Feminist Roundup
This looks cute, doesn’t it – but look closely and think about what it is. It’s a baby girl dressed up like a woman advertising lingerie. She can’t walk or talk or feed herself, but that’s okay, because she looks fabulous in high heels and pearls! Source: www.peeweepumps.com
This fortnight’s feminist roundup focuses on issues that affect girls and women of all ages – the proliferation of pornography and its ready availability to young children, and the insidious sexualisation of girls in all forms of media.
We begin with an article documenting negative responses to an online store selling high-heeled shoes for infant girls. Seriously, how much more overt sexualisation of girls will society tolerate before we start holding these advertisers and their products accountable? We, quite rightly, deplore the sexual exploitation of children. Can we really turn a blind eye to images of semi-naked infant girls adorned with satin, lace and pearls, reclining on couches wearing mini leopard skin pumps? I think we know which individuals would find those images the most interesting, and it’s not women looking for something pretty for their little girl.
Read more at -http://www.collectiveshout.org/sexualisation_backlash_over_peewee_pumps_high_heels_for_babies?
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Next up is a recent article in The Age newspaper reporting a Melbourne Catholic school’s investigation into pornography access by students whilst on campus. It appears the students were using school iPads to view pornographic material at break times.
Read more at – http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/primaryaged-children-accessed-pornography-at-school-20150615-ghok2a.html
The world wide web has been a boon to modern society in many ways – promoting online trading and making research a doddle for students, for example. Back in the old days, everyone had to shop in person or wait weeks for a mail order item to arrive, and students had to trawl through library catalogues, and scheme and connive and knock their classmates out of the way to get to the best books.
And if porn was your thing, you had to be 18 to buy your fix in a sealed cover from the paltry selection at the local newsagent. Or sneak into an unmarked, dimly lit store in a seedy part of town and take your purchases away in a brown paper bag. Or order stuff from a place in the ACT. And it was pretty tame by today’s standards.
Today, we have at least two generations of young people – with more to come – that have ready access to the most appalling pornography imaginable. Academia is catching up, and studying the effect of this phenomenon on young people’s ideas about sexuality and human relationships, and the results are not positive. But how could they be?
Hopefully, commonsense tells us that impressionable boys and girls viewing images of hairless compliant women with huge breasts being dominated and subjected to all manner of sexual abuse by men is not conducive to the development of respectful, consensual adult sexual relationships. Women don’t really look like they do in porn videos – they grow body hair and their breasts sag. And they’re not all huge fans of rough sex or anal sex or having semen sprayed on their faces (and let’s face it, that is by no means the worst of what can be seen in porn today). How can we teach boys to value and respect women, and girls to value themselves when pornography has become normalised, if only because of its ubiquitous presence in modern life?
It’s a massive task now for educators to counter the ‘sex education’ that young people are getting via online porn. In the recently published Handbook of Children and Youth Studies, Lyn Harrison and Debbie Ollis of Deakin University, Melbourne contributed a chapter titled ‘Young People, Pleasure and the Normalization of Pornography: Sexual Health and Well-Being in a Time of Proliferation?’. They said –
‘Many young people are learning what sex looks like from what they – or their partner or peers – observe in pornography. Significantly, pornography is normalizing sex acts that most women do not enjoy and may experience as degrading, painful or violating. This raises serious implications for young peoples’ capacity to develop a sexuality that incorporates mutual pleasure, respect, and negotiation of free and full consent……Research into the effects of pornography consumption provides reliable evidence that exposure to pornography increases aggressive attitudes and behaviour towards women for some viewers……Pornography consumption also has been found to be associated with sexual health risk taking and can impact negatively on body image and sense of self……and as such is a serious health and well-being issue, particularly for young women……as sexuality educators, our concern is the normalization of pornography and its constant portrayal of women as sex objects, the increasing violence against women in so-called mainstream pornography, the early initiation into pornography, and the skewed view of human sexuality that it represents’ (pp. 155-156).
