QotD: “Ruined” January 22, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in pro-sex anti-porn, quote of the day, Radical Feminism, sexual liberation.1 comment so far
Pornography was always available for those who sought it out; the difference is that in the 21st century pornography is as ubiquitous as religion once was. Its sadomasochistic stock in trade is still the same. No sexual revolution will happen until the role of penetration as a mechanism of domination is obliterated, until it makes no sense to snarl at anyone: “Get fucked”, until “fucked” does not mean “ruined”.
Sex education, you’re doing it wrong January 20, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in Anti-porn: you're doing it wrong, sex and relationships education.add a comment
MPs will debate a controversial bill [today] calling for teenage girls to be given lessons in sexual abstinence.
The bill, proposed by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, would require schools to offer extra sex education classes to girls aged 13 to 16 and for these lessons to include advice on “the benefits of abstinence”.
[...]
The bill has elicited considerable criticism from politicians in all three of the main political parties.
Dan Rogerson, co-chair of the Lib Dems education and family backbench committee and an MP for North Cornwall, said the bill would result in girls being given a “dire warning about their future prospects”.
“To single out girls is at best unhelpful and at worst damaging,” he said. He said boys and girls needed to be given high quality advice on all aspects of relationships.
Niki Molnar, chairman of Conservative Women, which has at least 4,000 members, said boys needed to be included in classes on sex and relationships to ensure that they learned to respect women.
[...]
The British Humanist Association (BHA) said the bill had so far been supported predominantly by socially conservative Christians and had little chance of succeeding.
However, Naomi Phillips, head of public affairs at the BHA, said it was “yet another attempt by a lobby on the religious right to promote and impose on others, a narrow, unshared and potentially damaging perspective regarding sex, sexual health and abortion rights”.
“All children and young people have a right to high quality, comprehensive and objective sex and relationships education in all schools, including ‘faith’ schools, which would and should equip young people – both boys and girls – with the information and skills to say no to sexual activity if that is what they choose.”
Dorries has also campaigned to reduce the time during a pregnancy when an abortion can take place from 24 to 21 weeks.
Darinka Aleksic, campaign co-ordinator for Abortion Rights, said the bill served to further Dorries’ “moral agenda, which involves restricting abortion and teaching teenage girls that they, unlike boys, must save themselves for marriage”.
Full article here.
Row for Freedom! January 19, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in activism, sexual exploitation, Trafficking still not a myth.add a comment
Row for Freedom – the team of five women who are rowing the Atlantic in order to raise money for ECPAT UK – have moved into fifth place in what has been described as ‘the world’s toughest rowing race’.
The women, none of whom had experience of rowing at sea before, have made amazing progress since departing from the Canary Islands at the beginning of December, and now have less than 500 miles remaining.
After more than a month on the ocean, battling fatigue, 30ft waves and seasickness, Row for Freedom looks on target to set two new world records – the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by an all-female crew and the first five woman team to row any ocean in the world – helping to raise the profile of ECPAT UK and our work on child trafficking.
Out of 17 teams that entered the race, only 11 remain – with others having to withdraw or be rescued due to difficulties.
Nonetheless, the Row for Freedom team are determined to raise awareness of the plight of child victims of trafficking. In particular, they want to garner support for ECPAT UK’s campaign call for a system of guardianship for child victims.
Read more about it on ECPAT UK’s website and their Facebook campaigns page, and please consider donating to this cause if you can.
Trafficking still not a myth: “Has the UN learned lessons of Bosnian sex slavery revealed in Rachel Weisz film?” January 17, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in objectification/commodification, sexual exploitation, Trafficking still not a myth, violence against women.add a comment
We do not see the torture inflicted on one girl for trying to flee her captors, but we see the tears of her fellow slaves forced to watch. We see the iron bar tossed on to the cellar floor when the punishment is over, and we know what has happened.
The Whistleblower spares you little. It is a film about that most depraved of crimes: trafficking women for enslaved sex, rape and even murder.
