enjoy being raped then their protests about being harmed by rape can easily be reduced to a farce.

More about Abigail’s book and how to order can be found here. 

Another example of the abuse women receive for speaking out

By Caitlin Roper

Last week, The Australian newspaper reported that Channel Seven’s 7mate would be broadcasting the Lingerie Football. To all those who are unfamiliar with this spectacle, yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. While many accomplished women’s sporting leagues in Australia are both competitive and successful, media coverage is reserved for those women’s leagues where the uniforms consist of lingerie.

I created a change.org petition to Channel 7’s Board of Directors, asking them not to broadcast the Lingerie Football League that Australia Womensport and Recreation Association had described as “sexist and demeaning to all women.”

Some supporters of the Lingerie Football League, including players and men who didn’t like their access to sweaty, lingerie clad women challenged, referred to my petition on various pages on Facebook. They googled me looking for something they could use against me. I was labeled a “jealous bitch”, obviously fat and ugly, and most likely bitter that my husband was fan of Lingerie Football. I was too ugly to land a partner. I should be sent to “Guantanimo (sic) Bay” (an overreaction I thought, but still) and I probably think “walking to the kitchen for another jam donut counts as exercise” (that last one is true.)

A small sample below:

I considered responding with some facts- that I am happily married, that I work out several times a week and that I am not ugly. Then I recalled this was a classic silencing tactic I had experienced many times before– tearing women down by criticizing their physical appearance.

Women in our hyper-sexualised culture are valued for their physical attractiveness and their ability to please men sexually. Conforming to limited, stereotypical, pornified ideals of beauty and sexuality, we learn, is where our power lies. As Gail Dines writes in Pornland:

“In a porn culture, our power lies, we are told, not in our ability to shape the institutions that determine our life chances, but in having a hot body that men desire and women envy.”

In a porn culture, women can be either “f*ckable” or “invisible”. With this in mind, being regarded as an undesirable woman with nothing to offer could be potentially upsetting.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been subjected to abuse for speaking out against sexism and misogyny.

It is telling that my opponents’ first course of action was to call me fat and ugly, and that these were perceived as the most stinging insults they could unleash. What if I was fat or ugly? What if I am? If my face and body are not sufficiently pleasing to the male gaze should I be rendered voiceless?

I have more to offer than my body and I have more to offer than being pretty, as do all women and girls. Our obsession with being hot is merely a distraction.

Women are more and should be viewed as more. Unfortunately, from my experiences, the day women are recognized for their contributions and not their bodies still seems a long way off.

Lingerie Football: An open response to an open letter

An open letter “To those who oppose the LFL in Australia” was posted on our [Collective Shout] Facebook page yesterday.

Elise – an athlete who has recently joined an LFL team – asked us to read and consider her views on the LFL.

You can read Elise’s open letter here. (Opens PDF)

Below is an open response to the open letter.

Dear Elise,

Thanks so much for writing to share your views on the Lingerie Football League.

Firstly, we do understand that the owner of the League has changed the name and brand to “Legends Football League” and has very slightly modified the bikini/lingerie style uniform he requires players to wear, by removing some lace and a garter and modifying shoulder pads.

The changes are so minor we don’t understand how anyone could take this seriously. The rebrand is nothing more than a cynical attempt at making the League more appealing to potential sponsors who may be put off by supporting a “Lingerie Football League.”  (Readers can view the big announcement here.)

Despite a “rebrand”, the essence of the “sport” remains the same – providing titillation for men at the expense of women’s health and safety. Hence, we’re not buying into this “rebrand” and will continue referring to it as the Lingerie Football League.

Lingerie Football – whatever one chooses to call it – is not a sport. It is not recognized by the Australian Sports Commission. They do not support it.

The LFL has drained the bank accounts of former players in the US by not providing adequate compensation for serious injuries. Players understood that their injuries would be covered when they paid the insurance premiums offered by the LFL, but were instead left thousands of dollars in debt. Players who spoke out publicly about these experiences were threatened with legal action. As you’re probably aware, the US does not have the same healthcare system enjoyed by Australians, so adequate health insurance should be the highest priority for the LFL, particularly when safety equipment is the lowest priority.

Sport can indeed be an expensive pursuit and athletes are not always compensated for participation unless they are sponsored.

Now that the Lingerie Football League has a “contract” with Channel 7 and 7 Mate, will players be paid?

