The Wonderful Co-op.

Co-op are not going to be stocking a number of exploitative magazines aimed at a manipulative and patronising construct of masculinity (my rather long winded avoidance of saying 'lad's mag's!). 

Wahooo!!!!

This is because those companies have refused to provide said magazines in sealed bags which would prevent people being able to see the content unless they actively wanted to and bought them. (Unfortunate that these have been referred to as 'modesty wraps')

The wonderful wonderful thing about this is that no one can call this censorship - it is not. The Co-op is, well a co-operative, and has a membership, a membership today I am very proud to be part of. This decision is a response to listing to that membership. Democracy at work. 

The publishers where given a choice and they made a decision, a decision I would imagine might bring the co-op many more customers and members. 

What I love about what's happened at the Co-op is that it demonstrates how alternative business structures bypass the debates other organisations will inevitably get tangled up in: Freedom of speech (aka I want to wank to whatever I like) vs. the right to live free of oppression and intimidation, everyone needs to be free to chose and we can't possibly do anything to effect our profit margins, etc, etc.

Members of the co-op said um actually no we don't like it so it's going - simple.

I suspect though that the co-op will be miss-understood and accused of censorship. Just as David Cameron fundamentally misunderstood the point of the 'No More Page 3 Campaign' . There seems to be a disconnect between campaigners using collective voicing of issues to challenge and change attitudes and practices and those who should understand democracy and the democratic process seeing calls for censorship everywhere.

There is a co-operative alternative to capitalism. 

The essence of F***

‘I had to fake it till I made it’ is Rhianna’s explanation for how she became ‘so comfortable in her sexuality’, a sexuality which Esquire magazine described as ‘the very essence of F***’.  I think I found these statements some of the most disturbing of the whole interview.  Essentially it was a discussion not about the individual life choices and experiences of one 24 year old but a moment, for those who could see it, of real honesty about the pornification of the music industry and indeed the universe.

There have been a lot of responses that have raised concern about Rhianna’s comments about her relationship with Chris Brown, jumping to reiterate that abuse is never acceptable and berating Rihanna for not giving a more nuanced  response, especially since she was a ‘role model’. But even if she had given a model response would we want to be promoting her and by implication the industry she is involved in, as a role model.  

It makes no sense to say that Rhianna is comfortable in her own sexuality if she had to fake it until she made it. If she had to fake it, it is not her sexuality it is someone else’s, and is not about her pleasure, desire or sexual expression it is about someone else’s. But what choice did she have? As Gail Dines puts it the choice for many young women ‘is to be f***able or invisible’.

Rhianna was described as the very essence of ‘F***’ not ‘sex’, not ‘beauty’ not ‘love’ but ‘F***’ There is something in the word F*** that is inherently aggressive and violating.  The way we use the word reflects this. Have you ever heard anyone say ‘My love shall we have a F***’? It is rarely something mutual but normally describes one person doing something to another without consent and to the detriment of that person. I wonder if the pictures of Rhianna after Chris Brown assaulted her contributed to her ‘F*** essence’?

Rhianna stated that she was not sure that that was what she had been aiming for. I am fairly convinced it was exactly what many in the industry where aiming at for her and I’m not sure she really ever had a choice about how people would see her. But here we are, in a situation where the highest accolade for a woman is that she is the essence of ‘F***’.

Of course the other option available for women (though it is a little more niche and American) apart from invisible or ‘F***able’ is to be virginal, so virginal in-fact that you can’t even get raped and certainly can’t conceive from rape.

Is this why 50 Shades of Gray is so popular? I have to be honest I have not read it and do not intend to, but I have read substantial amounts about it. From what I gather the book is all about Ana becoming F***able and F***ed by a powerful, rich and controlling man. Women who have been so surrounded by pornified images and narratives, but for the most part still not able to overcome the social mores and watch porn, are perfectly able to read something penned by the hand of a woman (but really written years ago in the offices of Hustler et al.) that dresses itself up as a romance novel, and dream about gaining some value through becoming ‘F***able’.

And is this why so many people seem so confused about what rape is? ‘Cause clearly if a powerful man like Assange “inserts” (thanks George!) while you are asleep you have been ‘F***ed’ and should therefore be flattered. When ‘the essence of F***’ becomes the dictated ambition of women rape becomes a compliment.

