'Choking women is sexy': Honey Birdette ads eroticise violence against women
Named 'champions for women' host BDSM-strangulation ads in their malls
'Choking is sexy, women love to be choked'. That's the message Honey Birdette is broadcasting to all-ages audiences in shop windows across the country.
Read moreInternational Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women 2020
'We cannot end violence against women without addressing the cultural drivers which normalise and fuel it.'
November 25 is International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. It marks the first of 16 days of activism to raise awareness about male violence against women and amplify the global call to end it.
In our decade of work to end sexual exploitation we’ve repeatedly highlighted the links between a culture which glamourises violence against women - in advertising, marketing, products, music and film - and societal attitudes which tolerate it. We cannot end violence against women without addressing the cultural drivers which normalise and fuel it.
Read moreSubmission to Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Inquiry
House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs Inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence
Read moreBritish Boxing Board of Control suspends Billy Joe Saunders' licence after instructional video for hitting women
World champion boxer Billy Joe Saunders has had his license suspended by the British Boxing Board of Control following the release of his video instructing men on how to hit their female partners.
Below is an expanded version of a piece that first appeared on RendezView.
Read more"See what you made me do": author Jess Hill's mission to understand abusive men
Via ABC News
Read moreSydney bar slammed for ‘To-Kill-Her’ cocktail
“Domestic violence and femicide is a real issue, pairing that issue with alcohol is beyond disgusting.”
Read moreScentre Group and Honey Birdette Advertisements in Westfield Retail Space: Eight examples of Inconsistency
1) Scentre Group promotes awareness and supports victims of domestic violence
Read morePushing women to their death is not a joke, but a real-life scenario for too many women
*Content warning: This post contains descriptions of men’s violence against women and may be distressing*
This week a supporter contacted us after coming across a disturbing image on Golfporn’s Facebook page. The picture, which showed a woman being kicked off a cliff after suggesting her male partner sell his golf clubs, “did not violate community standards”, according to Facebook. It had been shared over 1500 times.
It is an unsettling image for many who understand the shocking reality of domestic violence and murders of women.
Not a joke, but a reality
This isn’t an absurd abstract scenario - it is a real-life and often life-ending scenario for many women.
In 2015, Harold Henthorn was sentenced to life in prison after pushing his wife Toni 130 feet off a cliff while hiking in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park to celebrate their anniversary.
Brisbane man Daniel Brookes was arrested in 2015 having been accused of killing his girlfriend Maria Elena Huilcanina Ocampo by throwing her off a balcony. The couple were heard having an argument before security footage showed her body fall. Her sister said that Maria had blood under her nails when she fell.
Simon Gittany was found guilty of murdering his fiancée Lisa Harnum by throwing her off the balcony of a Sydney high rise apartment block.
At trial, witness Joshua Rathnell recalled hearing “deranged screaming” and looked up to see someone “unloading” something from the building.
”I saw the man load the object off the balcony, and in what I described as a fluid motion, turned and went straight back into the apartment.”
Rathnell later realised the object he saw was Ms Harnum’s body.
At the time of Gittany’s conviction, Justice McCallum said Ms Harnum must have been "in a state of complete terror in the last moments before her death".
Earlier this year, Alexander Kenneth McIntyre pleaded guilty to assault charges after he held a woman by the neck against a balcony and told her he would drop her to her death and “happily do 16 years” in jail. Holding a knife, he threatened her “I will cut your head off, c***.” A crying child was also present.
Last year, Loren Bunner was sentenced to 52 years in prison after murdering his 18-year-old ex-girlfriend Jolee Callan while they were hiking together. He shot her in the back of the head and in between the eyes before shoving her off a 40- foot cliff. Bunner bragged to cell mates about killing Ms Callan, claiming that if he couldn’t have her no one else could.
New South Wales man Des Campbell was found guilty of killing his new wife Janet Campbell by pushing her off a cliff. The prosecution told the court that Ms Campbell was "worth more to her husband dead than alive" because he needed her money to pay off his debts.
Given this awful reality, how can casual joking about pushing one’s wife off a cliff be regarded as humorous? Joking about violence against women is sinister in its apathy and callous attitude to women whose lives ended this way.
Trivialising acts of abuse
Dr Kristin Diemer, one of the lead researchers and authors on the National Community Attitudes Survey on Violence Against Women, noted that excusing the abuse of women as a joke “minimises the impact of violence against women”.
“Few Australians openly support violence against women, but many others subtly endorse it by trivialising and excusing acts of abuse.”
Media has an impact on attitudes and behaviours. That a social media post making light of violence against women is so popular and unremarkable both reflects and perpetuates our desensitisation to these horrific crimes.
Dr Diemer concluded:
“Community attitudes on violence against women are an important barometer on gender relations. They illustrate the way people respond when they witness violence, whether victims feel confident to seek help, and whether perpetrators are likely to be excused or held to account for their actions. Changing attitudes is crucial to preventing crises in the longer term. Community attitudes shape the way we respond to domestic violence.”
