I have a significant issue with the way women are represented in mainstream media as sexualised objects. Not only does it condone the sex industry, significantly harm gender relations and provide poor role models for young girls, but is also increases the risk of dehumanising women and increases the risk of sexual crimes and violence against women.
A number of Feminist not-for-profit organisations have conducted reviews into the objectification of women as sex objects which identify rising levels of pornographic poses, vacant expressions and harmful messages to society. In turn this also provides “hypermasculine” role models for men and advocates strong gender divide relationships which damaged society as a whole.
There is a significant rise in aspirations among young girls and young teams to be Glamour models with media stars endorsing sexualisation of women by posing in “lads mags” or simply being Jordan.
The presentation of the One Dimensional Woman has a cascade effect to younger generations, As OBJECT identifies with WH Smith selling pink Playboy pencil cases and Amazon sell pole dancing kits with paper money as toys. Alongside more negative gender stereotypes such as the Domestic Goddess and few female role models in Parliament and big business, Society is effectively rolling back decades in gender equality.
There is a significant separation between content and advertising and it is the portrayal of the content of advertising that is the issue. Advertising will continue to increase all the time there is a demand and nobody steps up to say the representation of women in this respect is wrong.
OBJECT runs a Feminists Friday campaign to promote the covering up of “lads mags” with anti-sexist slogans. The more attention that can be created through this, the more likely it is that the presentation of women as sexual objects in mainstream media will stop.
However, there is still a requirement for a socially responsible media in relation to the sexualisation of women. I would encourage you to lobby your Councillors, lobby your MP and lobby the national government to prevent further damage to gender relations.
The Sex Industry
The discreet patriarchal argument that working in the sex industry is the “choice” and the misrepresentation of careers from the globally successful Belle De Jour and Playboy Simply allow corroboration with the idea of “choice” and further degrade and dehumanise women. If you attempt to argue against it you are generally questioned as to whether you work in the sex industry and if not then your argument is not valid.
However, an independent study conducted by OBJECT reports that 75% of women working in the sex industry were drawn into it as children and the other Life events have a significant impact on on the so-called choice of sex industry workers.
There is a growing rise in violence against women at work in the sex industry where it is implicit that the right to buy sex also allows the right to perpetrate sexual crime.
And while the studies reported are not peer-reviewed, they identify serious concerns with the promotion of women sexualised objects within society.
The Netherlands provides what they call a failed legislative experiment whereby legislating on the sex industry has failed to ensure safety and actually promoted higher levels of sexual crime of violence towards women. It ultimately provides a market where the desire for the market grows with legitimisation and therefore the trafficking and abuse of women who work in this industry increases.
The issues in the sex industry are not limited to sexual crimes, but there are also issues around trafficking.
In order to prevent trafficking in the UK section 14 of the Police and Crime Act 2009 states that men who purchase sexual services where they are aware that the woman is traffic are liable to be charged. This is a strict liability offence. However, since the implementation of the section in April 2010 only three men have received cautions for such a crime. Men have telephoned crime reporting lines to report within being trafficked, but when questioned, in the majority of instances they have already slept with a woman who was trafficked and are simply reporting it as a consciousness issue afterwards. This further legitimises the market of trafficking in the work of women in the sex industry.
Local authorities are currently taking the lead and challenging qualification in their area. OBJECT is running a campaign to ensure that people can lobby their local councils to license sex industry venues appropriately, i.e. by going through a magistrates court to ensure the welfare of women and the crease the risks of harm, trafficking and destruction to gender balance relationships.
However, this essentially absolves central government of any responsibility to preventing a growing mainstream media concept of sexualisation of women.
It is up to people to act and stop the objectification of women in the media, in the sex industry and in society as a whole to prevent the cascading damage to young people.
---
This post was orihinally posted on www.disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com
Monday, 25 October 2010
Why the Fawsett Society Challenge Actually Discriminates Against Women Further
The Fawcett Society has launched a major, high press challenge against the government's spending cuts to child benefit and benefit cuts in general.
Controversially, as a feminist, I disagree with this action.