It looks like the ‘essence of F***’ is here to stay impregnating every part of our lives, it looks like it is determined to be the dominant definition of what it is to be a woman, forcing all others into obscurity. But I for one refuse to be invisible and they can think of a million names to dismiss me with, but I will not become invisible.

I will not become invisible because I have unearthed other archetypes and role models, some in legend, some in story but my most favourite in scripture. A diversity of strong courageous diverse women who lived life on their terms creatively challenging the patriarchy around them and a Jesus who meet them on their own terms and offered them not 50 shades of ‘F****ed up’ but a celebratory rainbow of humanity. 

The pornification of childhood

My small daughter’s life is extremely edited.  She is likely to grow up thinking the only program on TV is Abney and Teal. She will have a surprise when she gets to school and discovers that the bedtime stories she’s come to love actually don’t have an equal representation of men and women and that the world is not a fair and egalitarian place.  And she will at some point encounter that horrifying narrative of the princess.

What has any of this got to do with porn? Well what I would like to argue is that:

1.) We use story and narrative to understand and explain the world and this is especially important to children.

2.) There is a particular narrative that Porn tells

3.) This narrative has been present in childhood for a very long time, but is now becoming more insidious and endemic and it primes children to accept and expect a porn narrative.

So what is the porn narrative? Essentially it is that women exist for the sexual pleasure of men and their worth is connected to how sexually attractive they are to men. Masculinity is defined by sexual violence and predatory conquest within the porn narrative. 

Recently I re-watched Disney’s Snow White. In an early scene Snow White is singing about wishing for the one she loves to find her, she is clearly not talking about someone she knows, she looks like a teenager. Suddenly an adult man appears beside her she is clearly frightened and runs away but then listens at the window flattered by the attention. We all know what happens at the end of the story, that while unconscious, having been drugged, this same man sexually assaults her and then they live happily ever after. (While we are at it Sleeping Beauty is the story of a women out cold, a strange man climbs through her window and sexually assaults her. This is not OK.) But that initial scene struck me as I had just finished Gail Dines’ chapter on the use of pseudo-child images and the narratives were very similar ‘At first she was nervous, but she wanted it really’.

So these storys we tell young girls and boys that normalise sexual violence and male ownership are far from new, but while they used to function to groom young girls into being submissive compliant wives who on getting wed discovered Cinderella had no better time of it in the happily ever, now we are seeing a narrative creep into childhood that has a slightly different angle. Building on the princess, girls are now taught that they must exude sexiness in order to please the men.

So enter beauty pageants (http://www.missminiprincess.co.uk/), Bratz by day Catz by night, (http://www.bratz.com/), pole dancing dolls, cute little playboy bunny’s everywhere, make up and high heels for toddlers, even Lego thinks a girls preoccupation should be beautifying herself (http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Products/Details/3187.aspx), and don’t even let me get started on Hannah Montana. While grooming our girls we equally groom our young men into a sense of privileged and a warped idea of masculinity. How many times have you seen 'naughty' 'trouble' etc written across toddlers just because they happen to be male. Boys watch the princess stories too and learn they are to be characterless thugs. Boys also play with dolls, only theirs come with weapons and biologically impossible muscles and a noticable absence of genitals.  

So the messages of porn are infecting early childhood, grooming and priming children so that as they enter adolescents their space and freedom to explore and discover their own sexuality is severely restricted. And now they are bombarded with normalising attitudes in magazines, television programs and even on occasion what purports to be objective positive information. Girls begin to experience sexual violence and intimidation in school environments and discover adults are ill equipped to respond and protect them, that victims get blamed and perpetrators get kudos. They begin to hate every part of their body because, like the all seeing eye in lord of the rings, the pornofied gaze is everywhere. The only option of validation left for a young woman is as a sexual object and the ultimate expression of masculinity for a young man is to perpetrate sexual violence.

I know some people think my anxiety about my own daughter and other childrens experience of childhood is misplaced, that it is not that dangerous or toxic environment I think it is, that body dismorphia and self loaving are not inevitable.  I agree, they are not, but in our current climate they are probable and I am not kidding myself about the kind of effort we need to make to provide an alternative storyline for young people.  Hugh Hefner himself said ‘I don’t care if a baby holds up a playboy bunny rattle’. So let’s not pretend that a powerful industry is not trying to groom the next generation of product and purchaser. 

The Pornoglare

A poem inspired by Gail Dines' Pornland and Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland! Probably won't make much sense if you haven't read The Jabberwocki.

