What happened to your body image and self-respect policies Girlfriend mag?

In the year 2013, I wrote the ‘Girl Mag Watch’ reviews for Generation Next, which were published on the website of the youth mental health social enterprise and in its newsletters to thousands of subscribers. I reviewed Girlfriend and Dolly (an example of a review can be found here).

After years of criticism the mag, leading up to my becoming a reviewer for Gen Next, I started to notice that Girlfriend was improving. I didn’t have as much cause to be critical. In fact, I found myself commending Girlfriend for publishing positive content to help girls navigate life’s challenges. Unexpectedly, on March 26, 2013, I received an email from then editor Sarah Tarca. She was “genuinely excited” to see a positive review in GF’s March issue.

Would I be interested in meeting? She said she would be pleased to hear my concerns face-to-face and that “I truly want Girlfriend to be a magazine that has a positive influence on teens”. Three months later, with Collective Shout’s chair and Body Matters Australasia co-director Sarah McMahon, I found myself in a café with Sarah Tarca and head of Pacific Magazines youth department Mychelle Vandbury. The meeting went well, and we were persuaded that GF had learnt from errors of the past and was genuine in its intention to be a good influence on girls, especially at a time of distressing mental health figures and growing body image dissatisfaction in girls.

But now, five years after this mutually beneficial exchange, things appear to have gone downhill at the teen mag. So much for the positive body image and diversity commitments. So much for the ‘Self-respect’ checklist. We’ve posted on this at Collective Shout (reprinted below). I am certain this would not have happened under Sarah Tarca’s watch. Girlfriend, surely our girls deserve better.

Youth advocate shares views on the sexualisation of our kids

[UPDATE]

OPEN INVITATION – Parents and Community Session Hosted by Coolum Beach Christian College

This is a free event with child minding provided. Click here for more info:  https://www.facebook.com/events/680485449009905

As published in the Sunshine Coast Daily

SUNSHINE Coast parents and carers who wonder if their children are growing up too quickly and are worried about self-image and confidence are invited to a free presentation at Matthew Flinders Anglican College on Tuesday, July 17.

Flinders principal Stuart Meade encouraged parents and carers of students in Years 4-12 to hear from respected Sydney author, speaker and youth advocate Melinda Tankard Reist, who will share her enlightening 75-minute presentation Too Much, Too Young.

Leading child psychologist and author of Raising Girls and Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph, describes Melinda as “… probably the world’s best presenter on the damage advertisers and pornography do to our children and teens – often when we don’t even know.

“Her highly visual presentations will knock your socks off.

“You will be left angry in the very best way and be so much better equipped to talk to, and protect, your kids.”

Melinda’s presentation explores the impact of hyper-sexualized messages from media and popular culture on our children and young people.

Presented as part of the Flinders Speakers Series, the talk is open to all parents and carers on the Sunshine Coast to encourage partnerships between school, home and the community to learn positive ways to support and guide our young people to enjoy healthy lives and schooling journeys.

“Many young people are being swept along in the tidal wave of ‘pornification’ which engulfs their world and they need to know it should not be normalised and they do not have to buy into it,” Mr Meade said.

“The issues of sexual assault, consent, respect and identity are ones which many young people also deal with.

“Melinda is one of the pre-eminent speakers in the country on these topics and her ability to relate to her audiences is well-known.”

Drawing from current global literature on the subject, Melinda will explore with parents and friends how the proliferation of sexualised images and messages contributes to a distorted view of bodies, relationships and sexuality, hampering their children’s healthy physical, emotional and social development.

“The lives of young people are increasingly socialised, conditioned and informed by porn-related content online,” she said.

“They are exposed to this content not only before they have had sex, but often before their first kiss, with 11 years being the average age of first exposure.

“In this pornified landscape, young people are acting out through social media and sexting, putting their bodies on display for attention and judgement.”

The powerful presentation will explore how parents, carers and the broader community can address this toxic culture and raise happy, healthy and resilient kids.

Parents must book their free tickets to secure their seats. Visit www.trybooking.com/WJEJ

“Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want” – Anna Lappe

There are too many companies who want you to think they care about corporate social responsibility (CSR) when they clearly don’t. Every year we collate a list of the worst for you to send a message that CSR actually really does matter and if they are going to make profits off the backs of the bodies of women and girls, you don’t want them to get your Christmas dollars. It’s great see some companies engage in genuine change – we’ve rewarded them by dropping them from the list. It’s great to see The Cotton On Group (which now owns Supre –  one of the first companies we began campaigning against almost a decade ago)  state in its ethical framwork: “We have a responsibility to participate in stopping the exploitation, sexualization and objectification of women and girls in all aspects of the business”.

