Schoolgirls as young as 12 will be taught how to send naked selfies in Victorian schools.

The ‘Art of safe sexting’ program is to be rolled out in classrooms to instruct school girls how to ‘safely’ send nude images of themselves, apparently by cropping out their heads and faces and any identifying features.

In a five-minute video on Rosie website, girls are told that “sending a nude pic of yourself can be a fun and flirty thing to do” and given tips on “sexting done right”. It also provided information about relevant laws and some of the risks of sending naked images.

Program author Briony O’Keefe argued, “We know they are going to engage in it, so a harm minimisation approach is really important.” However, experts have slammed the program and accused it of promoting misinformation.

Former Victoria Police officer and cyber-safety expert Susan McLean called the information “flakey” and “a crap resource”, and emphasised there was no safe way to send a naked image.

Collective Shout co-founder and advocate for women and girls Melinda Tankard Reist said that encouraging teen girls to crop their heads and faces out of sexualised images serves to further dehumanise girls:

“The art of safe sexting' advises girls to crop out their faces from nude images before sending. This just de-humanises the sender even more and exposes the complicity of the program's designers in encouraging girls to send de-personalised/ disembodied sexual body parts for boys to get off on.”

The program does a disservice to girls by promoting sexting as a potentially fun and sexy activity. The reality is more complicated, with many teen girls reporting feeling pressured and coerced to send nude photos, and a widespread culture of sexual harassment, disrespect and male entitlement.

Growing Up in Pornland: Girls Have Had It with Porn Conditioned Boys- Melinda Tankard Reist

A study out of Northwestern University earlier this year revealed teen girls’ experiences of being pressured to send nude images. Researchers analysed 500 accounts from teenage girls, finding two-thirds had been asked to send explicit photos, with boys engaging in threats and harassment if they did not comply. In response, 20% of the girls gave in.

The adolescent girls shared both immediate and long-term repercussions of saying no to boys’ demands. Out of the 500, only 12 said there was no backlash from refusing boys’ requests for naked images. Girls described feeling trapped, stuck or scared of the consequences of saying both yes or no. One reported death threats after saying no. Read more.

Closer to home, a Plan International Australia and Our Watch survey in 2016 of 600 girls aged 15-19 found that levels of abuse and harassment were endemic:

58% agreed girls often receive uninvited or unwanted indecent or sexually explicit material such as texts, video clips and pornography.

51% agreed that girls are often pressured to take sexy photos of themselves and share them.

82% believe it is unacceptable for a boyfriend to ask a girlfriend to share naked photos of themselves.

Girls as young as ten being coerced into sending sexual images- Collective Shout

The harm minimisation approach which encourages girls to crop photos of identifying features implies that the only harm in underage girls sending naked photos of themselves lies in later being identifiable. However, she would be identifiable by other means if the recipient wanted to get revenge and share the image. It’s also not unheard of for men and boys to photoshop heads onto such photos.

The program completely ignores the overarching problem of girls existing as a pornographic supply for boys. We do not see websites devoted to ‘dick pics’ or to humiliating men and boys, however boys trade sexual images of girls like trading cards. Encouraging girls to participate ‘safely’ does not challenge this culture of objectification or the entitlement of men and boys. It is clear this practice does not quench boys thirst for objectified women, it makes it worse.

“Harm minimisation” fails to address the actual factors at play- the pressures on women and girls to send sexual images against their will. Teaching young women how to acquiesce to men and boys’ coercion and sexual demands is not a solution.

While there is a need to have frank and open discussions with young people about sexting, legitimising the practice as a fun, sexy activity does a great disservice to girls, many of whom have openly described their reluctance.

Far from empowering young women, the ‘Art of Safe Sexting’ encourages underage girls to tolerate and embrace requests for sexual images even while teen girls are reporting feeling trapped, stuck, scared, pressured and coerced. Legitimising sexting does not minimise harm, it undermines girls’ ability to say no.

Further reading:

 Why is Frank Body asking young girls for naked selfies?

‘Beat the p***y up’ – the way we talk about sex with women

 By Jessica Eaton

 This blog contains a discussion of violent language to discuss sex, sexual violence and porn. It also contains the titles to real porn films that a lot of people may find disturbing. Please take care of yourself whilst reading this and seek support after reading if you need to.

As a massive old skool (and sometimes new skool) RnB, Rap and Hip Hop fan, I often find myself experiencing some pretty serious cognitive dissonance to try to enjoy my music without yelling at the radio or crying into my crisps.

