Guest post by Caroline Pugh-Roberts

“There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do.”

Collective Shout quoted in 10 Daily article

10 daily forwarded several photographs of Australian Instagram models aged between nine and 15 to Collective Shout. It's a grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls.

“I searched for a couple of images and found them on porn sites. It’s likely the majority of them are on porn sites and others are in a chat room with inappropriate sexual comments about a primary school aged girl,” campaigns manager Caitlin Roper said.

10 daily has viewed and can confirm that these images were shared on a porn site and other chat rooms.

But who should be held accountable for where these pictures are ending up?

Michael Murchie was the man behind the camera for at least one of the child photos Roper found a porn site. He told 10 daily all clothing in his shoots belong to the models.

When questioned about the age-appropriateness of the photos of teen and pre-teen girls such as the images above, Murchie said:

“I never take revealing photos of minors. I merely take the photos requested of me by the clients, their parents."

But Roper doesn't buy it.

“Is that an excuse? If a parent wants to exploit their kids then its OK from a photographer to make money from it?”

Girls and women's advocate Roper said modelling decision being made by parents could be damaging to their children in years to come.

Do they not understand the implications for their child or do they not care? Is it about fame ahead of their child’s rights and safety?” 

Read the full article at 10 Daily

Objectifying Christmas promotion turns heads; stomachs

We recently shared an article detailing a mother’s experience with her teenage daughter and an online swimwear company. Here's what happened next.

My 16 year-old’s first thong/G-string Bikini arrived today

We were recently contacted by one of our supporters, author and freelance writer Jas Rawlinson, who had concerns about content she had come across online. Seek.com, which promotes itself as Australia’s no. 1 jobs, employment, career and recruitment site, was hosting ads calling for ‘male models’ with no experience required, with the promise of making up to $900 per hour. Jas did some digging, and found some disturbing content and information.

Jas recounted what she found in a blog post at www.thoughtsfromjas.com:

It was August last year when I first came across a ‘models wanted’ advert, offering extreme amounts of money to teen boys/young men for – you guessed it – no required experience.

Jumping onto the advertiser’s website (let’s call them ‘SS’), I noticed there was – unsurprisingly- a real lack of information about who their company were and what they offered. Likewise, their social media also showed little information, with barely any engagement or followers – so I decided to do a reverse Google image search of the teen boys featured on their page.

In barely any time at all, I was lead to another social media account with the exact same images – only this time, the young boys were advertised with terms such as ‘youthful’, ‘fresh faced’, ‘milky skin’ and ‘twink’ (a gay slang word that refers to slender, underdeveloped young men with ‘little to no body hair’).

Digging further online, I discovered that not only was the ABN of ‘SS’ also connected to gay pornographic services, but that the images used on Facebook were censored versions of the real photographs – which featured older men performing sexual services on the young men.

When the ad popped up again this month, I was told by SEEK’s Customer Service Fraud and Compliance Analyst, Sarah Grigg, to contact the ACCC instead. Only when I mentioned that the police had been notified – along with the Office of the eSafety Commissioner and organisations such as Childwise – did they then change their tune – eventually, removing the ad.

However, the fight to prevent ads of this nature being uploaded continues, as I again found the ad listed only a few days later (after reporting it again, the ad was swiftly removed). SEEK have vowed to try to do more to prevent this business from getting around their systems in the future, but it has to be said – why did they allow a gay pornographic service to falsely advertise to teenage boys in the first place?

There are millions of online sites where people can seek, or sell, sexual services. Teen boys should not be being targeted on a mainstream employment website.

Have you noticed advertisements of this nature on SEEK? Email [email protected] to let them know. 

Read the original post here.

The #MeToo movement has taken the world by storm, exposing the endemic exploitation and abuse of women and girls by men across a range of industries. The social media campaign to hold predatory men accountable for their actions has sparked a global dialogue, forcing many to re-evaluate their sexist attitudes and practices.

In the wake of this cultural shift, Formula One has announced plans to end the long-standing traditional of ‘grid girls’, clearly recognising that the use of attractive women as props or accessories for men is “clearly at odds with modern day societal norms.”

