Women's Views on News |
- Which of these women has changed the UK?
- Time to fight against revenge porn
- ‘Porn on the brain’ misses the point
| Which of these women has changed the UK? Posted: 09 Oct 2013 08:33 AM PDT
Media Diversity UK wants you to vote to find out which 8 of a list of 134 notable women of colour you think have changed the UK. They have set up a poll listing the 134 women, and the eight women who voters choose will be revealed at a Media Diversity UK event in November. The women on the list are all successful in their fields, and all have made a difference. You can only vote once – so take time to research your entry! You can find their bios and some information about each one of them here. The bios are courtesy of Power List 2013, Britain's 100 Most Influential Black People; the I'm Possible website and the 100 Great Black Britons project. Among those on the list are: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Ugandan-born British journalist and author; Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of KidsCompany and Place2be; Carlene Firmin, principal policy advisor to the office of the children's commissioner; Hope Powell, head coach of England Women football and capped 66 times; Jessica Ennis, Olympic gold-medallist; Mrs Justice Dobbs, high court judge; Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, space scientist; Reverend Rose Huskin-Wilkin, chaplain to the House of Commons; Composer Shirley Thompson; Novelist Zadie Smith; Historian Charmaine Simpson; Jasvindar Sanghera, campaigner for the rights of those facing forced marriage and honour-based abuse; and Academic Sara Ahmed. Click here to see the full list. For the direct link to the poll, click here. The Twitter hashtag is #EightWomen Voting ends on 17 October. Media Diversity UK was set up earlier this year, to tackle the lack of diversity in UK media.  |
| Time to fight against revenge porn Posted: 09 Oct 2013 04:24 AM PDT
Whether it involves tears, recriminations or resignation, breaking-up is hard to do. It's hard enough without having to worry about your ex posting pictures of you naked online. Yet that's exactly what hundreds, if not thousands, of women have had to contend with as the internet has made the disgruntled ex that little bit more dangerous. This so-called 'revenge porn' is the publication of sexually explicit pictures or videos, posted without the person's permission and with the intention to hurt or humiliate. Pictures are usually posted by an ex and so far revenge porn has tended to be men posting images of women. Whole websites have been dedicated to helping exes propagate naked images of former lovers. The now discontinued isanyoneup website managed to sink to new depths of depravity as it included a woman's full name, profession and city next to the image. This meant that a quick google search of the woman's name, say by a prospective employer, would yield the naked photo. Hello humiliation and goodbye job. Revenge porn goes well beyond the embarrassment of someone seeing you naked. It exposes a private and sexual moment and exposes it for all to see and criticise. There is a strong slut-shaming component to this practice: women are being humiliated online because they are caught in a sexual act rather than just because of the nudity itself. Think of the criticism hurled at Tulisa when her ex-boyfriend released a sex tape. She was victim of a heinous abuse of trust, yet most of the criticism was directed at her. You don’t have to be a celebrity to suffer. This summer, a 17 year-old who was photographed mid sex act at an Eminem concert. The photo was published, republished, tweeted and retweeted until there was even a hashtag dedicated to her. Thousands of commenters poured vitriol and on scorn her, while the man in the photo was deemed a 'legend'. The 17 year-old was so distraught she had to be sedated in hospital. The age-old double-standard prevails, that sex is something a man should be proud of and a women ashamed. And this double-standard helps make revenge porn truly damaging to women’s lives. Indeed the effects of revenge porn, whether perpetrated by an ex or a stranger, have ramifications far beyond embarrassment and humiliation. Dr Hollie Jacobs, founder of the US campaign End Revenge Porn, suffered the fallout from revenge porn for more than three years. She had to legally change her name, change jobs and was even restricted from publishing in her field. Revenge porn is also about power and abuse: men in existing relationships have used the threat of posting intimate photos to try and control their partners. Nikki Yeagar's ex tried to blackmail her into sex with a naked photo he had of her. In the end she didn't cave and he posted the photo, though luckily she couldn't be identified in it. A particular sorry side to the rise of revenge porn has been the extent to which victims continue to be blamed. The criticism should be directed at the perpetrator who abused trust and set out to harm, not at the person who shared an intimate moment with someone they trusted at the time. Yet perhaps the tide is turning. California Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a bill that criminalises the publication of pornographic content without the person's permission, and