I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I am November 22, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Body Image, objectification/commodification, pornography harms, quote of the day, sexual exploitation.2 comments
Pro-anorexia websites, which often display pictures of emaciated looking women to provide “thinspiration” to users and tips on how to fool doctors and falsify weight, outnumbered recovery sites five to one, she said.
“These sites are toxic and very dangerous. While some are run by girls with anorexia there is a clear link to pornography and evidence that there are people who get sexual gratification from grooming young girls and getting them to post pictures of themselves online.”
From this article (quoting Susan Ringwood, chief executive of beat, an eating disorder charity).
Porn Profits October 21, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in objectification/commodification, pornography harms, sexual exploitation.1 comment so far
Cath Elliott has blogged about the falling profits for the US porn industry, as a result of free on line content. This has resulted in porn performers having to accept lower pay for more dangerous sex acts.
It’s interesting how people’s attitudes suddenly change when they’re confronted by the reality of what goes on in the porn industry. Instead of the usual sanitised crap the industry itself tries to present to the world, and that we can see in this video with all the smiley clean-cut blokes trying to come off as respectable businessmen, Donohue comes face to face with an industry insider who’s prepared to tell the truth about what it’s all about. And it’s about shitty crappy parents trying to push their daughters into porn so they can make some money off their backs; it’s about girls and women being increasingly expected to do more and more extreme acts in return for less and less money; it’s about, as Shelley says, girls and women being expected to carry out acts with up to 75 men at a time.
Cath also posts this YouTube vid:
Statement by Members of XPALSS October 19, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Radical Feminism, objectification/commodification, sexual exploitation, violence against women.add a comment
Statement by members of:
Ex-Prostitutes Against Legislated Sexual Servitude
As women who have been prostituted in Vancouver and in the light of these facts:
- That current discourse on prostitution would have the public believe that it is normal work that simply needs to be better regulated
- That there is currently a proposal to open a legal brothel in Vancouver
- That this proposal is said to speak for current and former prostitutes of Vancouver
- That this proposal promises to make the lives of prostituted women “safer” at best
- That none of us have ever met a prostituted woman who would not leave the “trade” if she had a real chance to do so
- That we are women who have been abused on Canadian soil, by Canadian men while all levels of our Government did nothing to intervene.
- That some members of parliament are now advocating to legalize that abuse.
We want you to know:
We are women who have been harmed by prostitution. We believe that no amount of changing the conditions or the locations in which we were prostituted could ever have significantly reduced that harm. We experience the normalizing of that harm by calling it “work” insulting at best.
It matters very little to us whether we were prostituted on the streets or in the tolerated indoor venues and escort agencies of Vancouver. Our memories are not of the locations but of the men who consistently acted as though we were not quite human. We remember the countless other men and women who daily averted their eyes. We remember the utter lack of services or options that made any sense and the blatant denial of access to any kind of help or justice. We remember the need to “dumb down” our sense of entitlement to a better life so we could bear the one we were in. And we remember too well the numbing despair that came when we finally lost faith that there existed in this world anything decent and good.
We oppose any measure that would put more power in the hands of the men who abused us by telling them that they are legally entitled to do so. This proposal does not speak for us, would not have affected our level of safety in a way that matters, and would not have spared us the harm that is inherent in prostitution.
We are not impressed with lip service proposals to make prostituted women’s lives “safer”. Safer is not good enough. We consider it a violation of our human rights that we were abandoned to years of situations that fit the definition of sexual assault under current law. But not only is this violence not recorded, not prosecuted, not punished. We are now being told that we chose it.
We believe that, where there is public and political will, lives can be changed for the better. We do not believe the lie that prostitution is inevitable. We believe it can be abolished.
As hosts of the 2010 games, we want our city, our home, to refuse to take part in the global flesh market that is sex tourism and send a message to the world that women will not be sold in Vancouver.
We believe that every sexually exploited woman represents a life wasted. We are greatly saddened for the lives of women lost in prostitution, as well as the loss of the sum of the contributions that countless women still living would have made had they not been abandoned to sexual slavery.
