Walter is so self-evidently right that you wonder how this "debate" can still be taking place. The reason - and the problem - is that the feminist critique has consistently failed to account for women's own complicity in the genre.
The Nuts website, for example, features a page called Assess My Breasts, inviting men to study photos of naked breasts and rank them - which doesn't seem particularly respectful. But the thousands of images have been uploaded by ordinary women - "entirely voluntarily", for free, as the spokeswoman took pleasure pointing out. Without these willing armies of female volunteers, there would be no breasts for any readers of Nuts to assess - or any of the "Real Girls!" beloved of porn shoots, and no "High Street Honeys" for FHM porn scouts to find.
...
A recent American book, Pornified, chronicles countless cases of schoolchildren videoing themselves having sex - on the school bus, surprisingly often - and distributing the footage via their mobile phones. I had hoped this was a peculiarly American phenomenon, but at a London school where a teacher I know works, a pupil recently videoed a younger girl giving him a blowjob in the school toilets, then uploaded her performance straight on to YouTube.
I used to think that rumours about normal, well-adjusted teenage girls posting topless pictures in chat rooms for boys they had never even met were alarmist myths. But I spent some time around 12-year-olds this summer, and it turns out they are absolutely true. This week FHM was censured for publishing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old without her consent - but the real shock came in FHM's revelation that it receives more than 1,200 submissions of women topless or in lingerie every single week.
It is no wonder a lot of men now genuinely believe that women want to be treated as sex objects. Who could blame them when so many of us have internalised an exhibitionistic ideal of our own objectification?
Read the rest.
The Nuts website, for example, features a page called Assess My Breasts, inviting men to study photos of naked breasts and rank them - which doesn't seem particularly respectful. But the thousands of images have been uploaded by ordinary women - "entirely voluntarily", for free, as the spokeswoman took pleasure pointing out. Without these willing armies of female volunteers, there would be no breasts for any readers of Nuts to assess - or any of the "Real Girls!" beloved of porn shoots, and no "High Street Honeys" for FHM porn scouts to find.
...
A recent American book, Pornified, chronicles countless cases of schoolchildren videoing themselves having sex - on the school bus, surprisingly often - and distributing the footage via their mobile phones. I had hoped this was a peculiarly American phenomenon, but at a London school where a teacher I know works, a pupil recently videoed a younger girl giving him a blowjob in the school toilets, then uploaded her performance straight on to YouTube.
I used to think that rumours about normal, well-adjusted teenage girls posting topless pictures in chat rooms for boys they had never even met were alarmist myths. But I spent some time around 12-year-olds this summer, and it turns out they are absolutely true. This week FHM was censured for publishing a photograph of a topless 14-year-old without her consent - but the real shock came in FHM's revelation that it receives more than 1,200 submissions of women topless or in lingerie every single week.
It is no wonder a lot of men now genuinely believe that women want to be treated as sex objects. Who could blame them when so many of us have internalised an exhibitionistic ideal of our own objectification?
Read the rest.
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