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).
The Rise in Cosmetic Vaginal Surgery November 20, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Body Image, pornography harms, quote of the day.1 comment so far
From an article in today’s Guardian:
Those asking for this surgery on the NHS, Creighton says, “can be very young – sometimes as young as 10 or 11. Mostly they’re in their late teens or early 20s. There are two pairs of labia: the fat pads on each side and the thinner, slightly more frilly skin on the inside. The ideal these women want is not to be able to see their labia minora at all. That is the image from porno-graphy and magazines. Because of shaving and fashions in underwear, this part of the body is more visible now. And everyone is more exposed to these images of a ‘perfect’ body, so people feel pressured to look a certain way.” She argues that women are aiming for “a certain genital appearance that used to be an obligation only for some glamour models”. The report warns of a culture where a “homogenised, pre-pubescent genital appearance” is therefore being perceived as the norm.
As with any surgery, labiaplasty is potentially risky. Creighton says that there have been no studies into the after-effects or possible complications of labiaplasty, nor has there been any research into the impact on childbirth: she suggests that women who opt for this procedure might experience the same problems while giving birth as women who have undergone ritualistic female genital mutilations. Allison Henry, a US woman who had her labia reduced after a vaginal prolapse, recently wrote that the operation “was brutal. All [the] patients who say it doesn’t hurt are lying. I’d rather get my teeth pulled out than do that again.” In Anna’s case, she was unable to walk for two days after the operation, and was in recovery for six weeks.
One thing we have noticed is that people will have it done and then come back to have more taken off.
Quote of the day: IBTP archive November 9, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Radical Feminism, bin the bunny, pornography harms, pro-sex anti-porn, quote of the day.add a comment
Take, for example, that, despite the Rollergirls’ impressive skaterly talents, the “sport” is only nominally about skating. You have already guessed what it’s actually about, but I’ll tell you anyway: sex. That’s right, sex, only not real sex, such as the kind we could all be having if Hugh Hefner hadn’t ruined it for everybody, but phony sex as defined by the horndog ideology of the pornocracy. The roller derby is an example of what you might, if you were me, call “proto-porn”—a non-penetrative, G-rated, but nevertheless two-dimensional, stereotypical, and bogus picture of female sexuality generated from an amorphous plasma of cultural misogyny. It’s kindergarten burlesque.
From this post.
Quote of the day: Cultural Transmission November 4, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in pornography harms, quote of the day, sexual exploitation, violence against women.add a comment
From this post at Reclusive Leftist:
The whole premise — that TV and movies and records and pornography have no effect on reality — is just preposterous. Humans are cultural animals. TV/movies/records/pornography are a means of cultural transmission, just like any other medium or form of communication. Nowadays, in fact, these are our primary means of cultural transmission.
And everybody knows that. That’s why people object to racist depictions or homophobia or even the absence of positive onscreen role models for minorities. Because all that’s part of our cultural transmission, part of how we share and exchange and teach values and ideas.
This knowledge mysteriously evaporates, however, when the subject is something dear to one’s heart — like pornography or violence or bimbotastic portrayals of women. Then, magically, the movies and porn are said to exist in some kind of otherworld vacuum: no cultural transmission, no values, no impact whatsoever on the humans consuming. It’s fucking ludicrous.
Quote of the Day: Rapists’ Utopia November 1, 2009
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Interesting essay up at The Thinking Southerner, titled ‘If I Were a Rapist …’ (discovered as she links to us in the essay), in which the writer examines rape culture.