As a younger feminist, I used to tell myself that it was okay that women were called bitches and hoes because that’s the way that artist chose to express themselves (I know, I know, so progressive).

As I got older, I started to resent the use of the word ‘bitch’ in my once-favourite songs. I stopped listening to some artists because I couldn’t stand the way they spoke about women and sex. The next challenge was dealing with the rise of female artists using ‘bitch’ and ‘nasty hoe’ to describe themselves. I thought the rise of female MCs, rappers and writers would eliminate this constant woman-hating but it didn’t. Nicki, Cardi B, Lil Kim, Missy Elliott – they made me wanna two-step and cry at the same time.

(Edit: I would just like to add that misogynistic and rape-glorifying lyrics are found in Death Metal too so this issue clearly isn’t unique to my music preferences, but I have never listened to it so didn’t know until someone told me today! Here’s a link.)

It is often the case in music that women sing about loving men and men sing about f*cking women. And it’s this that I want to talk about.

I noticed recently that the range of ways men sing, rap and talk about having sex with women has become inherently violent. They aren’t talking about ‘getting jiggy’ or ‘having fun’ or ‘doing the deed’ – I mean, they are not even calling it sex anymore. Not only that, but they are not even naming or identifying the woman anymore.

I decided to sit and think about all the violent ways men describe having sex with women these days, and came up with this list in about 3 minutes. I am sure there are many more and people will contact me with others.

List of violent terms to describe having sex with women:

Hit that

Hurt that

Smash that

Smack that

F**k that

Merc that

Destroy that

Crush that

Beat that p***y up

Beat it up

Ruin that

Bang that

Nail that

There are two main points here. The first is that sex is being described in very violent terms and the second is that the word ‘that’ is used in place of ‘her’ to objectify the woman they are talking about. These men aren’t saying ‘I would love to have sex with her’ or ‘I would shag her’ or even ‘I would f**k her’ – they are saying ‘I would f**k that’. ‘That’ is not a pronoun. ‘That’ is not a name. ‘That’ is used for objects. I’ll come back to this point.

The first point is the violence in the language. Hit. Destroy. Ruin. Bang. Beat up. Smash. Smack. Hurt. These are words that describe violence and injury. They don’t describe sex. They don’t describe the type of sex any woman wants to have.

When I started to search the terms I had heard and read, I easily found memes, articles, discussions and blogs using this language about women in a completely normalised way. Men saying to their friends ‘The girl next door, I would ruin that!’ or ‘She’s gonna get it hard. Beat that p***y up!’ The image of all of the guys saying they would rape the sleeping girl on the sofa. I found hundreds of song lyrics like the ones I have listened to.

Gucci Mane released a song called ‘Beat it up’ about having sex with women. So did Slim Thug. So did Chris Brown. And no, I’m not talking about one song they all featured on, I’m talking about three separately produced songs about ‘beating that p***y up’.

Here are the lyrics from Slim Thug:

Guess what? I’m f**kin tonight

Whether you know it or not, Ima beat that pussy right

Yeah I’m f**kin tonight, Ima beat it up

In song lyrics, R Kelly says he ‘beats the p***y up like Django’and Lil Wayne says he ‘beat that p***y up like Emmett Till’.

Chris Brown says he f**ks women back to sleep in ‘Back to sleep’. I don’t really know why he would want to make a woman he has sex with fall asleep but the song lyrics are creepy as shit:

F**k you to sleep, wake you up again, I go so deep, beat it up again

Just let me rock, f**k you back to sleep, girl 

Don’t say no, girl, don’t you talk

Just hold on tight to me, girl

F**k you back to sleep, girl.

The issue here is that these influential men in our popular culture and music industry are openly using sexually violent references to having sex with women and then every day adults (and children) are singing along to Chris Brown riffin’ about the women he wakes up to make them have sex with him again when they are too tired. We are so oblivious to what we are listening to, this language quickly becomes the norm.

One article I found listed every artist they could find who referred to sex as ‘beating the p***y up’ and they found over 15 current male artists using that term in hit songs. Jay-Z to Lil Wayne – they were all describing sex as harming women.

After searching for evidence on each one of the terms I listed above, I found a website discussing what ‘destroy that’ and ‘ruin that’ meant and was surprised to find how open men were when talking about what they meant. I had thought that maybe it was being used semi-consciously by men who were using it in banter, but they were using it literally. One page defined it as ‘having sex with her so rough that you cause injuries, the more physical injuries the rougher it probably was’. One man said he used it with his friends to mean destroying or ruining a ‘nice girl’ by having very aggressive sex with her or by taking her virginity.