We urge you all to refuse to believe that prostitution is normal or that it is an equal exchange ”between two consenting adults”. We urge you to oppose any attempt to introduce a legal brothel in Vancouver.
A State of Pre-Porn October 18, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Radical Feminism, objectification/commodification, pornography harms, quote of the day.add a comment
A brilliant quote of the day from Jill at I Blame the Patriarchy:
She grasps that, as a member of the sex class, she exists continuously in a state of pre-porn. She understands that she is only allowed to wear tank tops when she is “alone in [her] apartment.” That’s because, in public, she will be judged by Dude Nation’s occupying forces and their collaborators, all of whom have exacting (but ever-fluctuating) standards with which members of the sex class, who ceaselessly walk a fine line between virgin and whore, must comply.
McCain’s mistake is in momentarily forgetting this detail and imagining herself to enjoy fully-human status.
Turn your back on page 3 August 16, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in activism, objectification/commodification, quote of the day.add a comment
Another from the F-Word today. Francine Hoenderkamp has an article up explaining the background to her Turn your back on page 3 campaign, including her meeting with Clare Short.
“Can this be eradicated?” I immediately asked. Clare seemed positive that it could be, and surprisingly enough she thought even more so because of the current economic climate. She said that the press is under huge pressure at the moment, which leaves them with no choice but to assess their strengths and weaknesses. I was perplexed by this, because I thought surely Page 3 would be the last thing to go? Why, the drop in sales and thus loss of taxes would put such a dent in Gordon’s Brown’s pocket he may have to close a few hospital wings! Although, if it did ever come to this, maybe he could start with closing the breast augmentation wings, especially as it is now possible to get breast enlargements on the NHS if it is affecting a woman’s self-esteem… but isn’t Page 3 and its ilk part of the reason women have self-esteem issues in the first place?
Quote of the Day: How do I look in this? August 15, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in objectification/commodification, quote of the day.1 comment so far
Alex Brew, of the FemAdLib Kolektiv has a feature up at the F-Word, How do I look in this, on this, doing this, with this…?, challenging how subversive the use of pornography-influenced imagery in art really is.
The advantage (for the artist, gallery, dealer, media and audience) is that the female body is still being shown in galleries and might even be titillating. But what makes it remarkable, according to the critics, is that it now has the ability to provide a dose of analysis. But does it really? Did anyone else spot that parodying a porn movie by flirting ‘outrageously’ with the camera seems like a strange strategy given that porn stars are already highly valued for their fakery and flirtation?
To what degree would you have to exaggerate the sexualisation and commodification of women’s bodies to make it grotesque to the point of discomfort and create a shift in consciousness? The grotesque exaggeration of women’s sexual bodies became embedded in our culture over 30 years ago when breast implants, lip augmentation and labia trimming (not apparently the same as genital ‘mutilation’) became mainstream.
Quote of the Day: “The Weight of the Gaze” June 4, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Radical Feminism, objectification/commodification, pornography harms, quote of the day.add a comment
Feminamist has written powerfully about her experience of the sex industry, particularly in relation to how images of her have been used:
There have certainly been times in my life when I have felt violated by the gaze of others. Or made uncomfortable by the thought that images of my body have been used for sexual purposes. Why? No one was touching me. My body physically remained my own, I wasn’t actually violated, but I still felt abused, sometimes even in cases where I didn’t know at the time that my image was being used. I suspect that just like with physical violation, the tension is about consent and whether you have granted the viewer yours or not.
She also illustrates succinctly how men view the buying of sex/ualised services as buying an object to be used:
I was also thinking about how as a stripper, when I was doing a private dance for a punter, sometimes he would get annoyed if another man watched his show. Like he was being robbed, and I say that trying to hold back ironic laughter. He would often make a remark along the lines of, “I ought to go and get $20 off that guy to cover his share”. Of course I wasn’t being robbed, it was never me out of pocket when some arsehole watched a dance for free and nobody ever offered to go and retrieve some money on my behalf, but why would he? He had bought me and the experience was his, not mine, the body and its display his, not mine, the money his, not mine and the theft of it left him feeling violated.
Quote of the Day: Body Image May 31, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Body Image, objectification/commodification, pornography harms, quote of the day.add a comment
Another from PostSecret.