In my rapist’s utopia, I’d make sure that women’s bodies were used to sell EVERYTHING, and that half-dressed women in sexy poses, airbrushed and photoshopped to perfection, were on the covers of almost all the magazines in the stores. Then women would compare their bodies to the women they’re seeing on the magazines and TV commercials and movies, and realize they could never measure up. Thin, beautiful women might work excessively at staying thin and “beautiful”– doing everything they could to look like the women in the media, hoping to gain some sort of acceptance, while all along learning to use their beauty and superficial sexuality to make gains in life, win attention, and make life easier. Then they’d come to view themselves not as whole women, competent and with great potential, but as shells to be polished and presented, whose worth depends completely on a specific set of ephemeral physical qualities that may or may not last through life. I’d make sure that women who don’t fit that narrow definition of socially approved physical “beauty” doubt themselves, and constantly think that nobody could ever find them sexy, so that when they are offered less than ideal sexual experiences that are degrading, devastating, or dismissive, they’ll readily accept, having been taught that to be found sexy and attractive is an ideal to aspire to in and of itself, with or without the empowerment that comes from having your sexuality honored by a caring and attentive partner. And I’d definitely want children to see these media images from a young age, so that little girls learn that their value comes from their ability to use their sexuality, and little boys learn that women are objects to be used.
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:
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.
Africa goes Hardcore August 31, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in pornography harms.1 comment so far
The maker of the documentary mentioned below has a CiF piece up, highlighting the shocking situation he observed in Ghana:
The village has no electricity, but that doesn’t stop a generator from being wheeled in, turning a mud hut into an impromptu porn cinema – and turning some young men into rapists, with villagers relating chilling stories of assaults taking place straight after the film’s end. In the nearest city, other young men are buying bootlegs copies of the almost always condom-free LA-made porn – copying directly what they see and contracting HIV. The head of the country’s Aids commission says porn risks destroying all the achievements they’ve made. It’s a timebomb, he says.
The concerns aren’t theoretical – I met young fathers with HIV whose only sex education came from LA, women living in the villages subject to post-screening abuse, and even a shy teenage virgin who has written to a porn outfit in California asking to star in their films (his return address was care of the local church in Accra).
Unfortunately, his ’solution’ is ‘corporate responsibility’: getting all the multinational companies that make huge profits from porn to insist on condom use. What he misses is that since most of the porn consumed in Africa is going to be free clips or boot-leg copies, African ‘consumers’ don’t matter in terms of profit. As LA pornographers have already made abundantly clear, demand from paying (ie Western) consumers is for no condoms. The pornographers have also made it abundantly clear that if anyone does attempt to police the industry, they will go underground and do it anyway, and worse.
The porn producers aren’t deliberately pushing their products into Africa. But the tide of black market DVDs on sale at street markets and hardcore clips viewable at internet cafes is almost unstoppable. Surely this multibillion-dollar industry needs to take some responsibility for the human costs?
It’s staggeringly nieve, to imagine that either multinationals or pornographers give a shit about anything other than their profits.
And as one of the commentators over at CiF points out, all this is doing is asking men to use condoms when they commit rape, he doesn’t seem to care so much about the rape, only that men are “copying directly what they see and contracting HIV” – he doesn’t even mention that they will also be passing HIV on to the women and girls they rape.
Hardcore Profits docu on BBC2 tonight August 31, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in pornography harms.2 comments
Hardcore Profits
10pm, BBC2
The conventional wisdom that sex sells has never looked less disputable than in the internet age: the pornography business contributes up to $20bn to the US economy annually, and by some estimates makes more money than Hollywood. Tim Samuels’ two-parter explains how pervasive the porn economy has become. Its cultural impact is also colossal, as Samuel discovers in Ghana, where a local fondness for Californian hardcore is undermining efforts to promote condom use.
Anti-porn quote of the day August 29, 2009
Posted by antiplondon in Radical Feminism, pornography harms, pro-sex anti-porn, quote of the day.add a comment
Alright, dude, we get it: widespread porn consumption among teenagers has led to an expectation among young men that sex ought to mimic porn, and hence that women ought to submit to all manner of the degrading and potentially harmful acts that mainstream porn depicts. That’s fucking terrible news, as us anti-porn feminists have been saying all along.
From Nine Deuce: This must be one of those “eye of the beholder” things. She is reading misogynist crap so you don’t have to.
