What’s entertaining about women in lingerie hanging by their necks on chains? What’s artful about images of drugged, unconscious women about to be sexually assaulted? Nothing. It’s misogyny, graphic and simple. Instead of artistic expression, political and social commentator Zerlina Maxwell described Kanye West’s music video for Monster as “a rape scenario set to a […]
Pornography will always be exploitative I recall a few years ago being interviewed (read ‘debated’) by two young men on an Adelaide radio station, on the issue of prostitution and trafficking. After cataloguing a litany of harm caused as a result of the global trade in the bodies of women and girls, the boys came […]
Cross ’em off your Christmas list Jingle bells, Christmas is here. Well, it was here around October according to most retailers! But that’s another blog entirely. So it’s time for you to fill the Christmas stocking, Christmas hamper or car boot with goodies again. Throughout the past year, Collective Shout has taken action to create […]
How we started. Where we’re heading It was a comment about my book, Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls, which sparked the birth of Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation. A contributor, Melbourne writer and blogger Tania Andrusiak (author of Adproofing Your Kids: Raising critical thinkers in a media-saturated world ) described […]
Latest child abuse book removed but others remain [trigger warning for survivors of child sexual assault] After a global protest and threats of boycott, on-line bookseller Amazon removed The Pedophile’s Guide to Love & Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct from its site yesterday. The book endorses sexual crimes against children. The E. book by […]
Ritualised aggression designed to keep women in their place Listen to this: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLh0RMpit1k[/youtube] Does it send shivers up your spine? Make you feel chilled? That’s what it did to me. The chanting pack, the ‘No means Yes’ mantra, the threatening insistent tone, the sense of ritualised aggression. It felt like something the Klu Klux Klan […]
Calvin Klein: selling the degradation of women (Trigger warning for survivors of sexual assault) “I cannot escape one simple fact: that if we continue to subject future generations of young men to great barrages of aggressive, misogynist, over-sexualized and violent imagery in pornography, movies, computer games and advertising, we will continue to see the rates […]
Published today on Sexism: alive and well in Australia Virginia Haussegger is right to lament the status of women in other countries and the brutalities and indignities they suffer daily. But attitudes towards women in our own so-called liberated western democracy desperately need an overhaul as well. While I frequently write about the objectification of […]
Whether it hurts the woman or not, the men don’t care The sex industry done well at spinning prostitution as a positive good for all involved. This piece in The Irish Times cuts through the gloss and shows what life is like for many prostituted women (and there’s no reason to believe these experiences are […]
The brutalisation of girls In the past couple of weeks I’ve met or heard from young girls whose experiences give further disturbing insight into just how bad things are for girls right now. A 12-year-old girl approached me after I addressed the question ‘Are girls being treeated as sex objects?’ before an audience in Sydney’s […]
Men are stereotyped too Came across this father’s day ad in The Weekend Australia magazine. Right here we have a snapshot of the stereotypes that limit men and contribute to socialising them into standard – and often harmful – ways of behaving. The ad spruiks six SBS DVDs for dad. The first is ‘The Killing’, the second […]
The latest in eroticised violence in advertising There’s no shortage of material documenting the mind numbing levels of violence against women and girls in the world. This blog is in many ways a testament to that, documenting the treatment of women and girls in the 21st century, lest we forget the scale of human rights […]