It doesn’t look likely. LFL owner Mitch Mortaza stated just this month to US program Inside Edition (watch below) that the league could not afford to pay players. It has been suggested by a US sports commentator that the Leagues foray into Canada and Australia is motivated in part by our health care system. Mortaza will pocket the profits from these events and Australian Medicare will foot the bill for injuries if private health insurance offered to Australian LFL players turns out to be inadequate.

The athletic skill of the women involved in the Lingerie Football League is not in question. There is no “attack” on the players of the LFL. If there is an “attack” it is directed firmly at the owner of the LFL and any corporation complicit in his exploitation of women for profit.

Some players have commented that they are not “skinny” and therefore promote positive body image. The question is asked  “would you rather your daughter look like a Victoria’s Secret model or an LFL player?”

Are those really the only options? And why is physical appearance so important? 

We would rather our girls not be pressured to look a certain way at all and instead  be recognised for their skill and expertise in whatever activities they choose to participate in.The LFL reinforces that physical appearance and conforming to a narrow standard of beauty is what is most important, over and above athletic skill.

If Lingerie Football is about skill, then unfortunately fans didn’t get the memo. The sexist, degrading comments on social media and elsewhere about LFL player’ss bodies and what sort of sexual acts fans would like to perform are absolutely disgusting. (example) The “sport” is marketed in such a way as to invite and allow this behaviour and creates an environment that is hostile and discriminatory to women and girls. This is institutional sexual harassment. No sporting body should promote or allow this behaviour but sexual harassment is built into the business model of the LFL.

Yes, the League exists because it is “marketed well.” There is a huge market demand for pornography, prostitution, stripping and other forms of sexual exploitation. Men have not suddenly decided to embrace women’s sport. Channel 7 and 7Mate has not decided to embrace women’s sport and therefore, the LFL will not encourage other stations to embrace women’s sport. The LFL is not some new cutting edge concept, this is not the “fastest growing sport.” This is not sport at all, this is the same old sexual objectification of women, repackaged and “rebranded.”

To say if “we don’t like it don’t watch simple!” – Yes, that is a very simple statement, but it is a completely ineffective response to sexual objectification in our culture.

I don’t like it, I don’t watch it, but I have to live in a community with people who do. I have to live in a community with people whose sexist attitudes towards women are reinforced by sexploitation events. I have to live in a community with people whose ideas that women are objects of sexual recreation are affirmed by these events.

A culture in which women and girls are seen as sexual objects is one in which relationships between men and women suffer and sexual harassment and violence against women thrives. I and other women and girls are harmed by this toxic culture, even if I have never personally played football in my underwear, participated in a beauty pageant or stripped off my clothes in a nightclub.

Sexual objectification of women and girls harms all women, not just those who say they choose to participate. “Don’t like it, don’t watch it” makes as much sense as saying “don’t like pollution, don’t breathe.”

Elise, we thank you for taking the time to share your views and to provide information about the recent developments in the LFL. These minor changes to the League- if they can be called changes at all – do not change our views on the exploitative nature of the League.

Clearly we disagree on this and will continue challenging the Lingerie Football League’s introduction to Australia.  However, we do wish you and your fellow athletes all the very best.

Melinda Liszewski and Collective Shout

Click here to watch longer interviews with 3 former Lingerie Fooball League players discussing abuse and exploitation in the Lingerie Football League.

See also: ‘Still sexist: Why we’re not falling for Lingerie Football’s rebrand’, Jas Swilks, MTR blog, February 19, 2013

‘When women are sport: lingerie football comes to Australia’, MTR, Sunday Herald Sun, May 20, 2012

‘A sad day for all women in sport’, Deborah Malcolm, MTR blog, June 10, 2012

 ‘Abused, called pussy and told to “pancake the shit out of her”: my experience of Lingerie Football League try outs in Sydney last week’, Talitha Stone, MTR blog, June 9, 2012

MTR column Sunday

Molly, 16, (at their request, only first names are used) was asleep in the home of a friend after a party a year ago when a boy snuck into the room.

The schoolgirl from regional NSW says she felt powerless. ”I felt threatened. I guess I knew he wasn’t going to take no for an answer, that all he wanted was sex.

”I do think he knew I didn’t want to do it, but he also knew he would be able to force me to anyway, and I do believe he had power over me.”

When others heard about it they called Molly – a virgin until then – an ”attention seeking slut” who was ”asking for it”.

”A friend had to pull him off me so I could get away. If she hadn’t been there I don’t know what might have happened. I am, petite, 5’6′, he was at least 6’4. He could have easily overpowered me.” She was shaken and distressed for days. Neither girl reported what happened.

