We must half messages and imagery which reduces women to sexual objects, fosters a culture which condones sexual violence, and pressures young girls to act in prematurely sexual ways

Collective Shout has made a submission to the NSW Parliamentary Committee on Children and Young People Inquiry into sexualisation.

We hope  this inquiry won’t go the way of all the others before it – doing nothing to rein in the vested interests of marketers, advertisers and the media  and allowing business as usual, despite the growing body of global evidence of the harms to young people due to the proliferation of hypersexual images and messages inundating them daily.

Submission summary  

Children and young people are growing up in a high-tech culture steeped in relentlessly sexualised, sexualising and sexist messaging from media, advertising and popular culture which conditions them from a young age to view themselves and others in terms of their appearance and sexual currency. While women and girls are primarily the subjects of hyper-sexualised media representation, these messages also play a crucial part in socialising men and boys to see the sexual objectification of women and girls as normal.

Many adults are overwhelmed by the task of protecting and equipping children as they navigate the contemporary media and social landscape. The current legislative and regulatory environment is piecemeal, confusing for the community to navigate, and tends to serve the commercial advantage of corporate and marketing interests to the detriment of the community – children and young people in particular. Despite a number of state and federal inquiries demonstrating the need for systemic reform, media classification and self-regulatory schemes have failed to halt or even slow the proliferation of imagery and messaging through electronic, print and social media and marketing that demeans women, reduces them to sexual objects, fosters a culture which condones sexual violence, and pressures young girls to act in prematurely sexual ways.

Collective Shout is critical of the self-regulatory system currently favoured in media and advertising, which allows free rein to marketers while placing the burden of action on those most at risk of exploitation and harm. In particular, we are concerned about the lack of effective incentive or enforcement to deter those who are making a profit from the sexualisation of children and young people. Media and advertising interests have had ample opportunity to hear and act on community concerns but have instead have chosen to protect their vested interests. It is time for government to step in and act on behalf of children and young people

Recommendations:

• Recognition of the harms of sexualisation as a public health crisis requiring swift and decisive action on behalf of children and young people.
• The restructuring of the current regulatory environment to bring the regulation of all media and marketing together under one encompassing independent federal regulator, including a division with the primary responsibility of protecting the interests of children and young people, addressing both the direct and indirect sexualisation of children in all media modes from a child-rights basis.
• Equipping parents and carers with the appropriate media literacy tool and institutional supports, to raise children who have the ability to be critical consumers and creators of media.
• The evaluation and implementation of appropriate school-based education programs to educate children and young people about the harms of sexualisation, and funding to help schools secure these resources.
• For a child-rights based approach to addressing the harms of media hypersexualisation, including respect for the voices and points of view of children and young people.
• That the prevalence of sexualised images of women in our society be recognised as a significant underlying contributor to violence against women and girls.
• The commissioning of comprehensive research to establish the extent of the exposure of children and young people in NSW to sexualising media content. However, this research should not preclude swift government action on the basis of the evidence that already exists.

*Full submission will be made available when it appears in submission listings on the NSW Parliament website.

Meagan Tyler tackles the false separation between revenge porn and commercial porn

By Meagan Tyler

In recent years, there has been growing media coverage, academic research, government interest, and public anger about what’s known as “revenge porn.” But a false separation between “revenge pornography” and the proliferation of commercial pornography undermines existing analyses.

The basics of revenge pornography are often understood to involve “sharing private sexual images and recordings of a person without their consent, with the intention to cause that person harm.” That harm is largely enacted through “degrading women sexually and professionally.”

Despite its definition, “revenge porn” is almost never used to describe commercial pornography. Indeed, the rush to decry “revenge porn” implies that commercial pornography is somehow not about harm, degradation, and humiliation.

It is taken for granted in many of these public discussions that all women in commercial pornography have freely and willingly consented, not only to the sex acts that have been recorded, but also to their global distribution. Beyond that, the stories of abuse from within the commercial pornography industry are largely ignored.

Women involved in all aspects of the porn industry, from the so-called “soft porn” of Playboy and the “free choice” of amateur, to the harder forms of gonzo, have spoken publicly about violence and coercion. I also recount a number of their stories in Selling Sex Short. The filmed recordings of these assaults and abuses of trust are still in circulation for a mostly male target audience to access for the purposes of sexual arousal.

Even the inclusion of specific abusive incidents in the commercial industry as “revenge pornography” is still very limited. The analysis remains stuck on an individual level and offers no meaningful context of consent. Most understandings of “revenge porn” hinge on the idea that the person in question — almost always woman — has not consented to the distribution of her image and that the purpose of publishing the image is to degrade or humiliate her in some way.

We need to understand that questionable consent, along with humiliation and degradation, are hallmarks of the pornography industry itself. Firstly, women’s inequality — economically, socially, political and sexually — contributes to a kind of cultural coercion into pornography production in the first place. There is little sense in suggesting that commercial pornography is all about “free choice,” as though consent exists outside the context of a capitalist-patriarchy or pornified culture.