with the intent of causing nuisance or distress. Any publication is punishable by six months in prison or a USD6000 fine. Legislators in New York have submitted a similar bill. The law is not perfect; for example it doesn't cover 'selfies' so wouldn't apply to photos received by the ex. The legislation also fails to target the revenge porn websites that create an audience for these images and profit from people's pain. Nevertheless, the law is a welcome move in the right direction. Will the UK follow suit? Scottish Women's Aid has become the first UK group to campaign for a strengthening of laws to combat revenge porn. Scottish Women's Aid strategy against revenge porn is three-fold: as well as working to change laws they raise awareness around existing laws so that victims can have recourse to justice. Their website also offers a space for women to share their stories and access support networks. Finally, their work with practitioners and policymakers around sex education aims to promote healthy relationships to discourage people from posting revenge porn in the first place. What can you do to help? You can sign an international petition to show your support and submit a message of support to women who have been victims. These messages feature on Scottish Women’s Aid Flickr wall. Women’s Aid also encourages talking and debating this issue: if change is to be effected we don’t just need to change laws, we need to change attitudes.  |
| ‘Porn on the brain’ misses the point Posted: 09 Oct 2013 01:09 AM PDT
The Channel claims that its series of programmes will ‘reclaim sex from the airbrushed, surgically-enhanced, depliated, gymnastic fantasies and celebrate the joy of real sex’. So, Channel 4 is going to tell us how to ‘do sex’ properly and remind us that sweaty, awkward, hairy and sometimes boring sex is OK? Well, OK then. My scepticism is not to say that sex, sexuality and the impact of cultural assumptions about, and depictions of, sex aren’t conversations worth having. They are. I’m just not sure this is the way to do it. I say this largely because other episodes in the season – ‘Date my Porn Star’; ‘The Week Women Came’; ‘The Golden Rules of Porn’; ‘Diary of a Teenage Virgin’ – read like the wayward love child of the now blessedly defunct More! magazine and Channel 5′s Friday evening schedule. So, I approached ‘Porn on the Brain‘ with a cautionary ambivalence. The show aimed to investigate the effect of pornography on teenagers’ brains, and the impact porn has on their lives. A worthy subject, but one for which some of the real issues – bodily integrity, violence against women and girls, the attitudinal and behavioural affects of unfiltered graphic imagery – are lost amidst a mire of tabloid scaremongering and the decrying of perceived paternalism. I had a vague recollection that the presenter Martin Daubney, former editor of Loaded magazine, had performed some kind of evangelical about-face, renouncing the ‘soft porn’ of a magazine he once fiercely defended. I also remember this had something to do with becoming a father, or wanting a continued career in the media without the stench of casual objectification clinging to his suit jacket. One of the two. I’m not adverse to second acts; I admit to experiencing the vicarious thrill of seeing the once binned-off force their way back into popular culture. Yet I struggle to buy Daubney’s claims of blind ignorance to the nature and effect of the magazine he steered to the lofty heights of a single issue ’200 nipple count’. Apparently ‘it never occurred to us that this was porn’. Maybe when your day is compartmentalised alongside body parts; an erect nipple with morning coffee, lunch next to an impossibly smooth arse, the mundanity bleeds the scenes of any sexuality and you forget what the whole looks like, and the message it creates. Or maybe you give yourself away with reflections on your burgeoning epiphany such as this: ’Some of the Loaded models had children. I’d think ‘what is your kid going to think of you when he’s old enough to understand Mummy used to get her boobs out for a living?”’ However, Daubney did seem genuinely concerned about the pernicious effects of porn and young children, and was quite legitimately alarmed by information from the Children’s Commissioner that children are exposed to pornography by the age of ten. A survey commissioned by the programme revealed that one fifth of boys surveyed were ‘dependent on porn’. This may have benefitted from some clarification on the definition of ‘dependent’, but instead we were introduced to a self-confessed teenage porn addict with the gloriously incidental name of Calum Wrist. Calum watches porn whenever he has spare time, sometimes up to 28 times per day. Although it was difficult to discern at times whether it was ‘watching porn’ or ‘masturbating’ that Calum was actually referring to as the meaning of the two acts had seemingly elided, typified by Calum’s assertion that if he hasn’t got access to porn he will ‘visualise it’. Calum certainly seemed to watch porn compulsively and it felt as if a salient point was being reached when he was asked how this perpetual pornography consumption affected his sexual relationships with ‘real girls’. His responses were unsurprising; the