This is the reality for so many girls in their sexual experiences. And the pressure isn’t just from strangers.

An idea floats around that girls are sexually freer than ever. That they are exercising ”agency” in their sexual decisions and having great sex lives. That’s not what I’m hearing as I talk to girls all over the country.

For so many girls it appears the boy calls the shots. It’s submission disguised as freedom. Many feel they are not allowed to say ”no”.

And the stories girls used to tell me at 16 and 17, they are now telling me at 13 and 14.

Somehow, despite the women’s movement, despite ”Girl Power” sloganeering, girls have become disempowered.

Shannon is bright, articulate and confident. I met her at a Tasmanian school recently. She is a leader among her peers. Yet she captured what so many girls are experiencing: a struggle to assert themselves in relationships with males.

”I felt this overwhelming feeling of being lower than my boyfriend,” she said. ”I felt as though he was the male therefore he was dominant over me and I was there purely to fulfil his physical needs.

”I feel my needs, both sexually and emotionally, come second to my partner’s.”

At a private girls’ school in Melbourne, girls shared their experiences. Jen, 16, said: ”When you are in love they are allowed to treat you however.”

”If you say you want to wait, you are asked ‘why?”’ said Marly, 16.

”Girls want love and they are willing to compromise themselves to get it,” said Marina, 16. ”They need that validation. Boys feel they have more worth. They often think when they are in love, even when he treats you badly, they think this is meant to happen, I deserve this, this is how relationships are meant to be.”

”We are stuck in mindset of them having power over us,” said 16-year-old Micaela. Samantha, 16, believes girls are taught by media and popular culture that having sex will give them a sense of worth. ”If you don’t have sex he will leave for someone else.”

A 15-year-old Tasmanian student, teased for being a virgin, was planning to ”get it over and done with” with a 19-year-old she had met twice. He was happy to oblige, telling her feelings didn’t have to come into it. She told me this with tears streaming down her face. It was clear she wasn’t ready.

Girls say that it’s hard to keep feelings out. ”Girls get affected more, they are more emotionally connected and think they are in love,” said Marly.

”For girls sex is more of a sacred thing with someone you love. With boys it is seen as more of a joke … they have a different mindset. Girls have different attitudes, guys don’t seem to care that much,” said Jen.

Girls describe being touched inappropriately, frequently pushing away unwanted hands.

”At parties boys come up and just touch you,” said Micaela. ”You are there as an object. If you don’t do what they want they call you frigid”.

But girls are growing tired of being reduced and degraded in these ways. They are increasingly demanding respect-based relationships in which their wishes and desires are treated equally, not last. ”I stand up for myself now,” Aurora told me.

The sexual landscape is grim, but let’s hope more girls are empowered to follow Aurora’s lead. Listening to girls’ experiences and supporting them to stand up for themselves – as well as calling boys out on their abusive and too often criminal behaviour – is more helpful to them than persisting with media fantasies about the wonderful and liberated sex lives of Australian girls in the 21st century.

As published in the Sun-Herald November 17 2013

‘What it’s really like to be a teen mum’ starts off: ‘Babies might seem cute, but having one of your own is no joke’. Is anyone really saying having a baby is a joke? Do girls really think it’s a bit of a laugh to be pregnant in a culture where they will be punished and called sluts – as pregnant teens tell me they are labelled ? There are many ready to bring them down to earth, that’s for sure. “So many people told me ‘having a baby isn’t a novelty you know’” a young woman I know told me, referring to the lectures she received after she had decided to keep her child.

In this issue, Talia, 17, shares her story of discovering she was pregnant at only 14. Not in a relationship with the baby’s father, she says she was in “total denial” until she heard “the little heartbeat”. It was then she “instantly melted and knew I had to keep my baby”. And that’s when the punishment started. Talia was subjected to “dirty looks and endless rude comments.” Friends abandoned her. Talia went into labour six weeks early and her son was born by emergency c-section. Her family reaches out to the Red Cross for housing with other young mums and she also received support from the Raise Foundation (raise.org.au – I’m a new ambassador with the foundation so glad to see they get a mention). “Being a mum is seriously hard work. It was the best thing that has, and will ever happen to me, but there are serious sacrifices,” says Talia honestly.