So here it is, the Crossed Off list for 2018. Let your family and friends know!

Empowering boys to change

Recently I addressed Year 10 girls and boys at a school in NSW. During question time at the end of my presentation, one of the young women read out a Facebook post by a male peer, filled with disparaging descriptions of the girls in his class. The girls were clearly upset. In the next session with the boys, I decided – without identifying the young man responsible – to read an extract from the Facebook post and share how distressed the girls had been by it.

That evening, after the parent session, one of the Year 10 girls approached me. She asked me if I would like to know the outcome of my time with the boys. Naturally I was interested. She said that the young man was so impacted by my message he decided to take responsibility for his actions and personally apologised to the girls he had offended, saying he would never do it again.

I am witnessing more outcomes like this. Boys, when given the opportunity to see how the culture they live in shapes and conditions them with harmful ideas about masculinity and damaging attitudes toward women and girls, can choose to reject social dictates and pressures and become young men of integrity. My new presentation for young men is designed to do just this.

‘Insightful, eye opening, authentic’

I recently had the privilege of presenting to a few hundred young men from schools in Sydney’s West at The Young Men’s Health Forum, organised by the passionate team at Conviction Group. You can see the impact of the message in this graph – 90% of students saying their views changed or were enhanced by my presentation on healthy relationships.

And this is what the director of the program had to say about the session:

“We received overwhelmingly positive feedback regarding your ‘Healthy Relationships’ presentation. Teachers, students, volunteers and special guests all commented on how insightful, eye opening and authentic it was.” – Marco Capobianco, manager Director, Conviction Group.

‘I have never seen the boys so engaged or so empowered’

More encouragement about the possibility of behavioural change from this teacher at The Southport School:

“I would like to say how fantastic your presentations were today. In my nine years at TSS I have never seen the boys so engaged or so empowered to act & change the culture they are operating in. I was really moved by how many of our students passionately voiced their opinions on the topic of both male and female sexual objectification. The subjects of social media, sexual expectation and body image all resonate with our boys” – Corinne Russell, teacher, The Southport School, Queensland.

To learn more about my seminars for boys, please contact me through this website.

Sex is too intimate to compromise. – Melinda Tankard Reist

By loveandnoregrets May 8, 2017

Sex is too intimate to compromise.

 ‘I’d already decided that teen sex was no fun, especially for girls. Too many of my friends told me about the sex they’d had and it sounded horrible. It sounded fast – insanely fast- and unpleasant. And unsatisfying. To make things worse, it seemed that as soon as it went from making out for about a minute to having sex, the boys turned into emotional zombies who got as far away from the girls as possible’.

This quote, from a new book Love, Sex and No Regrets for Today’s Teens, describes the experiences of girls I meet everywhere. Fast, expressionless, meaningless, non-intimate, care-less sex which makes them feel like a masturbatory aid. Boys who know how to give a girl a pounding but not how to make love. Girls desiring authentic intimate connection but finding de-personalisation and emotional disconnection instead.

Boys are learning about sex from porn. Most boys have seen it by 15. They are learning lies about women, what they are good for, what they want. Porn conditioned boys have no idea.

With porn the dominant model, a radical and potent new approach is needed, one that cuts through the distorted ideas porn gives about bodies, relationships and sexuality. With what girls are reporting about being harmed physically and psychologically by porn conditioned boys, in this article on for the ABC network Religion and Ethics points out what is on offer now in regard to sex ed is not working.

A big problem is that much of sex ed is about mechanics (putting condoms on bananas, for example), about STI’s (the ‘disease’ model of sexuality as it has been called) and reproduction. Young people need to know more than where the vas deferens is located. What is lacking is a deeper, broader approach which addresses meaning, values, character, the nature of human relationships and authentic intimacy and connection.

The young people I address ask questions like ‘How do I say no without hurting his feelings?’ and ‘How can we be better men’? We need a comprehensive, respect-based program which enables girls to be empowered to reject premature or unwanted sexual activity, which fosters in them strong sense of dignity, self-worth and confidence, which helps them desire something better: how to shun the cruel boys and the players: learning that being able to say ‘no’ is a sign of self-respect. A program which taps into the good at the heart of young boys well before porn gets a hold and messes them up, which offers healthy representations of masculinity, and which enables them to aspire to be the best men they can be.

