Feh Muh Nist

[dreamer_easy]

In Sydney, hundreds of men are being raped each year, often after their drinks have been spiked.

In New South Wales, rape law reform continues: "Under NSW's new laws, a person can be found guilty of sexual assault if they did not make "reasonable" efforts to establish the other person had consented voluntarily without the influence of intoxication, coercion or threats... the onus would now be on the accused to show he had reasonable grounds to believe the alleged victim had consented."

In Australia's neighbour Indonesia, Female Genital Mutilation continues.

And in another neighbouring country, Malaysia, where abortion is illegal and therefore prohibitively expensive, women are using abortion pills, despite concern about risk.

In the US, Native American women who are raped lack crisis services and justice; Amnesty International is calling on the government to fully fund the Violence Against Women Act to redress this, and ask to you write the White House an email.

Anne Manne discusses the intersection between pornography and sexual violence.

Comments

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

On the subject of sexualizing small girls, Woolworths in the UK have been marketing a bed intended for 6-year-old girls under the name of 'Lolita'.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3285597.ece

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Reading that last article, it strikes me that the missing factors are compassion and critical thinking. That's what potentially makes readers of porn different from cats faced with uncovered meat. In a world where information is distributed freely, it's more important than ever that the recipients of the information learn to think about the information that they receive.

In this case, the audience that consumes mainstream porn needs to remind itself, just as if they were watching any other kind of fiction, 'This is not real, and real life doesn't work this way.' Maybe when boys who go out and humiliate a girl on tape, we're seeing the intersection of two failures of their upbringing: (1) these are the kids whose parents never said 'That's pretend, it's not really happening' when something violent happened on prime-time TV drama, and (2) these are the kids whose parents never told them 'Think about how someone feels when you do things to them'. If women in porn happily accept anything thrown at them, that doesn't mean real women are the same. This is scripted, these are actors, the people in it are being paid.

(I'm aware that sometimes women who act in porn are ordered to do things outside of their contract that they never agreed to, or have to put up with otherwise atrocious working conditions. This is a case for compassion in a different direction, like buying fair-trade coffee or cruelty-free cosmetics.)

Having said that, compassion and critical thinking are things that don't seem to be 'teachable' unless someone is raised on them from a very young age. (Am I being overly cynical, or is there some kind of neurological-learning-thing at play here, like when kids don't learn language early enough and their brains lose the capability to learn it?) Is there an alternative to censorship if compassion and critical thinking can't be taught effectively?

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Footnote to paragraph 2: this is similar to kids who get killed while trying to reenact 'pro wrestling' moves. There's no acknowledgement that what they saw on TV might have been faked, and no ability to think ahead for themselves and realise that what they're about to do could have bad results.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Man, it's like they never grew out of the hiding behind the sofa phase - of not being able to tell TV from reality.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Yeah... so in either case, will we do more good by censoring the fiction, or by punishing the actual criminals?

My generation grew up watching stuff like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and hearing about kids getting hurt acting out Power Ranger fight scenes. As grownups, we're getting sick of hearing that TV 'makes' us do these things, because it didn't happen to most of us. I think there's a generation of parents coming up that will be better at turning off the TV and/or talking to their kids about what they see on it, and making them into healthy consumers of fiction.

When it's adults or teenagers acting this stuff out, at an age when they should know better, you can't really point a finger at parents. Or can you? Are the boys who coerced a girl into being humiliated on camera just kids who managed, out of sheer luck, to survive into puberty without getting hurt imitating action movies? They didn't learn the lesson earlier, and now they're old enough to be interested in reenacting fictional sex without considering the consequences.