Australia has the 4th highest teen pregnancy rate in the world. It’s certainly not something to encourage. The Dolly article doesn’t mention contraception or abortion, though the later could be read into the subtext as preferable to giving birth given the warnings and information on the cost of nappies. The reader is warned of “premature birth, low birth weight, death in the womb, SIDS, anaemia, high blood pressure and competition for nutrients.” (I recall a 2004 Girlfriend issue which catastrophised teen birth in a whole new way. In ‘You’re pregnant, now what?’ the reader was told if she kept the baby her parents will not support her, she’ll get kicked out of school, her boyfriend will clear out and, worst of all, she wouldn’t have time to read Girlfriend Magazine because she’d be too busy “wiping drool of your baby’s chin”. I doubt the subject would be treated so trivially under more recent editorship. While there are dire warnings about risks of pregnancy, I’ve never seen the potential mental health risks of abortion mentioned in a young woman’s magazine. Adolescent girls who abort unintended pregnancies are five times more likely to seek subsequent help for psychological and emotional problems compared to their peers who carried unplanted pregnancies to term, according to a 2006 study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence). Read article here

As published in Generation Next Blog

A female teacher at a Tasmanian school where I spoke on the objectification of women could not stay to hear the end of my talk.

The images I showed were too confronting, bringing back traumas suffered two decades ago.

”The very acts that have become part of my trauma were there on display as a part of mainstream culture,” she said.

Do advertisers, editors, fashion, music and video-game producers think about how their violent images traumatise female survivors of sexual abuse and degradation?

T-shirts in surf stores depict women naked, bound and splattered in blood. Mainstream advertising shows women pinned down in simulated gang-rape scenes, tied up in cars boots, buried, chopped into pieces, decapitated. Women are shown as passive, vulnerable, often naked and as sex aids.

These images, among 200 in my presentation, took Genevieve back 20 years.

Once an idealistic young person, Genevieve worked hard to turn her love of acting and performing arts into admission to a prestigious performing arts school.

”It went without saying that you did not get in just on talent, but on marketability,” she says.

”I remember consciously dressing in a low-cut body suit and tight jeans aware that my acting skills were only part of my ticket in. From that moment on, I was a commodity and accepted treatment as such.”

Groomed by a lecturer, she ended up drugged and sexually assaulted for three days by five men. Each played out fantasies that were listed in explicit writing on the walls. Because of their power and status, she didn’t go to the police, fearing retribution.

She also felt that being cross-examined in the courts would retraumatise her. She had seen what had happened to other victims.

What Genevieve suffered came back to her as I spoke. Seeing my images caused her to panic. Her heart beat rapidly, she went into a hot sweat and she felt herself dissociating and losing time.

She says she felt retraumatised. ”I could feel a rising wave of fear. I’ve spent 20 years rebuilding my life. Every day I have to make a wall between me and the world. I’m so busy trying to protect myself. Deviant behaviour is now on public display every day.”

Do those who profit from the images they use to sell things even care about the impact on women like Genevieve? She is worried about the normalising of these images to children. ”What hope do my boys have of knowing where the line is? What hope does a girl who experiences these things have of getting understanding and support when she is confronted by constant exposure to images that say it is OK?” Genevieve asks.

Two years ago, Brian McFadden (his fiancee at the time, Delta Goodrem, was an anti-violence ambassador) released a song titled Just the way you are (Drunk at the Bar), which contains the lines: ”I like you just the way you are, drunk as shit dancing at the bar, I can’t wait to take you home so I can do some damage … I can’t wait to take you home so I can take advantage.”

In response, one survivor wrote in a comment on my blog:

”So, Brian McFadden, do you think this is something to poke fun at? Does my story deserve its own catchy tune and rounds of laughter and applause because you were so clever to come up with something witty that ultimately diminishes the trauma of my experience and belittles my feelings about it?”

Such imagery and words, as used by McFadden, create a harmful cultural narrative about what it means to be a woman today. Media and popular culture reflect values. Any reading of the social landscape tells us women are really only good for one thing: to be used sexually.

Anti-violence campaigner and sexual assault survivor Kate Ravenscroft points out that one in three women is a victim of violence, yet the trauma of their experience is diminished and belittled.

The cultural messages that make violence appear sexy are part of the same culture in which victims of sexual assault have to survive.

”Seeing that violence treated flippantly, carelessly, can be devastating,” she says.

Women like Genevieve battle to control rising panic most days, everywhere they go, because the acts done to them are on display so casually, with the tacit approval of governments who love to repeat a mantra that self-regulation is working. It’s not, and it’s real women who are hurt because of it.

As published in The Sun-Herald Nov 3 2013