It reminded me of a film I watched (and use in my teaching) about mail order brides and the way white, wealthy guys were buying and sexually exploiting women as servile brides from deprived areas. There was this one guy who used military metaphors to discuss meeting and having sex with potential brides. He made my skin crawl.

He is sat in a dark club when he says to the camera:

“Uh, the search and destroy mission for today is to circulate, work the room, identify a target and go for it. If plan A doesn’t work, I retreat, rally the troops and then go out and then try plan B uhh to capture the target.”

He doesn’t even say woman. He doesn’t even talk about humans. He talks about destroying and identifying targets.

This links to the second point I wanted to make – that this language dehumanises and dementalises women – it reduces them to their ‘p***y’ or their ‘ass’ that the men are going to ‘hurt’ or ‘hit’ or ‘crush’ or ‘beat that up’. They no longer converse about sex in human terms – they talk in metaphors and disconnected, dehumanised language. They refer to women as ‘that’ or they only talk about her body parts. She is there to be used, abused and hurt for their pleasure.

Where is this sexually violent language coming from?

Well, sorry to be the not-the-fun-kind-of-feminist, but its porn and societal misogyny. There is no doubt about where this is coming from. Work by people like Julia Long and Gail Dines has long told us that porn has become more and more violent, with Long (2012) arguing that over 90% of porn now features violence against women including hitting, slapping, kicking, choking, hurting, whipping and deliberately painful and extremely degrading sex acts.

You only have to look at the titles of porn films on Pornhub or X Videos to see the way they describe women in violent and degrading terms to see where this is coming from.

Here are some examples that are on porn sites today (18th May 2018):

‘Passed out slut letting me f**k her brains out’ (this film is of a clearly unconscious young girl being raped on Pornhub)

‘Unwanted painful anal’ (another allowed to stay on Pornhub despite clearly describing a rape)

‘Rip her up’ (the name of a series of videos in which women are raped)

‘Blonde babe gets brutally slapped and f**ked’

‘Beauty humiliated and ruined – BRUTAL’

‘Teen gets anally destroyed – hear her real screams and crying’

‘Heavily pregnant teen used by men’ (Pornhub allows this!)

Men’s compulsive pornography use has led to increasing numbers seeking treatment, reported the Evening Standard:

One Harley Street clinic has reported a 100 per cent rise in referrals in the past six years. The rise is partly blamed on the volume of high-speed streaming sites that offer hardcore content.

Harley Street psychotherapist Rob Watt, who managed the Priory’s addiction treatment programme, warned that a generation of teenage boys faced difficulty forming healthy relationships if their developing brains were exposed to such endless free porn.

Experts describe the neurological processes in porn users, including teenage boys:

Mr Watt said:

“Sex addicts presenting today are unrecognisable to clients presenting 10 years ago. We are increasingly seeing more people presenting with a compulsive behaviour on pornography and, in the younger generation, this is becoming more pronounced. With porn, you can find bigger, better, faster, harder consistently." 

"Dopamine is the neurochemical of desire and you might as well be on coke, having one line and not putting it down until the bag’s finished. There’s a tolerance level that develops — in other words, what did it for you yesterday doesn’t do it today, and there’s some pretty dark stuff going on out there.”

Psychologists are also concerned that, in the adolescent brain, when an “arousal template” is ingrained, porn users will struggle to maintain future relationships and treat partners respectfully. Mr Watt said this developmental immaturity led youngsters to become “emotionally illiterate and socially inept”.

Read the original piece here.

Online child safety advocate Rachel Downie says parents are unaware of about 80 per cent of what their teen engages in on the internet at home.

Ms Downie, a former teacher, told ABC she had surveyed more than 20,000 students over the last five years, asking "what's something you do on the internet at home that you know you're not allowed to do?"

The results were concerning, with teens viewing violent real-life content, such as fights, muggings and pornography that looks non-consensual.

Photo by Rachel Downie 

From ABC:

Ms Downie said 51 per cent of children, mostly boys, had viewed pornography or other illicit material, while one-fifth of respondents admitted to bullying, trolling and stalking for fun.

For some behaviours, the children themselves were screaming out for stronger regulation.

She said parents were often unaware of how far "down the spiral kids are".

"After every presentation, and it's usually with mums, they want to come chat to me afterwards about the fact that their 12, 13, 14-year-old son is addicted to pornography.

Ms Downie said it is a confusing, unchartered time for parents, exacerbated by the demands of school and society for children to be technologically savvy.

