It’s The Patriarchy, Stupid

The BBC reported yesterday on a study conducted for the NSPCC by King’s College, London, the Institute of Education, and the London School of Economics. Below are highlights from the article:

Teenage girls are coming under increasing pressure to text and email sexually explicit pictures of themselves, a report suggests.

The report, commissioned by the NSPCC, suggests the demands come from peers rather than from adults or strangers.

[…]

Jon Brown, head of the sexual abuse programme at the NSPCC, said the revelations were disturbing.

“What’s most striking about this research is that many young people seem to accept all this as part of life. But it can be another layer of sexual abuse and, although most children will not be aware, it is illegal.”

[…]

The in-depth interviews with 35 teenagers at two London schools found that girls as young as 11 were being asked to send “special photos” to boys who they knew.

In some cases, the girls had to write a name in black marker pen on a part of their body to show it was the “property” of a certain boy.

The teenagers also faced a “barrage” of messages from boys demanding for intercourse or oral sex.

“Even while we were interviewing them they were being bombarded with these messages,” said lead researcher Jessica Ringrose, from the Institute of Education.

The BBC article contains a link to the report. I don’t have time to read through it right now, but just scanning through the pages, several things have leapt out. First is the “top messages from the evidence” (pages 7 and 8), which are, in summary:

1. Threat from peers.
2. Sexting is often coercive.
3. Girls most adversely affected.
4. Technology amplifies the problem.
5. Sexting reveals wider sexual pressures.
6. Ever younger children affected.
7. Sexting practices are culturally specific.
8. More support and resources vital.

(From page 28:)

One of the key findings of this research highlights the extent to which gendered power relations saturate the young people’s lives. No understanding of sexting would be complete without an appreciation of the extent to which an often completely normalised sexism constitutes the context for all relationships – both on and off-line. As researchers going into the schools to meet with young people, we were distressed by the levels of sexist abuse and physical harassment – even violence – to which the girls were subject on a regular basis. More than this, we were struck by the way in which it is entirely taken for granted by both girls and boys – even when the same behaviours would be grounds for dismissal in other settings and among adults (e.g. in the workplace) or for arrest and prosecution if they happened in public space.

Perhaps the broadest level at which sexism operates in the young people’s lives is to be found in the deeply rooted notion that girls and young women’s bodies are somehow the property of boys and young men. As we shall show later, this took on vivid forms in one of the most common practices of sexting in which boys solicited, and girls sent, photographic images of themselves or parts of themselves in which a boy’s name had been written in black marker pen. Significant numbers of these images were circulating in the period of this research, with some boys claiming to have up to 30 pictures of different girls on their phones. A typical example would be for a young woman to send a shot of her naked breasts, squeezed together, with the caption ‘Jason owns me’ scrawled prominently across part of her cleavage.

The report also covers porn use (by boys) and how that shapes the harassment inflicted on girls:

(From page 31:)

Boys say stuff like, ‘Can I butt in your face?’ and you just like, ‘Can you do what?’ ‘What do you mean’ and they are like, ‘yeah, can I butt in your eye?’ ‘No, why would I even’ Who is going to sit there in their right mind and say yeah, go ahead, ejaculate in my eye? What could that help? Like that is not even normal like seriously, but I have literally sat down with a boy and said, ‘I need to literally understand what you guys get out of porn?’ I have actually sat down with a boy and said ‘Put it on, let’s watch it yeah’ (Monique, 15, School One)

(From page 40:)

Another 15 year old girl said she thought that porn was shaping boys’ imaginations and sexual demands, and also that boys had no interest in girls’ pleasure. She went on to explain how she thought this worked: how a form of emotional blackmail was used to get girls to do things for their boyfriends.

Post-modern ‘sex positive’ ‘feminism’ wants to dismiss concerns over the sexualisation of girls and young women as ‘prudishness’ and ‘anti-sex’; post-modern ‘feminism’ doesn’t want us to recognise the systematic, structural harassment of women and girls by men and boys, and the part pornography and the ever-expanding sex industry plays in reinforcing this male supremacism (apparently, it’s seeing that this happens that causes the harm, because our seeing shatters the illusion of ’empowerment’ that is so important to sex pozzer funfems).