compartmentalisation of body parts; the objectification; the disappointment that he can’t have sex like a porn star, with that blame displaced onto the ‘real girls’ who ‘don’t have confidence’; the problematic schism between ‘real girls’ and porn stars. The overall effect though, rather than concern that a young man talks of women in this way and what the implications of this may be culturally, socially and psychologically, was an underlying assumption that porn was ruining Calum’s ability to have sex in real life. The message seemed to be that porn was stopping Calum from ‘enjoying women’ the way he should, which whiffed vaguely and disappointingly of sexual entitlement. I also wondered where the voices of these ‘real girls’ Calum is so desperate to connect with were. Why do we not hear how porn makes young girls feel, and whether they feel the weight of pornification, or feel that their sexual relationships or cultural and social standing are diminished by the prevalence of pornography? I wanted to hear their voices, and hear more about studies such as the recent NSPCC survey which explored how porn is infiltrating and dictating young people’s sex education and relationships. I wanted to hear about the possible links between pornography and sexual coercion, about sexual bullying in schools, and about violence within teen relationships. Somehow the programme didn’t seem to think this was important. All it offered on this front was a brief allusion to the sheer inadequacy of sex education in schools; a task Daubney felt was forced onto parents. He concluded that parents were going to have to have the ‘porn chat’ with their children, even though it was ‘going to be shit’: right to the end the program couldn’t shake the laddish air clinging to Daubney’s colloquy and was all the worse for it. The experiment conducted by the programme in which the brains of ‘heavy’ porn users were analysed against ‘healthy men’ – supposedly to determine whether pornography was addictive – proved little beyond the fact heavy porn users got more excited by porn. This is unfortunately an experiment I can no longer give any credence to. Not because I know the damnedest thing about neuroscience, but because I foolishly read an article in which Daubney described some of the the images shown to the subjects within the experiment which included ‘images known to excite all men, such as bundles of £50 notes and extreme sports in action’. I’m sorry? Money and extreme sports are known to universally excite men? Well, I conducted a similar experiment, with the scientific rigour of asking only my partner, and I can conclusively say that he does not get his rocks off to stills of white water rafting. And even though Daubney took the experiment as conclusive proof of porn’s inherently addictive nature, he did little with this notion other than to intone the circular argument that being addicted to porn is damaging because addiction is damaging. According to Daubney, giving children access to pornography is ‘like leaving heroin lying around the house’. Such breathless hyperbole and ill-proportioned scaremongering felt as if the Daily Mail had been made flesh but added little to a necessary debate about what pornography means for gender relations. For all its pretensions towards science, the programme was continually beset by the perils of anecdote, supposition and small-scale samples. The overall approach was less empirical than attitudinal, which is perfectly fine, as it is pornography’s effect on attitudes towards women and girls that I am most interested in. Yet, it was only after half an hour that Daubney touched upon a pertinent issue, albeit framed negatively. Speaking to John Woods, a psychotherapist who treats sex offenders, he suggested that "there is no direct proof…that watching violent porn in itself creates acts of violence towards women" to which Woods replied that there was no proof, but that "clinically, it is clear there is a connection". Such wonky, Brass Eye-inflected science was ripe for ridicule in the press but this is a man who has seen a huge spike in offenders using online porn. It may not be quantifiable and links are very hard to prove but I believe there is a valid concern there, and one worth exploring, despite the constant rebuttals of lack of evidence, or scaremongering, or puritanism. I also believe that women should be able to have a say in how pornography makes them feel, and how their lives and sex lives are informed by or imbued with the pornographic. This is part of a campaign for real sex. There doesn’t seem anything ‘real’ about only hearing half the story, especially when that story denigrates porn performers to the realms of the ‘not real’, running us into the dangerous territory of the nice and the nasty; of who does and who does not deserve respect. Daubney, for all the self-proclaimed liberalism, displays a starkly conservative attitude towards sexual relationships, proselyting that ‘you can’t have sex unless you love the other person, otherwise it isn’t real sex’. No, Martin, ‘real sex’ is about consent, trust, mutual respect, safety and bodily integrity. It can sometimes be about love, but you don’t get to choose which one is more real.  |
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