Ultimately, I feel this hinders the gender equality debate, is a poor use of legislation and does not represent a true equality impact assessment of the spending cuts in line with other legislation.
Do the Spending Cuts Disproportionally Discriminate against Women?
Flexible Working and the Public Sector
The Fawcett Society states that "65% of public sector employees are women". It then goes on to illustrate why two thirds of civil servant employees are in fact female. Firstly, it is because the public sector has far more stringent flexible working schemes, equal opportunities governance and care related policies than the private sector.
By campaigning against the spending cuts to the public sector, all the Fawcett Society appears to be achieving, to me, is preserving the public sector as the best equal opportunities employer in the country. This immediately implies that these women would be unlikely to seek employment opportunities outside the public sector because practices are not as adequate.
Therefore, the debate is not about the cuts to the public sector, but in fact about how inadequate private corporations in the UK are at providing equal opportunities in employment for women, caregivers and those who seek flexible working schemes.
By enforcing major budget cuts on the public sector, this would significantly increase job seekers into the market who do not just seek flexible working, but insist upon flexible working. This would force companies into applying more suitable flexible working policies, and seek better ways of functioning with a level playing field of diversity strands.
The Fawcett Society may succeed in their legal challenge, but all this would do with secure a narrow field in which women can work and allow private companies to continue to discriminate against women and diversity strands.
Child Rearing
The Fawcett Society is responding to the sociological issue that women are, in the majority of cases, the main child rearers.
This is not a response to the amount of money these women receive, whether from benefits or employment, but in fact a response to the entrenched notion of discrimination within the family unit that the society has failed to address since the onset of second wave feminism in the 1960s.
Gender discrimination and patriarchy remain truly embedded within society through a variety of means. All the time we allow women to be considered as the "caring, mother figure" stereotype, we persist in the notion that women nest and men build.
Sexual liberation in the 1960s allowed women to have sex with a much lower risk of pregnancy thereby allowing them a far greater choice of partner prior to embracing family life.
However, the barriers still exist post commencing that relationship. Once she selected her partner, she is still expected to undertake certain roles within that relationship. This includes being the one to take leave for nine months to two years when a child enters the relationship. While a leave of absence is reasonable for women that have given birth, the assumptions of "biological destiny", "bonding" and the interdependent relationships indicated within society between mother and child ensure that the woman feels guilty for not taking for maternity leave, feels guilty when she is struggling with a variety of related child rearing issues, feels secondary to her child and is obligated by the sociopolitical landscape to fulfil these roles.
The Fawcett Society challenge to spending cuts perpetuates the concept of the woman of the child rearer, thereby inadvertently preventing the positions of women within society from changing to a more equal stance within the workplace.
The limiting of child benefit may in fact assist to reposition the role of the female as a potential to be an equal or main earner within the family; dependent on meritocracy and not upon negative and perceived social roles.
Legislative Tools
There is an entire range of gender equality legislation now available for use within the UK. But all the time that negative sociopolitical concepts of the roles of women within the home, the workplace, or career style, persists, all challengers are effectively moot.
Legislation from the EU indicates that you cannot discriminate against gender on the basis of goods and services. However, we still see gender stereotyping in marketing, advertising and merchandise as well as in the services surrounding capitalism in the UK.
The legislation should be strategic and proactive, enforcing companies and service providers to take into account equality impact on gender.
However, persistent messages such as "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" in advertising, education, and social media seem to be so entrenched, that no one even considered challenging them.
I recently submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority with regards to an advert for Dove on the television. This is particularly targeted at men with a voice over detailing how fantastic it was to be male, including lifting the entitlements of the man within society and the role and gender rise masculinity that he should fulfil. I was informed by the Advertising Standard Authority that my complaint was not valid as I was the only person to complain.
What is the point of legislation if it does not exist to combat discrimination in these areas?
Instead, the Fawcett Society are using it as a reactive tool to discrimination. To combat discrimination against women based on these entrenched rules without both advising, consulting and instigating steps to erase such embedded notions from society, is what I consider to be a misuse of the legislation.