‘This book helps parents understand how we can win back girlhood – happy, wild and free. It’s the core of individuality and self-belief – and is the new feminism that we want for our daughters’

Globally renown psychologist and author Steve Biddulph has been a remarkable support for our movement Collective Shout since the earliest days. He not only cared about the cause, he cared about us, as the individual activists at the forefront of this new grassroots campaigning movement against sexualsation, objectification and pornification. I recall one of our first gatherings as a core team in Sydney, Steve leading us in a session not on how we could change the world, but how to look after ourselves while attempting it. Since that time, eight years ago, Steve has continued to check in, with wise advice and wisdom about self-sustainability for the long haul.

I was honoured when Steve asked me to write a chapter on ‘Girls and the online world’ for his 2013 book Raising Girls, a follow-up to his million-copy best seller Raising Boys. Now Steve has again featured my work in his latest title 10 Things Girls Need Most: And How They Will Help Her Throughout Her Life (Finch Publishing). This new title, available through Booktopia, is already on the best seller lists.

The book is interactive. “These interactive tasks immediately get you thinking about your own life, your family and, of course, your daughter… It provides the very best information that we have about girls growing up today – and, alongside, are interactive tasks and self-exploration practices will help you to put that into practice”, Steve says.

Steve describes the aims of the book:

“Firstly, to help you understand how daughters grow and thrive, and to be confident in raising your own. To lay down the foundations of good mental health early in your daughter’s life, and to keep her strong all the way through. And secondly, to enlist you in the new wave of feminism, fighting against a world that is so toxic to our kids.

We have the potential to change the world our daughters face. Girls are being exploited. We need to challenge the companies worldwide that profit from making girls insecure and compliant through manipulative marketing.

This book helps parents understand how we can win back girlhood – happy, wild and free. It’s the core of individuality and self-belief – and is the new feminism that we want for our daughters.”

Here’s an extract from the chapter describing my work with young people:

A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

Melinda Tankard Reist is standing before an audience of two hundred girls aged from twelve to eighteen. Neat in their school uniforms, they are seated in curved rows on the floor. Uncharacteristically for this age group, they are utterly silent. Melinda is the founder of Collective Shout, a national network of young women campaigners against the sexual exploitation of women and girls. She will criss-cross to schools across the country giving this talk about ‘sex, porn and love’ dozens of times a year to girls of every ethnicity and demographic. When Melinda finishes speaking, the girls erupt in applause and besiege her with tearful thanks for her message. They will tell stories of their own experience – of being touched or assaulted by boys or men on public transport, of being leered at or spoken to obscenely in the schoolyard. Or, in their relationships with boyfriends, of feeling pressured into doing things they didn’t want to do, and of sexual encounters entered into happily and trustingly, where nice boys that they thought they could trust became aggressive, spoke demeaningly or physically hurt them.

When Melinda talks to boys about these issues, they often express shame and regret, recognizing they have acted in these ways, but not seeing how harmful and disrespectful their behaviour has been. They literally thought this was how you were supposed to treat girls.

The world our kids grow up in today sexually is not a happy place. Sex has been so misused, in advertising, the media and in music videos – and most powerfully of all in the torrent of online pornography – that it has badly distorted what young people think about how it works, and how it can be part of a caring, gradually unfolding relationship.

A recent study by the Burnet Institute in Sydney, Australia, found that 90 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls had encountered pornography between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. Thirteen was the average age of first exposure for boys. Forty-four per cent of older teenage boys watch porn weekly, and 37 per cent daily. This indicates a fair bit of exposure. Pornography is a vast and highly profitable industry. Our consumer society is industrializing sexuality, and the kids are its first trial run….

…for the boys who see these depictions, the women in pornography are paid to act as if they like and enjoy this treatment – slapping, strangling, hair-pulling, and being called abusive and demeaning names. For a fourteen-year-old boy the mislearning about what sex is like is bewildering, if not dangerous.

Here is what Melinda (and educators like her) report from talking to adolescent girls:

1. They are being increasingly and persistently pressured into sexual acts that they don’t want or enjoy. This pressure often becomes the central focus of the relationship with boys who they thought liked them or wanted to be with them.

2. When once teenagers enjoyed hours of kissing, or had a relationship consisting of talking, laughing, spending time together and snogging, this now doesn’t happen at all. It’s too much a delay in getting to the goal.

3. Sex isn’t really sexy any more. There is no sensuality, no body pleasure, no tenderness. You are meat to be used. The sex girls have with boys is fourth rate.

4. As a result, by sixteen or seventeen, girls are often totally disillusioned about sex, put off it by the dismal lack of skill, awareness or connection offered by the boys in their lives. It becomes a routine, dreary chore to put up with if you want to be in the company of a male. (How progressive and modern!)