Also, from this Women’s eNews article:
Labiaplasty was once the domain of sex workers, nude entertainers, nude models, swimsuit models and the occasional woman who needed her labia reduced for medical reasons such as infection or pain. Not anymore. Doctors have reported that women from every walk of life and from ages 15 to 75 are having labia and cosmetic vaginal surgery.
Many doctors who perform the surgeries say while there are some women who opt for the surgery because they are unhappy or their labia has caused them physical discomfort, the bulk of the women getting this surgery are ultimately being pressured by men who want them to conform to a idea of beauty most often seen in the porn industry. Doctors say these women request the procedure because they are afraid of having “old looking” vaginas. Doctors Loftus and Young say feedback from male partners is the number one reason women request the surgery.
“The most common reason we hear is that they have had a negative comment made by a male sexual partner. Women are made to feel that they are not perfect the way they are and often it’s the partner that sets this off,” Loftus said.
“My feeling is that women who aren’t sex workers are getting this kind of thing because there’s pressure from someone who’s telling them they’re not perfect,” Young said. ‘There’s often pressure from a man who tells them they need it,” adding “I assume that their standards for labial beauty were set by a combination of the porn industry, sex-oriented magazines and the Internet.”
Commodification quote of the day May 30, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in objectification/commodification, quote of the day.add a comment
In creating their site “profile”, the young inevitably aim for maximum appeal, self-advertisement. They are under great pressure to be “marketing characters” (as the social psychologist Erich Fromm put it), seeing themselves and others as commodities. Using personality and looks, they aim to increase their value and to raise it by association with other high-value commodity-persons. There are high- and low-status networks to be linked into, creating winners and losers.
Oliver James, here.
20/20 Documentary on Prostitution April 16, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in articles/essays/commentary, objectification/commodification, sex industry advocates, sexual exploitation.1 comment so far
(also found via Quit the Compromise)
Some brief thoughts and observations:
Decriminalising the women themselves who are involved in prostitution is an urgent priority; the constant cycle of drug addiction, arrest and poverty serves no purpose and is basically just punishing women for being poor and desperate.
All of the women interviewed who were working on the streets were drug addicts, most of them had been sexually abused as children; they were working after dark and early in the morning, out in freezing cold temperatures.
As one of the talking heads pointed out, the men who use prostitutes are rarely punished, because they might be someone important, the women never are.
All of the women featured in the documentary were amazingly strong and wonderful human beings, especially the homeless/vulnerably housed drug addicted women who took care of each other like family (better than family), particularly the woman in her 40’s/50’s who took in a homeless teenage girl so she wouldn’t have to start prostituting to survive.
On the ‘menu’ at the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel: ‘salt and pepper party’ one black woman, one white woman; ‘Neapolitan’ one blonde, one brunette, one redhead. Please see this definition of objectification, particularly the point on fungibility.
While the men visiting the Ranch were apparently screened for sexual health, I’m willing to bet it’s no where near as invasive as the gynaecological exam the women working there have to undergo every two weeks.
When the women at the Ranch were talking candidly, none of them said they enjoyed the sex.
Many of the women, whether on the street or in the brothel, seemed to be suffering from emotional burn-out. This can happen in many jobs, for example being a doctor or nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, or a homicide cop, but these are considered worthy jobs, it’s harder to justify women in their early 20’s burning out in service to men’s penises and men’s egos.
This is what is so strange about the ‘sex positive’ response to prostitution. As far as I can tell, ‘sex positive’ means that anything involving sex – or rather patriarchal, male supremacist, subject verb object (man fucks woman) constructions of sex – cannot be bad; but, if you are the one it is being done to, sex means almost nothing.
The Pimps. We are shown footage of three women following behind their pimp silently and with their eyes downcast. This is what slavery looks like.
The two women interviewed who were under the control of their boyfriend/pimps while they prostituted only entered into prostitution because of their boyfriend/pimps, they did not choose to be prostitutes then fall into the hands of pimps.
The ECP and the UKNSWP tell us that pimps are just the partners of prostitutes. If you only recognise control and coercion at the exact moment violence or the threat of violence is used, you won’t see much control or coercion.