Secondly, there is the representation of women in pornography. Sexual violence and sexual aggression against women in mainstream, commercial pornography is extremely common. The ways in which particular groups of women are depicted in pornography also shows that humiliation and degradation exist outside obvious sexual violence.

Racism, too, is pervasive in mainstream heterosexual (and gay male) pornography. As Gail Dines explains:

“Hiding behind the façade of fantasy and harmless fun, pornography delivers reactionary racist stereotypes that would be considered unacceptable were they in any other types of mass-produced media. However, the power of pornography is that these messages have a long history and still resonate, on a sub-textual level, with the white supremacist ideologies, that continue to inform policies that economically, politically and socially discriminate against people of colour.”

Dines demonstrates how sexism and racism intertwine with common tropes such as Asian women constructed as petite and submissive and black women constructed as poor, or “ghetto,” and easily pimped. Pornography not only reinforces male dominance and white supremacy, it sexualizes them: it makes inequality something to get off to.

Furthermore, the pornography industry fundamentally requires sexual objectification in order to function. As Kathleen Barry argues in The Prostitution of Sexuality, the increasing proliferation of pornography has been, at least in part, about publicly reducing women to sexed bodies for the male gaze. She states that, in post-industrial societies:

“[W]hen women achieve the potential for economic independence, men are threatened with loss of control over women as their legal and economic property in marriage. To regain control, patriarchal domination reconfigures around sex by producing a social and public condition of sexual subordination that follows women into the public world.”

In this sense, at a class level, all porn is revenge porn. Instead of an individual man benefiting at the expense of an individual woman — as in dominant understandings of “revenge porn” — this is men, as a class, benefiting at the expense of women, as a class.

The situation is similar with other aspects of the sex industry, as Sheila Jeffreys explains in The Industrial Vagina:

“The boom in strip clubs can be seen as a counterattack, in which men have reasserted their right to network for and through male dominance without the irritating presence of women, unless those women are naked and servicing their pleasures…[Strip clubs] provide an antidote to the erosion of male dominance by institutionalizing the traditional hierarchy of gender relations.”

As women have increasingly asserted their equality with (and autonomy from) men, the sex industry — including its most pervasive and profitable arm in pornography — has become a form of patriarchal compensation, or even revenge. It is a way of reclaiming hierarchies founded on racism and sexism.

We’ve had several decades worth of feminist theorizing and activism about the harms of pornography. It is 24 years since the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance put forward the idea that women should be able to hold pornographers who profit from their abuse civilly accountable. It is an ordinance that would have been well suited, in many ways, to addressing revenge porn today.

There is little need to reinvent the wheel in understanding the harms of revenge pornography. There is, however, an urgent need to re-engage with feminist critiques of pornography, sexual inequality, and consent if we are to have any hope of redressing such harms.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

Suit supply ad campaign uses larger-than-life-sexual objectification of women

As published at Collective Shout

But the male CEO of the fashion label suggests the ads are sexist towards men – we’re #notbuyingit

Fashion label Suit Supply has a history of using sexist and objectifying images of women to promotes its menswear range. In an article published at the Huffington Post, CEO of Suit Supply, Fokke de Jong, denied that the ads are sexist towards women stating “if you want to read any form of sexism in here than it has to be towards men.”

Images for the ad campaign depict “doll sized” men wedged between breasts and lips, pulling down bikini bottoms, tugging at zips and directing a stream of water from a hose into a woman’s mouth. Scroll down to view campaign ad images.

Collective Shout’s Caitlin Roper disputed the idea that using larger than life images of women’s bodies as props to be manipulated or back drops for men’s recreation gives women “the upper hand.”

“The notion that this ad could be an example of ‘reverse sexism’ or sexism against men, as they’ve alleged, is naive at best,” she told HuffPost UK.

“Sexism – social, political and economic inequality on a structural level – isn’t something that can be counteracted by superimposing tiny men onto women’s semi-naked bodies to sell menswear.

“It’s no accident the women are hyper sexualised and posed in subordinate and ridiculous poses while the men are fully clothed, posed with dignity and strength.”

Roper added that she’s disappointed by the campaign, but not surprised by it, as Suit Supply has a “history of sexually exploitative advertising”.

“They think they are being edgy and subversive but they are merely upholding the (sexist) status quo depicting women as passive sexual objects to sell clothing for men,” she said.

“When companies feel the need to resort to such blatant sexism to flog their products you have to really question how little confidence they have in the quality of their products.”

Read more at The Huffington Post.

As published at Collective Shout.

As published at Collective Shout

Earlier this year UltraTune launched its new series of television commercials which attracted substantial criticism from the broader community.

UltraTune opted to screen their ads during the Australian Open while families were watching the tennis. You can read about them in our earlier blog post here.

