Monthly Archives: December 2011

Pleasure vs. profit website launched

Pleasure vs. profit website launched

On December 14th The Women’s Support Project and Zero Tolerance‘s Pleasure vs. Profit launched it’s own website. The people behind the project acknowledge that young people are increasingly worried about the influence of pornography on their culture, relationships and sex lives, but that there is little information out there to help them understand and challenge the porn industry. Pleasure vs. Profit aims to fill this gap, providing the facts in an accessible, young-people friendly way as well as linking to further reading and resources for parents, carers, youth workers and teachers who want to tackle the subject with the young people they work with. To visit the Pleasure vs. Profit website, click here. Follow Pleasure vs. Profit and their Porcupine Campaign on Facebook here. You can view the Pleasure vs. Profit video...

Merry XXX-mas

At the start of this year I stumbled across an interesting article on the Techworld blog titled Do internet users really search for porn at Christmas?. The writer of the article was trying to come up with an alternative explanation to anti-virus company ESET’s claim that searches for ‘porn’ have been consistently rising around Christmas time since 2004. John E. Dunn, one of the co-founders of Techworld was in his own words fighting a “War on Error” proposing that the year-on-year rise was due to a rise in internet users worldwide and that people generally search more for almost everything during a holiday. He continued his argument by stating that looking for porn via a search engine does not necessarily mean that the user...

Challenging Porn Culture: Conference report

Challenging Porn Culture: Conference report

This is a write-up of the Challenging Porn Culture conference, organised by London Feminist Network, that took place in London on the 3rd of this month. Apologies for the lateness of the post. It felt like a privilege being at the Challenging Porn Conference in London on Saturday the 3rd. It was an interesting, moving and educational day. Prof. Gail Dines‘ opening presentation skilfully illustrated the aggression, sexism, racism and sexualisation of women and girls in advertising and pornography. It was the kind of media training and education I wish everyone would receive as survival skills in the image based world she described and deconstructed into words for us to digest. Dines said that while we have become familiar with reading and analysing print,...

Porn and Me: an adolescent’s relationship with porn

Porn and Me: an adolescent’s relationship with porn

I am a teenager living in the US and this is a short account of my relationship with porn. I started watching porn when I was in 5th grade. Seriously? 5th Grade? Yup. I had gotten my first laptop, and it was so easy to access. All I had to do was open up an internet browser, search, and there it was. It started by just looking at girls in their underwear, but then slowly developed until I was watching porn. At first it was just every now and then, then it became more frequent, until I was watching it 3 or 4 days a week. ‘Lesbian’ porn, hand-jobs, and then the list goes darker. I would masturbate to it, and the endorphins would...

Petition: Sexist and objectifying Ryanair ad

Petition: Sexist and objectifying Ryanair ad

Ghada, a member of an airline cabin crew, started a petition on Change.org after Ryanair ran yet another sexist ad in last week’s Guardian, this one featuring a woman in her underwear with a finger in her knickers, the slogan proclaims “Red hot fares & crew!” Women throughout the airline industry are furious at Ryanair’s attempt to cast female flight attendants in a predominantly sexual role, undoing years of work to change their image — and possibly encouraging harassment and advances by male customers. Ghada wants to make it clear that sexist representations of women in the airline industry will not be tolerated. A public outcry can get the ad banned — and send a clear message to other companies considering similar marketing ploys....

Need vs Entitlement: Vincent Tabak and myths about men’s sexuality

Need vs Entitlement: Vincent Tabak and myths about men’s sexuality

In response to the recent article on Deconstructing Vincent Tabak, I’d like to say some words about the premises of that argument, namely: that this murder was brought on by the conflict of ‘sexual needs’ and ‘sexual shame’, which men are subject to. I contributed at length to the discussion, this is a summing up of my comments to articulate clearly why I think this thesis is so badly wrong. 1) Men’s ‘need for sexual expression’ This very concept is where violence against women starts – ‘need’. As if men must have sex or else (what? They’ll die? Go mad?). It is a recurrent myth used to control women that ‘men need sexual expression’ (and so, by implication, women must enable them to express...

International conference on Sexualities, Power and Pornography – May 2012

International conference on Sexualities, Power and Pornography – May 2012

We realise that many people will be too wrapped up in getting ready for Christmas to think this far ahead, but we thought it worth posting this in advance for anyone who may want to book flights/planes to this. On the weekend of 25-27th of May the DGGS (German Society for Social Scientific Sexuality Research) together with the American Academy of Clinical Sexologists (AACS) and the Turkish Sexual Health Institute (CISED) organises the 20th DGGS conference in Munich (Germany). The conference is entitled Sexualities, Power, Pornography and contributions to the conference are based on scientific research. The sessions will be focussed on presentation of research findings followed by Q&A sessions. The formal part of the conference concludes on the 27th of May with a...

Misogynists are under no illusions about what porn says

Misogynists are under no illusions about what porn says

While well over a thousand feminists were gathered in London for UK Feminista’s FEM 11 conference a few weeks ago I was sat at home following the happenings of the event as best I could on Twitter. After trending for much of the day the FEM 11 hashtag caught the attention of what seemed like a fairly organised group of misogynists. Tweets like “National gathering of sandwich makers on Euston Road” and “Who’s let all these women out? Shouldn’t they be tied to a kitchen sink somewhere?” started infiltrating the #fem11 twitter stream. Whether these were just trolls or not, the aim was to offend and they knew quite well what to write to get their result. They knew what was misogynistic, they recognised...