I'll go further, saying that it helps perpetuate negative connotations of "feminists" as angry, reactive, aggressive groups that do not put steps in place to rectify mistakes but simply battle against them when the impulse takes them.
---
This post originally appeared on www.disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com
Controversially, as a feminist, I disagree with this action.
Ultimately, I feel this hinders the gender equality debate, is a poor use of legislation and does not represent a true equality impact assessment of the spending cuts in line with other legislation.
Do the Spending Cuts Disproportionally Discriminate against Women?
Flexible Working and the Public Sector
The Fawcett Society states that "65% of public sector employees are women". It then goes on to illustrate why two thirds of civil servant employees are in fact female. Firstly, it is because the public sector has far more stringent flexible working schemes, equal opportunities governance and care related policies than the private sector.
By campaigning against the spending cuts to the public sector, all the Fawcett Society appears to be achieving, to me, is preserving the public sector as the best equal opportunities employer in the country. This immediately implies that these women would be unlikely to seek employment opportunities outside the public sector because practices are not as adequate.
Therefore, the debate is not about the cuts to the public sector, but in fact about how inadequate private corporations in the UK are at providing equal opportunities in employment for women, caregivers and those who seek flexible working schemes.
By enforcing major budget cuts on the public sector, this would significantly increase job seekers into the market who do not just seek flexible working, but insist upon flexible working. This would force companies into applying more suitable flexible working policies, and seek better ways of functioning with a level playing field of diversity strands.
The Fawcett Society may succeed in their legal challenge, but all this would do with secure a narrow field in which women can work and allow private companies to continue to discriminate against women and diversity strands.
Child Rearing
The Fawcett Society is responding to the sociological issue that women are, in the majority of cases, the main child rearers.
This is not a response to the amount of money these women receive, whether from benefits or employment, but in fact a response to the entrenched notion of discrimination within the family unit that the society has failed to address since the onset of second wave feminism in the 1960s.
Gender discrimination and patriarchy remain truly embedded within society through a variety of means. All the time we allow women to be considered as the "caring, mother figure" stereotype, we persist in the notion that women nest and men build.
Sexual liberation in the 1960s allowed women to have sex with a much lower risk of pregnancy thereby allowing them a far greater choice of partner prior to embracing family life.
However, the barriers still exist post commencing that relationship. Once she selected her partner, she is still expected to undertake certain roles within that relationship. This includes being the one to take leave for nine months to two years when a child enters the relationship. While a leave of absence is reasonable for women that have given birth, the assumptions of "biological destiny", "bonding" and the interdependent relationships indicated within society between mother and child ensure that the woman feels guilty for not taking for maternity leave, feels guilty when she is struggling with a variety of related child rearing issues, feels secondary to her child and is obligated by the sociopolitical landscape to fulfil these roles.
The Fawcett Society challenge to spending cuts perpetuates the concept of the woman of the child rearer, thereby inadvertently preventing the positions of women within society from changing to a more equal stance within the workplace.
The limiting of child benefit may in fact assist to reposition the role of the female as a potential to be an equal or main earner within the family; dependent on meritocracy and not upon negative and perceived social roles.
Legislative Tools
There is an entire range of gender equality legislation now available for use within the UK. But all the time that negative sociopolitical concepts of the roles of women within the home, the workplace, or career style, persists, all challengers are effectively moot.
Legislation from the EU indicates that you cannot discriminate against gender on the basis of goods and services. However, we still see gender stereotyping in marketing, advertising and merchandise as well as in the services surrounding capitalism in the UK.
The legislation should be strategic and proactive, enforcing companies and service providers to take into account equality impact on gender.
However, persistent messages such as "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" in advertising, education, and social media seem to be so entrenched, that no one even considered challenging them.
I recently submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority with regards to an advert for Dove on the television. This is particularly targeted at men with a voice over detailing how fantastic it was to be male, including lifting the entitlements of the man within society and the role and gender rise masculinity that he should fulfil. I was informed by the Advertising Standard Authority that my complaint was not valid as I was the only person to complain.
