Overtly sexualised videos on the web? How about challenging overtly sexualised images everywhere else?
While I'm delighted that there is a campaign to limit sexualised content on the internet, I also think the reason, the message has been lost.
We should, bilaterally, be teaching children and young adults what is wrong with sexualised images of people, predominately women. This isn't sexist, but you rarely see Bella magazine with a naked man on the front cupping his genitalia as an incentive to buy the magazine.
Turning the female form into a commodity to be admired and purchased is an abominable social evolution and videos of Rhianna gyrating, or Brittany Spears in bondage gear encourage what is becoming a systemic acceptance of such behaviour.
Having been sparred by a friend who said 'I think pole dancing can be a legitimate career choice', I am quite voracious on the subject. The sexualisation of humans is an ugly trait in society and one that has become virulent on the internet.
Limiting access to the sites is one way to counter this, but I believe it is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Children need consistent messages about why it is wrong, and until these are in place, we are simply making the temptation more alluring in it's exclusivity.
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Oh Kelly, like all with good intentions, what a Pandora's Box you have opened........
ReplyDeleteWhat you are suggesting is but a form of censorship and limitations on how any company can market it's goods. Where is parental control in all that you propose?
Sex and the female form has been used for ages to sell products and yet it seems only those of the female gender complain. Yet the female form is used to sell clothing and cosmetics - where is the difference? I see nor hear any complaints on those particular fronts. Are not men used to sell aftershave and the ad aimed at the female market? Are men complaining about this, citing sexualisation of their kind? Do not men pose in 'Y' fronts for male underwear, exhibiting what purports to be large 'lunch-boxes', adverts aimed at the female market?
Why should a clever and witty advertisement be banned because it is suggestive? Be it sex, alcohol or smoking, what you are suggesting is surely a control on how someone runs their business?
Not that I have seen it, but I understand an ad is running on tv at present comparing two brands of tea, which is bought because the woman's husband likes both. After a pause she states that she doesn't like tea and states she like gin. That advert features both a woman and alcohol, which in your book should be banned. Yet who are you to believe you have the right to limit how someone conducts their commercial business? If people find this particular ad offensive then surely they will not buy the product? Market forces and personal choice?
Taking the point about constraints on running a private business, consider the smoking ban. Whether one agrees with smoking or not, is it not the choice of the publican whether he caters for one or the other, or both? What right has government or any pressure group, or individual like yourself to impose conditions on someone else's source of income?
Rather than control, should it not be parents that explain a balanced view to their children? By what right does the state have a duty to intervene and demand a certain course of behaviour? Or are we not free any longer to make up our own minds as to how we, as parents, can behave and instruct our children?
Perhaps you need to return to the drawing board?
David, I think the problem here is you are coming to my blog fairly late in to my feminist debates - rather than repeat myself I suggest you have a decko at the Feminism tag search
ReplyDeletehttp://disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com/search/label/feminsim
I would suggest you are seeing striking generalisations in my argument which simply aren't there - the presence of a woman doesnt offend me, but the representation of a woman who exists to serve a man does. Therefore, yes, I would find that offensive. The ACA is very aware of me, don't worry!
Just having a quick run through - this http://disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com/2009/02/feminism-and-pornography.html
http://disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com/2010/12/footsteps-of-feminism-in-2011.html
and this;
http://disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com/2011/02/perfect-advert-and-scathing-attack-on.html
should give you a synopsis of my opinion without me needing to repeat myself relentlessly.
And if my own opinion on the sexualisation of women is not enough, try Nina Power's The One Dimensional Woman, or http://www.antipornmen.org/ or UK Feminista, or the myriad of other feminist cause based campaigns out there.
The power of advertising has turned women into commodoties and sexualised videos further entrench this. I cannot believe that you would genuinely condone the representative structural ideology of madonna/whore. You're much too intelligent.
My 2 cents, in the FWIW department -
ReplyDeleteI'm all for consenting adults expressing their sexuality however they see fit, including filming it and posting up on the internet if they so desire, and I don't know that censorship is really helpful. Most people are sexual beings, and that's just reality. Most of what I have seen out there on porn sites I've had the misfortune to stumble upon, I find disturbing, but I'm loathe to simply state that it should all simply be illegal.
That said, these misogynistic ideas are out there, and they were out there eons before the internet made it all so in-your-face and accessible as well. People have been doing this shit for centuries.
I think the objectification of women in pornography, advertising and other mass media, is just one more outgrowth of a very primitive, stone-age view of women as a mere resource anyhow, it's just A leading to B as its sad, logical conclusion. You can even see it in the behavior of one of our closest living relatives, the common Chimpanzee - the males of the species can be very violent indeed with the females, and with each other in competition for mating access... On some level the cynic in me believes it must be genetic or at least a very old "race memory" that just won't go away. Humans are supposed to be reasonable, unlike "lower" animals, but sometimes I do wonder...
I agree that parents do need to pay attention to what their children are viewing and they need to teach a sane counterpoint to what the mass media is peddling, but that is something that has to be done by each parent with their own children, I don't think it's something you can just legislate out of our culture (I've always believed that trying to legislate morality is mostly a lost cause, anyway, of course).
The increasing sexualization of children, especially little girls, however, absolutely terrifies me and is one of the major reasons I do not want to have children of my own, I think I would just go absolutely insane with worry...
~@Ace_Gallifreya from Twitter