5. Sexual relationships that start at fourteen or fifteen rarely last beyond a few weeks, often less. They create a lowered bar, a kind of resignation, and drift into multiple, equally empty relationships.

This doesn’t just affect the girls who are sexually active. The effect on the social world that all our daughters move in – at school, university or going out in public on the street – is that it is constantly sexualized in an invasive and uncomfortable way. A girl finds she is being ranked and compared on sexual criteria on social media or even to her face. Some boys feel that they are entitled to touch or grope girls, harass them or worse. Some men gaze invasively at girls without any sense of respect or protectiveness.

Girls lose a sense of agency or that their needs matter. Melinda hears girls talk about their first sexual experience, being anxious only about how it was for the boy. ’He seemed to like it.’ ‘I hope I looked OK.’ There is nothing about their own enjoyment.

By mid-secondary school, requests for naked ‘selfies’ come thick and fast. Boys expect this from a girl they are friends with. Girls ask: ‘How can I refuse without hurting his feelings?’ But those photos may be traded among boys, used as revenge, or to blackmail them into having sex, then shared anyway. Girls in many countries have taken their own lives because of the humiliation or betrayal they experience, the sense of having their selves taken away.

Another sad side effect, is that non-sexual, actual friendships – once a great part of being young, and a stepping stone to greater confidence – have almost disappeared as everyone thinks they are supposed to be sexual.

SO WHAT TO DO?

In the face of this avalanche of hurt, the answer that educators and activists are giving girls is on multiple fronts, but has a central core. It’s the thing that sends girls at Melinda’s talks into empowered assertion of their own feelings. You Don’t Have To. Your own sexual wishes, enjoyment, values, and choices, are what you have a right to stand up for. You aren’t in this world to satisfy boys.

—

See also:

‘Growing Up in Pornland: Girls have had it with porn conditioned boys’, ABC Religion and Ethics.

‘When 5 year olds create porn themed images – in class’, Australian Childhood Foundation Prosody blog.

It’s time pornography was included in discussion of factors contributing to violence against women

I’ve just a released a new DVD!

It’s based on an address I gave to civic leaders, community groups, educators and those at the frontline of addressing domestic violence, in Queensland late last year. I think it’s safe to say it is the first DVD of its kind, unpacking the research on the relationship between pornography and violence as well as drawing from personal experiences shared with me. The back cover reads:

There is renewed debate on the national scourge of violence against women. This debate is to be welcomed. However the role of pornography as a driver of violence has not been properly considered.

In this new 35-minute video, author of Big Porn Inc Melinda Tankard Reist explores the latest research on how porn influences men and boys and eroticises and legitimises violence. She shares young women’s experiences of sexual assault, physical and mental injury, unwanted sexual advances and demands for sexual ’selfies’.

Melinda’s message will help inform you and equip you to join the growing movement against porn and advocate for relationships built on respect.

With Di Macleod after I addressed a conference on pornography and violence against women on the Gold Coast last year.

I am grateful for the support of frontline workers such as Di Macleod, Director, Gold Coast Centre Against Sexual Violence, who wrote this endorsement:

In the past few years we have had a huge increase in intimate partner rape of women from 14 to 80+. The biggest common denominator reported by the victims is consumption of porn by the offender. We have seen a rise in deprivation of liberty, physical injuries, torture, drugging, filming and sharing footage without consent. Melinda Tankard Reist is at the forefront of helping frontline services like ours educate the public on the link between pornography and violence – and the urgent action needed to address it.

I really hope this new DVD will help expand the debate on violence against women to incorporate the role of pornography.

You can order the DVD here. (Also, check out this special offer. Order Pornography and Violence: What is the connection? and Too sexy too soon as a package for the reduced price of  $36 saving 20%.)

See also:

‘When 5 year olds create porn themed images in class’. MTR, Australian Childhood Foundation Prosidy blog

‘Growing Up in Pornland: Girls Have Had It with Porn Conditioned Boys’, MTR, ABC Religion and Ethics

Opinion: Our kids exposed to an adult world

Melinda Tankard Reist

The Courier-Mail is to be commended for its series on the hypersexualisation of our young people — especially the impacts on children by allowing them to be exposed to porn even before their first kiss.

What has been documented here in the Generation Sext campaign is what I’m hearing everywhere I go.

Educators, child welfare groups, childcare workers, mental health bodies, medicos and parents are reeling.

All are struggling to deal with the proliferation of hypersexualised imagery and its impacts on the most vulnerable — children who think what they see in porn is what real sex looks like.