As a dramatised portrayal of reality, however, The Whistleblower is “a day at the beach compared to what happened in real life”, says its director, Larysa Kondracki. “We show what is just about permissible to show. We couldn’t possibly include the three-week desensitisation period, when they burn the girls in particular places. We couldn’t really capture the hopelessness of life these women are subjected to.”
Starring Rachel Weisz, The Whistleblower, released tomorrow on DVD, is the most searing drama-documentary of recent years and has won many prizes. But more important than the accolades is that everything in the film is true. The film deals with enslavement and rape in Bosnia, not during wartime 20 years ago but during the peace. Worse, not only were the enslaved women’s “clients” soldiers and police officers – so too were the traffickers, protected at the top of the United Nations operation in Bosnia.
[...]
Speaking to the Observer last week, [former peacekeeper] Bolkovac said: “The thing that stood out about these cases in Bosnia, and cases that have been reported in other [UN] mission areas, is … that police and humanitarian workers were frequently involved in not only the facilitation of forced sexual abuse, and the use of children and young women in brothels, but in many instances became involved in the trade by racketeering, bribery and outright falsifying of documents as part of a broader criminal syndicate.”
Bolkovac volunteered for Bosnia’s peacekeeping force in the late 1990s, working on domestic abuse cases, which brought her into contact with the leading UN officer for gender issues, Madeleine Rees, played by Vanessa Redgrave in the film.
“I went to work with large numbers of women who had been the victims of rape during the war,” said Rees. “But I ended up working as much with women who were being trafficked and raped by soldiers and police officers sent to keep the peace.” Bolkovac uncovered a network of brothels and bars at which kidnapped women were enslaved to “service” peacekeepers. “This was a difficult time in my life,” said Bolkovac. “Not being able to know who to trust when you are working with police officers and UN officials … It was clear that the protection of the ‘good old boys’ club’ was a first priority.”
[...]
“Countries get rated by the US Trafficking in Persons report on their records in dealing with trafficking,” said Rees, “for which you need to show results. If you don’t prosecute or repatriate enough people, your rating is downgraded, thereby your financial support. So when there were raids, the girls would be shipped home to Ukraine or wherever, probably to be retrafficked. It was a repatriation factory, run by people who had an anti-immigration approach, and didn’t want women to try to get into western Europe – no focus on the system or rights of the women. Our approach, by contrast, was slow and beginning to work, so it had to be killed off.”
QotD: Porn Truths January 16, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in pro-sex anti-porn, quote of the day.add a comment
The Pleasure Vs Profit website has a series of nifty “Porn Shocked!!” postcards challenging the received ‘wisdom’ around pornography. Go to the website to see them all.
Ditching Dieting Campaign January 15, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in activism, Body Image.add a comment
From the Ditching Dieting Campaign website:
Endangered Bodies is a global and local initiative to fight the culture of body anxiety, body hatred and fear that is pervading all parts of our society.
This month we are starting a campaign to expose the role of the diet industry in de-stabilising women and girls’ appetites and desires. We believe that eating disorders and the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ are merely more visible extremes of a much bigger, everyday phenomena: that we are accepting fear and hatred of our own bodies like gravity, that we are accepting ‘I am not good enough’ as a fact.
In the past weeks we have once again been swamped with headlines announcing an obesity crisis and we have seen news stories with the message that children may be taken away from their parents if the kids’ BMIs are deemed offensive or threatening. This ‘crisis’ is constructed from research funded by the industries that can make money from it, such as pharmaceutical and diet industries.
THESE INDUSTRIES ARE MAKING OUR BODIES THEIR BUSINESS
Porcupine: new anti-porn resource for young people January 15, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in activism, Body Image, objectification/commodification, pornography harms, pro-sex anti-porn, quote of the day, sex and relationships education, sexual exploitation, sexual liberation.3 comments
A new group called The Porcupine Campaign has started to help young people challenge porn culture.