`Twas normling, and the sleazy perves
Did gawp and grimace on the web:
All wanky were the femaphobes,
And the playboys outbleb.

"Beware the Pornoglare, my child!
The jaws that tare, the claws that gag!
Beware the Hustler bird, and shun
The profitmine de-beautmag!"

She took her Buttle sword in hand:
Long time the maxcore foe she sought --
So rested she by the Tumtuc tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in femish thought she stood,
The Pornoglare, with eyes of blame,
Came gourging through the primesat wood,
And distorted as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The Buttel blade went snicker-snack!
She left it dead, and with its head
She went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Pornoglare?
Come to my arms, my beamish girl!
O frabjous day ! Callooh! Callay!"
She chortled in her joy.

`Twas equaling , and the bodyforms
Did mix and mimble in the posed;
All gone were the gender norms,
And the sexism exposed.

Though it might seem like it because some of the words and concepts are new this is not a nonsense poem, just as anti-porn literature is NOT nonsense. 

So here's a few words that may need defining:

Normling: refers to that time of day before dinner after school pick up when your to tired to listen or think properly and the tv babysitter is the only thing that keeps you sane. The time when your intellectually most vulnerable the time and space that some people use to normalise what is not and should not be normal.

Outbleb: Bleb is a protrusion on a membrane or a fluid filled blister. To be outbleb is when the gunge you've filled yourself with bursts filling the mainstream or when other blisters grow so big they engulf you.

Profitmine: something that knaws into you for profit.

De-beautmag: A creature that takes away your sense of beauty. 

Buttle sword: a rhetoric cast in the mold of Josephine Buttler

Femish thought: A mind most detested by the Pornoglare, independent, deconstructive, creative and powerful

Primesat: A place that has been so saturated with the Pornoglare dung that the trees have both come to be dependent on it and poisoned by it. (A combination of primed and saturated)

Equaling: The time of day when you are most alert and celebrating life and humanity.

Posed: All places where images are placed for public viewing

The rest of the words that don't make sense you can blame on Carroll!

In Mourning for the Lego of yeasteryear

I never wanted to be the sort of parent who told their child who could and couldn't be their friend but there are five friends I do not want my daughter playing with. She will not be playing with Mia and her pets, getting her hair done with Emma, drink smoothies with Andrea, go to one of Stephanie's parties or even play in Olivia's tree house or dream up great inventions with her in her workshop. (http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx)


Lego how far you have wandered from what is beautiful. The Lego I remember as a kid was probably beginning to become dominated by male characters  but there was at least still space for my imagination to believe it had permission to be there, to create and to explore.

Lego being the amazing, brilliant toy that it is, has a unique opportunity to offer play spaces for children that allow their creativity to flourish and their sociological imaginations to run riot dreaming about what life could be like.

A family in a house that turns into a boat, a spaceship or a dragon.

The new 'Friends' theme fundamentally constrains children's play and sends some very clear messages:

1.) Friends are the remit of girls - not boys; and girls are friends with girls only.

2.) The activities girls do are limited to domestic and caring functions. If they are going to step out of these roles (Olivia's inventor workshop) then that is the exception not the rule and they must plaster all such activities in pink or lilac lest they compromise their femininity.

3.) The website very clearly lets you know that you must conform to one of these types of femininity. You can take an on-line quiz where you have to choose between fairly obtuse objects. This detailed and well-researched psychometric test will then tell you which type you are like, because apparently there are 5 types of girl in the world.

4.) This is clearly and obviously marketed at girls so what about the rest of the Lego world? Clearly it becomes 'for boys' and there is indeed a dearth of female characters in the rest of Lego's universe. The message is clear: boys and girls are fundamentally different. What is male is normative.

5.) The message is no longer 'discover something very, very, special: themself'. Instead it is clearly: don't you dare get out of the box. But try conformity, stick with the pattern, don't invent, you mustn't have a go or create. Keep 'you' very very quiet.

It also sends out some not so clear messages:

How old are Mia, Emma, Andrea, Stephanie and Olivia? Their clothing, interests and language would suggest that they are children (especially as Olivia's house clearly has a Mum and Dad). However, they are physically very developed to be children, and very skinny. In proportion to the average woman's waist they have very large breasts, probably not quiet as bad as Barbie but not far off. This mixing of adult  body images (and unhealthy ones at that) with children's themes contributes very directly to the sexualisation of children.