They tell me about children using sexual language, children touching other children inappropriately, children playing “sex games” in the schoolyard, children requesting sexual favours, children showing other children porn on their devices, children distressed by explicit images they came across while searching an innocent term, children exposed to porn “pop ups” on sites featuring their favourite cartoon characters or while playing online games.

The website PornHub is in the top five favourite sites of boys aged 11-16 according to ChildWise UK. The biggest selling genres of porn are those eroticising violence.

Boys are viewing violent depictions of sex, torture, rape and incest. They are having their sexual arousal conditioned by depictions of extreme cruelty, seeing women being assaulted for sexual pleasure — all while their sexuality is under construction.

In Australia there has been a significant increase in reports of child on child sexual assault — identified as “copycat sexual predators”.

AMA vice-president Stephen Parnis says the internet is exposing children to sexually explicit content teaching them that sex is about “use and abuse”.

“There are increasing levels of aggression and the physical harm resulting from sexual acts is becoming more apparent,” he says.

The Australian Psychological Association has seen the problem first hand.

“Over the past decade, we have seen a growing trend of younger children engaging in problem sexual and sexually abusive behaviours generally aimed at younger children — in other words, children sexually assaulting children,” their Senate inquiry submission said.

“Pornography is providing too many 10-year-olds with the mechanical knowledge to anally, orally and/or vaginally penetrate younger siblings, cousins and acquaintances.”

Girls especially are bearing the brunt of porn-inspired boys who have imbibed a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and girls.

We continue to hear the cry “Boys aren’t treating girls with respect!”. But there’s no mystery as to the reason.

Girls tell me about boys demanding sexual favours, demanding sex acts they don’t like, pressured to provide naked images (including girls as young as 11 and 12), being ranked compared to the bodies of porn stars.

One young woman told the South East Centre Against Sexual Assault: “When you have sex with a guy they want it to be like a porno. They want anal and oral right away. Oral is, like, the new kissing.”

There is a growing body of global literature testifying to how boys who take their sexual cues from porn develop sexist attitudes and aggressive behaviours — which has a trickle-down effect on women and girls.

For too many boys, the debasement they see on screen becomes real life debasement of girls.

In 2012, the UK Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection found that exposure to porn has a negative impact on children’s attitudes to sex, relationships and body image.

A 2012 review of research on the Impact of Internet Pornography on Adolescents found that adolescent consumption of internet pornography was linked to attitudinal changes, including acceptance of male dominance and female submission, with women viewed as “sexual playthings eager to fulfil male sexual desires”.

The authors found that “adolescents who are intentionally exposed to violent sexually explicit material were six times more likely to be sexually aggressive than those who were not exposed”.

In Australia, one in four young men think it is OK to pressure women to have sex.

Pornography normalises and eroticises violence against women as sexy. We have more than enough warnings by frontline service agencies about a public health emergency involving near-saturation rates of pornography consumption among men and boys.

This assault on the healthy sexual development of children has to stop if we want our children to engage in healthy sexual exploration and respect-based relationships, to know what real intimacy feels like.

The problem is so big and so vast it requires a whole of community approach. Parents, schools, educators, the medical profession, welfare groups, governments and regulatory bodies have to take action.

Fortunately there are signs that young people want something better. This is a message I received from a young woman who heard me speak.

“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 at 16 I’m disgusted and amazed at 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 have 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 action and we want to make a difference.

“I want to help girls feel like they are worth something. So thanks again you are an inspiration to us all and I hope to join your cause — Tiffany, 16.”

As published in The Courier Mail.

See also: ‘Kids looking for cartoons, seeing porn’, The Courier Mail

Yesterday Studio 10 screened a special investigation on the impact of pornography especially on young people.

I was part of the panel.

You can view an extract from the program below:

See also:

‘When 5 year olds create porn themed images in class’. MTR, Australian Childhood Foundation Prosidy blog

‘Growing Up in Pornland: Girls Have Had It with Porn Conditioned Boys’, MTR, ABC Religion and Ethics

Our new ambassador in her first media interview in the role

The hypersexual world and its impact on young girls and boys

In the two weeks since you heard Donald Trump’s confessions – unintended – of groping women, the strongest response has come from US First Lady Michelle Obama. You may have heard her say that Trumps’ words shook her to the core.

Well, this culture has also shaken, and motivated, Kerryn Baird, who’s the wife of New South Wales premier Mike Baird. This week, Kerryn Baird became the new ambassador for Collective Shout, an advocacy group for women and girls.

Listen to the interview below:

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