What is the point of legislation if it does not exist to combat discrimination in these areas?
Instead, the Fawcett Society are using it as a reactive tool to discrimination. To combat discrimination against women based on these entrenched rules without both advising, consulting and instigating steps to erase such embedded notions from society, is what I consider to be a misuse of the legislation.
I'll go further, saying that it helps perpetuate negative connotations of "feminists" as angry, reactive, aggressive groups that do not put steps in place to rectify mistakes but simply battle against them when the impulse takes them.
---
This post originally appeared on www.disconcertediscursives.blogspot.com
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Some ideas for discussion in our first meeting on 14th October
In preparation for Thursday's first Kentfeminista meeting we've started a couple of discussions on the facebook group that we can carry on in our meeting and I've posted them up on here so that anyone can comment.
It would be great if those of you from far flung places who can't make it could let us know what you're thinking about the big issues, and the slightly sillier ones, we're facing together!
Even better, if there's something you'd like to get other women's views on, you could start a discussion too - I decided to stop at two but there's so much to talk about...
In Sisterhood, Abi x
Feminista101
So, if we did have a feminista room 101 what would you be putting in it? Could be an item of clothing, a person, a movement, a writer, an institution, whatever makes your blood boil!
Bring ideas to the meeting but if you can't make it, let us know here what you think.
Personally, I think London Fashion week should go and sit on the naughty step until they've taken a class in what real women's bodies look like. I'd also like to see the back of George Osborne and his women hating budget cuts. I'd also like to make the case for heels, although I suspect I'm going to have a fight on my hands with that one...
Stop the Cuts
So, the cuts are going to hurt us much more than they are the men. Fawcett have put the difference at 72 to 28 per cent which I didn't want to believe until I read their report. Even Theresa May has complained to Osborne about the total lack of analysis of the gender impact of the cuts. What I thought we could start discussing is where we're already seeing evidence of cuts and the worries that we have about who they're going to affect.
One of my big personal worries is about the effect on the provision for new mums. When I had Lyra, I had daily visits from my midwife for 3 or 4 days after being discharged, followed by the arrival of a health visitor who came to my house at least half a dozen times and offered to come more. Now I know that new mums are lucky to get a single home visit after the birth. With the mounting pressures on young mums, this means that critical support is being removed from women at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. Post natal depression is on the rise and this lack of support is putting mothers at an even greater risk of suffering from this horrible and alienating illness.
It would be great if those of you from far flung places who can't make it could let us know what you're thinking about the big issues, and the slightly sillier ones, we're facing together!
Even better, if there's something you'd like to get other women's views on, you could start a discussion too - I decided to stop at two but there's so much to talk about...
In Sisterhood, Abi x
Feminista101
So, if we did have a feminista room 101 what would you be putting in it? Could be an item of clothing, a person, a movement, a writer, an institution, whatever makes your blood boil!
Bring ideas to the meeting but if you can't make it, let us know here what you think.
Personally, I think London Fashion week should go and sit on the naughty step until they've taken a class in what real women's bodies look like. I'd also like to see the back of George Osborne and his women hating budget cuts. I'd also like to make the case for heels, although I suspect I'm going to have a fight on my hands with that one...
Stop the Cuts
So, the cuts are going to hurt us much more than they are the men. Fawcett have put the difference at 72 to 28 per cent which I didn't want to believe until I read their report. Even Theresa May has complained to Osborne about the total lack of analysis of the gender impact of the cuts. What I thought we could start discussing is where we're already seeing evidence of cuts and the worries that we have about who they're going to affect.
One of my big personal worries is about the effect on the provision for new mums. When I had Lyra, I had daily visits from my midwife for 3 or 4 days after being discharged, followed by the arrival of a health visitor who came to my house at least half a dozen times and offered to come more. Now I know that new mums are lucky to get a single home visit after the birth. With the mounting pressures on young mums, this means that critical support is being removed from women at one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. Post natal depression is on the rise and this lack of support is putting mothers at an even greater risk of suffering from this horrible and alienating illness.
Saturday, 2 October 2010
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