There's a great short history of Lego's marketing and gender over at feminist frequency (http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/01/lego-gender-part-1-lego-friends/).

For my part I am one very sad mother worried about the pink universe my daughter may have no choice but to grow up in. The glimmer of hope is represented by the Lego my mother has stashed away in the attic and then there is that prayer that the world might change and that this ridiculous notion of deterministic binary gender could be dropped. One day. 

Go Riley

Sexualisation is not about Parents it’s not even about Children and Young People.

So now we have it the fourth Government review of 'Sexualisation' this time it’s of 'childhood'.

I am glad that this issue is still on the agenda and that the work of previous reviews was acknowledged and 'built on', but my constant feeling while reading through the review was that we are somehow completely missing the mark.

The review states that the "Government wanted the Review to assess how children in this country are being pressured to grow up too quickly, and to make recommendations on how to address public concern about this."

But is it that children are 'growing up' to quickly? Are many people not also raising concerns that young people are not taking responsibility for themselves and are too dependent on the state? We can't have it both ways.

Perhaps young people in their "growing up" are holding a mirror up to the rest of society and saying look this is what you’re teaching us to be. If we don't like it the answer is not to stop children growing up but to offer an alternative direction in which to grow.

The report does not define "commercialisation and premature sexualisation" as they "considered the work already done". It would have been helpful however for them to have stated what definition they would use.  Because how you define sexualisation determines what you think the problem is and how you tackle it.

What exactly do they mean by "premature sexualisation"? This is a phrase they use repeatedly. My main problem with it is that it implies that if exactly the same processes where happening a few years later then there would be no problem. At what age does the report believe young people should become sexualised? Or are they meant to leap from childhood to adulthood and arrive at a mature sexuality overnight?

Let us define sexualisation for the moment as the process by which people develop their sexual identity and sexuality. This process is one that begins in the womb and probably continues all our life's but its rate of change and development is probably most pronounced around adolescents.

If that is the case then what is the problem with young people becoming sexualised?  We come back to young people as mirrors.The problem is that the sexuality presented to young people, the ways of 'being sexual' and the ways of doing gender are very very narrow indeed, and one could argue, at the risk of being called all sorts of names (puritan, feminist, out of touch etc.), not particularly healthy.

The report states that "Many parents feel that this culture is often inappropriate for their children and they want more power to say ‘no’." So do I. I find the culture inappropriate for me and I want more power to say no. To be fair the report does admit that "This background affects adults as well as children and is everywhere in society." But it does not elaborate on this.

It is patronising to children and young people to have policies directed purely at 'protecting' them (though this is important) and not addressing the cultures that are endangering them. If we see something as clearly damaging to children are we sure it is not damaging us?

The review states that "We are all living in an increasingly sexual and sexualised culture, although it is far from clear how we arrived at this point." Really? I don't think it’s at all unclear, it may have come as a surprise but I don't think it’s too hard to trace its origins. There are many a campaign group who have been shouting about these issues for a long time.

The review refers to gender-stereotyped clothes and toys but doesn't explore these serotypes adequately for my liking. In-fact the whole issue of gender stereotypes and the adverse effects these have on people’s perception of self, particularly children and young people is rather dismissed as ”this is contested territory".

I find this so depressingly tiring. Any territory is contested, you will find people on either side of any argument but on this issue while the popular press and many pop psychology books are on the side of gender differences being innate the vast majority of the research world, the neurobiologists, psychologists, behavioural scientists etc. are not and are routinely ignored by the press, they should not be ignored by Government reviews.

As the review admits there has not been enough time to gather evidence that sexualisation causes any long term harm "but we should not wait for this before acting: insufficient evidence to prove conclusively there is harm to children does not mean that no harm exists."

But it is OK to dismiss the possible negative consequences of gender stereotyping due to lack of conclusive evidence?

These issues are fundamentally connected. The review and any action will miss the mark if it doesn't recognise that it is not the fact that young people are developing their sense of self, their relationships with others and their sexuality, but the environment in which they have to do it that is the problem.  While there is only one hegemonic masculinity on offer and one femininity that is designed for it we are all losing sexual freedom.

Young people want and deserve good quality sex education, an accurate representation of the diversity of people and their sexuality and the skills to critique media messages.The review starts to suggest some of these things but policies will be ineffective unless they address the wider issues. This is a problem that affects us all.

If you want to read a thoroughly good review of the problem read Living Dolls by Natasha Walter and then if you want to do something about it - pass it on!