We encouraged people to lodge a complaint with the Advertising Standards Board – some did so for the very first time. Yesterday we heard the news that the Advertising Standards Board had upheld the complaints against UltraTune’s ad.

The Advertising Standards Board’s response said:

The Board noted that the intent of the advertisement is to depict two women unexpectedly breaking down – with the advertiser suggesting that regular services from Ultratune will prevent such an ‘unexpected situation.’ The Board accepted that the intent of the advertisement is to show an unrealistic situation. However the Board considered that the women are depicted as unintelligent in the way in which they sit passively, with blank faces, in the car on the train tracks and also in the way they appear to not notice the oncoming train. This behaviour, in the Board’s view, makes the women appear unintelligent and presents them in a stereotypical helpless female situation.

In the Board’s view, the depiction of the women’s reaction to their situation is a negative depiction of women and does amount to vilification of women. The Board considered that the advertisement did portray or depict material in a way which discriminates against or vilifies a person or section of the community on account of gender and determined that the advertisement did breach Section 2.1 of the Code.

UltraTune responded saying they “intend to seek an independent review of the Board’s decision” and “vigorously dispute these findings”. UltraTune executive Chairman Sean Buckley still has the ad available on his YouTube channel at the time of writing.

To read the full report click here.

UltraTune’s refusal to comply with the ASB ruling raises some serious questions about the effectiveness of ad industry self-regulation. The ASB has no power to compel advertisers to abide by its rulings, nor are there any penalties for advertisers who refuse to do so. Companies who have failed to act in line with ASB rulings in the past include Aussie Boat Loans, Wicked Campervansand more recently sex shop Honey Birdette, who posted on their Facebook page “Nobody tells Honey Birdette to take down her signage!”

It is clear that industry self regulation is not working.

Contact UltraTune here

‘We’re not the first company to feel her wrath’:
Ultratune boss on Collective Shout activist Melinda Liszewski:

Listen to the full interview HERE

Read more about sexploitation at UltraTune here

Experts address packed-out UNSW theatre

The ground-breaking symposium ‘Pornography and harms to children and young people’ held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney last Tuesday has been declared a major success.

Hosted by Collective Shout, the Australia-first event brought together leading academics, researchers, educators, psychologists and youth and child advocates to examine the harmful impacts of early pornography exposure. Emceed by Andrew Lines of the Rite Journey, speakers including Dr Michael Flood, Maree Crabbe, Dr Joe Tucci and Susan McLean, unpacked the global research as well as examining local experience, to a standing-room only audience.

I also addressed the symposium on ‘How girls are harmed by porn-conditioned boys’ (pic above). I unpacked how girls and young women were affected by porn-using boys in their everyday lives. From my introduction:

The proliferation and globalisation of hypersexualised imagery and pornographic themes has led to destructive ideas about sex and makes healthy sexual exploration almost impossible.

Sexual conquest and domination becomes all important, untempered by the bounds of respect, intimacy and authentic human connection

Young people are learning about f—ing but not about making love.

Young men are being conditioned and shaped by the messages they imbibe from pornography, given a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and girls. Viewing porn often reinforces the idea that girls are always available for sex.

Girls are under extreme pressure to give men what they want, to adopt pornified roles and behaviours, their bodies merely sex aids. Girls learn that they are service stations for male gratification and pleasure.

I drew from stories girls themselves relayed to me in schools around the country, including demands for naked selfies, boys sending them ‘dick pics’ and porn videos uninvited (including to girls as young as 12), inappropriate touching, sexual harassment, comments about their bodies, being ranked in comparison to porn stars, demands for porn-inspired sexual acts, boys not respecting denial of consent, being mocked or having rumors started about them for resisting unwanted sexual activity.

After canvassing the research on how boys and young women socialized by porn act out on women and girls, I looked at ways forward so that girls can stand up against warped notions of sexuality conveyed in pornography and seek relationships based on mutual respect and care.

I quoted Tiffany, 15, who wrote to me through Facebook:

Hi Melinda. I was really touched by what you had to say and you opened my eyes to what sort of world we live in and as a 16 I’m disgusted and amazed and what girls my age have to go through. You said something about being asked for nudes and that and personally I didn’t know what you meant by that as I haven’t been asked to do that… Until today. To tell you the truth I wouldn’t of known what to do about it if you didn’t speak about it and I’m very grateful to you. The boy asked me for a photo or video and I said no that’s when he called me lame but I immediately told him I am more than just my body and you shouldn’t treat me like a piece of meat and instantly blocked him. Thank you for telling me that and I hope I have done the right thing and myself and other girls are taking part in taking action on this case and we want to make a difference. I want to help girls feel like they are worth something…

MTR on ABC QLD

There was a great deal of media interest in the symposium, with many speakers giving media interviews throughout the day. Here’s an interview I did with Steve Austin of ABC QLD.

See also:

Other media coverage here.

Media Release about the symposium.

Technology Online News.com: How the dark world of pornography is damaging kids lives forever.