The growing refusal to tolerate casual sexism poses a problem for companies who rely on it in order to function.  

Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, a magazine serving up an array of sexy, young women in bikinis for the viewing pleasure of a male audience, is set to hit newsstands this week. This year’s edition will feature a nude spread entitled ‘In Her Own Words’, a collection of photos of naked women with words scrawled across their bodies that apparently represent who they are.

According to the magazine’s Instagram, the series of naked women in the men’s girlie mag is intended to celebrate “more than just their bodies”. Which begs the question, why are they posed naked? Surely if the aim is to humanise the women included rather than to sexualise them, stripping them off, laying them on the ground passively and photographing them naked isn’t the best way to achieve this?

The project is being pitched by magazine editor MJ Day as empowering, as a means of giving women a voice (just not clothes). Day tells Vanity Fair the shoot is about “allowing women to exist in the world without being harassed or judged regardless of how they like to present themselves.”

What we’re seeing is the same routine objectification of women, the treatment of women first and foremost as bodies to be looked at, as passive objects, but Day assures us this is different. This time it’s revolutionary, about women’s right to self-expression or to be objectified- while the magazine conveniently profits.

By framing the conversation as one about women’s choices, the spotlight is on the women posing, and not the magazine who orchestrated the shoot. Sports Illustrated can continue to operate the same way as always, profiting from exploiting women’s bodies and sexuality, but now they can call it ‘female empowerment’.

The female models are still sexualised, their naked bodies used as canvases and offered up for male consumption. How is this particular photoshoot different from the everyday sexualised depictions of women in mainstream media and popular culture, while their male counterparts remain fully clothed and posed with dignity and strength? Is anything being challenged at all? It’s the same old sexism, but repackaged as progressive and feminist.

The PR machine keeps spinning, with Day attempting to associate the brand, a bikini mag with naked women, with the #MeToo movement in a Vanity Fair article entitled ‘Meet the First Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue of the #MeToo Era’.

The swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated is dominated by sexually objectifying portrayals of women, treating women as masturbatory material for men. In doing so, it contributes to and reinforces the second-class status of women, the notion that women exist for men, for their enjoyment and use, and that women’s value is determined by their physical appearance and sexual appeal- essentially, their ability to attract men. This frequent reduction of women to sexual objects is incompatible with gender equality.

Twenty years of empirical research, 135 studies from 109 publications, indicate that sexualisation and objectification of women has a range of negative effects. Consistent evidence found that:

"regular, everyday exposure to [sexually objectifying portrayals of women] are directly associated with a range of consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater self-objectification, greater support of sexist beliefs and of adversarial sexual beliefs, and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women. Moreover, experimental exposure to this content leads both women and men to have a diminished view of women's competence, morality, and humanity."

The treatment of women as sexual objects and the diminishing of women’s humanity cannot work alongside a social movement fighting for women’s human rights. The sexual objectification of women for profit is in direct contradiction with efforts to eradicate the exploitation of women. Treating women as sex objects doesn’t suddenly become a feminist act just because the photographer is a woman.

When corporates, whose primary goal is to sell a product, attempt to capitalise on a social movement or cause, we should absolutely be wary of their motives.

We all know that hot, naked women in Sports Illustrated isn’t about celebrating women or giving them a voice- it’s about selling magazines.  

“These are sexy photos…at the end of the day, we’re always going to be sexy, no matter what is happening,” says Day.

 See article, originally printed in Sydney Morning Herald here.

Google has raked in millions of pounds in advertising revenue from videos that exploit young children and even appeal to paedophiles.

One channel which has attracted billions of views on YouTube, owned by the search giant, features clips of sisters aged seven and nine in baby clothes, sucking dummies and being scared by snakes.

According to analysts, the Toy Freaks channel which was shut down by YouTube last week earns the girls’ father up to £8.7million a year, with Google collecting up to a further £7.1million.

Major UK firms including Which? and Iceland responded to the revelation revealed in a probe by The Times newspaper by suspending advertising on the video-sharing site. The row comes after Google and Facebook were criticised for failing to block videos glorifying terrorism.