The name ‘porcupine’ comes from the phrase “porn is a prickly issue”, which I think is brilliant and inventive! If you are on Facebook, go and like them; this is an important campaign, as young people particularly (and young men especially) are very likely to feel isolated and afraid of social ostracism if they speak up about there concerns over pornography. Peer pressure is so strong at that age, and as Porcupine’s accompanying website Pleasure Vs Profit says, “the porn industry manipulates a natural curiosity about sex to sell a narrow, joyless and harmful version of sexuality.” Young people really, urgently need and deserve better.
QotD, from Rage Against the Man-chine January 12, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in pro-sex anti-porn, quote of the day, Radical Feminism.add a comment
It’s fairly disheartening – though by no means surprising — that porn use is a given, and that all that’s left to discuss is which version of commodified sexuality one consumes, how degrading it is, and whether one partner can emotionally withstand knowing what forms of dehumanization the other finds orgasmic. We can simply no longer imagine a sexuality, apparently, that transcends scripts dictated to us by an industry that banks on fulfilling (and manipulating) male desires to the detriment of women’s humanity. But let’s not discuss that and what it might mean for our sex lives and our emotional development as human beings. That shit wouldn’t give anyone a boner.
QotD: “There is no greater issue at stake than the liberation of women from patriarchal oppression” December 28, 2011
Posted by antiplondon in pornography harms, quote of the day, Radical Feminism.add a comment
From this I Blame the Patriarchy post Spinster aunt can’t shut the fuck up all of a sudden
The liberation of women from patriarchal oppression is more important than a man’s right to 24-hour access to poontang. It’s more important than a woman’s right to the performance of sexy empowering femininity. It’s more important than a scholarly analysis of a canonical work. It’s more important than censorship.
Censorship has meant this and that and the other thing over the years. The government won’t let you burn flags. The authorities herd you and your “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” protest sign into a “free speech” zone when Dubya shows up at a rally. The secret police throw you in prison for writing unflattering stuff about your totalitarian government. Your library uses content-control software. The TV network bleeps out your (or Gordon Ramsay’s) F-bombs. The self-censoring Internet feminist uses the word F-bomb instead of the word fuck for no reason.
In the context of Internet feminist discourse, however, censorship seems to be something only feminist dissidents do, probably because we hate freedom! Censorship means “the practice of feminists voicing dissenting opinions on the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women.”
According to this interpretation, we Nazi feminists, with our intolerable idea that the fetishization of women’s oppression violates all women, are to be harassed, shouted down, and condemned by the liberal dudes found swinging from every rafter of the Internet, in an effort to suppress our dissent. Why? Apparently because saying “Lolita sucks” is tantamount to demanding a book-burning. Of a beloved, transgressive monument to lyric dudeliness.
Ironically, dudely suppression of feminist dissent is itself censorship, the very -ship that these free speech-lovin’ dudes purport to be against. Censorship is apparently bad only when it threatens to undermine DudeNation’s death-grip on its own sceptre of passion.
“Footage the porn industry doesn’t want you to see” January 18, 2012
Posted by antiplondon in articles/essays/commentary, Porn industry conditions, sex industry advocates.4 comments
I really was in two minds about putting up this YouTube video (found via The Porcupine Campaign) as it is so shocking and disturbing to watch. To be absolutely on the safe side, I am putting it below the fold, and giving a very clear warning:
WARNING, CONTAINS CONTENT THAT MAY BE TRIGGERING OR OTHERWISE TRAUMATISING
Obviously, it is also not safe for work.
I think it’s important to show this video, as it shows the ‘working’ conditions in the mainstream of the LA porn industry. This is not something hidden away where nobody knows about it, this is the norm of a massive global industry producing the mainstream of heterosexual pornography. Sex industry advocates like to pretend that it’s just the occasional ‘bad apple’, and any way, any abuse that does occur is no different to any other workplace exploitation, this video shows that it isn’t.
It also needs to be emphasised that, with out such abusive ‘work place’ conditions, it would be impossible to make mainstream heterosexual pornography. Such pornography is the record of abuse, the fact that the woman gets paid for it at the end is irrelevant.
(more…)