We can’t address men’s violence against women while simultaneously making light of it. Violence against women is not a joke.
Violence dressed up as erotica: Fifty Shades of Grey and abuse
This Valentine’s Day, why not ditch the roses and celebrate by watching some sexual violence? That’s a more honest marketing pitch for the Fifty Shades of Grey film.
It’s astonishing that, in 2015, sexual abuse can still be marketed as romantic and bondage can still be defended as freedom. Yet advance ticket sales for the film have been record-breaking, demonstrating that, to the wider public, Fifty Shades is seen as little more than harmless, kinky fun.
Plenty of companies have been keen to cash in on the film’s expected success. One Australian chemist chain is giving away free tickets as a “perfect way to celebrate Valentine’s Day”. Others have organised screenings as fundraisers for cancer charities, pre-schools, and even White Ribbon.
Yes, someone thought it was a good idea to use “domestic violence dressed up as erotica” – to borrow a phrase from Lisa Wilkinson – as a way to raise funds for “Australia’s campaign to stop violence against women”.
White Ribbon was eventually forced to distance itself from the event, which not only involved a screening of 50 Shades, but also included a Q&A led by a “professional dominant”. To top it off, the event was sponsored by a sex shop that sells bondage gear.
This raised more questions than funds. If the film screening was supposed to promote a discussion about ending violence against women, why did it seem more like a platform to extol the virtues of sex-industry-sponsored sadomasochism? If the event really was about trying to promote awareness and end abuse, why not have a Q&A session with someone from a domestic violence service, or a centre against sexual assault?
The politics of BDSM
The key to understanding this situation is to understand the politics of BDSM – that is, the politics surrounding the practices of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism; practices which fundamentally eroticise domination and subordination. Through decrying what is depicted in Fifty Shades as violence, and “fake” or “bad” BDSM, a defence of “good” or “real” BDSM has been spawned.
The sex in Fifty Shades doesn’t qualify as “real” BDSM, so the argument goes, because it involves unhealthy coercion and unauthorised control. “Good” BDSM, on the other hand, is supposed to be about mutual trust, pleasure and explicit consent.
This dichotomy is maintained despite prominent BDSM bloggers writing openly about experiences of rape, abuse, and harm, when consent was ignored and bodily integrity violated, even in supposedly “good” BDSM environments.
The “good” BDSM defence is evident even among those organising boycotts of the film. Fifty Shades Is Domestic Abuse, among others, plans to protest at a number of premieres.
But the group’s founder, Natalie Collins, felt the need to declare her group was not “against sex or BDSM” and that many from within the BDSM community were “concerned not just about the domestic abuse but the way their lifestyle has been portrayed and misrepresented by the books”.
In the social media discussion surrounding the film, and the (largely) feminist resistance to it, many have gone to great lengths not to disparage BDSM. And perhaps this should not be surprising when criticism of BDSM practices is now frequently met with accusations of “kink-shaming” and claims that the “BDSM community” is persecuted in the same way gay men and lesbian women were “30 years ago”.
These debates aren’t new. In 1982, the so-called feminist “sex wars” kicked-off at the Barnard Conference when radical feminists protested what they saw as the valorisation of sexual practices that harm women, in particular, pornography, prostitution and BDSM. What we are seeing now is a resurgence of the argument that engaging in BDSM is simply the expression of a liberated sexual choice that can be both empowering and transgressive.
Indeed much of the discussion today still hinges on individual choice, with the suggestion that if you choose to do something, and enjoy it, it is therefore beyond critique. But our sexual choices are never made in a social and political vacuum.
Continuum of abuse
In a culture where women and girls are encouraged to learn that sexual pleasure equates to pleasing men, even when it compromises their own physical or emotional comfort, the pleasure/ pain dynamics described in much pro-BDSM writing don’t look that radical.
In a world where at least one in three women will experience physical or sexual violence, it hardly seems transgressive to sexualise power dynamics. It just looks a lot like a continuum of abuse.
While a “liberated sexuality”, where patriarchy is magically subverted through sex-toy aided orgasms, may sound like a fun idea to some, this position is naïve, at best, and cannot seriously address the broader issue of violence against women.
As Professor Karen Boyle has wryly observed about the Fifty Shades phenomenon:
Whether individual women find new pleasure from butt plugs is not the point here. Rather, the novel’s engagement with broader debates about gendered violence and power cannot be fantasised away.
It is not enough to talk about “good” or “consensual” BDSM without taking into account the endemic levels of violence against women and the eroticising of that violence in a pornified culture.
Nor is it enough to talk about the pleasure that an individual may find in BDSM without considering the broader social context, not least the racist and misogynist origins of so much BDSM gear.
Indeed, the insistence on separating BDSM, as an individual choice, from issues of violence against women more generally, only serves to obfuscate the real underpinning of that violence, which is women’s inequality.
So maybe just don’t bother with the film at all and use your movie ticket money as a donation to a women’s shelter instead. Because while this debate rages on, many frontline services helping victims of violence and abuse could desperately do with a real fundraiser.
Full article here at the Conversation.