"What we're doing is 'ping, you're 12 here's your phone', 'ping you're 13, here's your own computer' and it's happening much earlier.

Ms Downie went on to give advice to parents on what they can do:

Ultimately, Ms Downie said adequate parental supervision and keeping conversations open is the key to tackling the issue.

"If you're not checking you wouldn't know, and it's not good enough anymore to say 'hey my 12-year-old daughter is a great kid, I really trust her'.

"I'm certainly not an advocate for banning everything because that's not the world we live in, but I am a very strong advocate for your need to know what they're doing.

"It's about being a grown-up and being the boss and getting your techno power back and saying, 'look we're going to set some boundaries around this stuff at home'."

Ms Downie said having those conversations with children and teens was crucial to building helping young people cope in the real and emotional online world.

Opening those lines of communication and setting boundaries should be done earlier, than later. 

Read the article in full here.

*Warning- this blog post contains graphic descriptions of violence in pornography*

“The pornographers did a kind of stealth attack on our culture, hijacking our sexuality and then selling it back to us, often in forms that look very little like sex but a lot like cruelty. The only solution to this is a movement that is fierce in its critique of sexual exploitation and steadfast in its determination to fight for what is rightfully ours.”

-Dr Gail Dines.

Culture Reframed, founded by Gail Dines, has come up with a program to help parents talk about porn with their tween-age children. The Culture Reframed Parents Program currently offers three free online courses that are short and self-paced, equipping parents with the knowledge and tools to support and guide their children.

From the ‘Parents of Tweens’ course content:

“Research indicates that just over 40% of young people view pornography on their phones, with just over 50% streaming or downloading it on computers. Many parents feel overwhelmed by this and want to know, ‘What can I do to help my child?’”

“The Culture Reframed Parents Program is designed to help you have age-appropriate, nuanced, and compassionate conversations with your child. It will give you the skills to establish in your young person a grounded understanding of sexuality based on boundaries, respect and trust.”

The program includes 12 Step-By-Step Modules, scripted conversations, specialist videos along with a range of recommended resources. Areas covered in the course include information on how to teach boundaries, consent and privacy, managing technology, how to lead discussions skilfully and what to actually say.

You can follow Culture Reframed on Facebook to stay up to date on their great work in this space.

Geelong females are being targeted in a pornographic online forum posting sexual images of women and girls without their consent, reported the Geelong Advertiser this week:

A recent post on the image-sharing forum, which shows revenge porn, seeks “good ones” from Geelong and Werribee alongside images of a female in states of undress.

Another post, from December, seeks nudes from Geelong and Werribee of a specific woman who claimed to work in the sex industry.

The site has users from around Australia, and even requests for images of girls who attended certain schools.

Users share images taken from social media platforms including Snapchat.

We were approached for comment:

Grassroots activist group Collective Shout is “frequently hearing stories from adolescent girls of sexual harassment from their male classmates, sexist bullying, requests for nude images, unsolicited sexual images,” spokeswoman Caitlin Roper said.

Ms Roper said the “discussion is often centred on why women take sexual images rather than why men distribute these images without consent to punish and humiliate women.”

“This is not unlike much of the discourse around rape and sexual assault, where women are again being held responsible for the criminal acts of men and expected to modify their behaviour in order to avoid being victimised,” she said.

But we cannot adequately address the rise of image based abuse, or so-called ‘revenge porn’, without considering the significant role of pornography and its toxic messages about men, women and sex.

Mainstream pornography is a “distortion of respect based sexuality”, reinforcing notions of male dominance and aggression and female sexual submission. It fuels a sense of entitlement in men and boys to the bodies of women and girls, who are portrayed as always ‘up for it’ and as existing for men’s use and pleasure. In porn, women’s humanity is diminished.

Pornography is the primary tool of sex education for young people. We can’t underestimate its power in fuelling sexist attitudes towards women. When boys’ introduction to sexuality is the filmed sexual abuse and humiliation of women in pornography, it has an impact on how their real-world interactions with women and girls, and we are seeing it here.

Victims are being encouraged to report images to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner so they can seek “rapid removal” of the material.

Read the full article here.

Three teenagers have a conversation about how online pornography has impacted on their lives in a new video from ABC. The seven-minute video explores the ways in which unrestricted access to pornography shapes young people’s sexuality, their intimate relationships and view of themselves and their bodies.

In a digital age with unrestricted access to hard core pornography, children are being exposed at unprecedented rates and from younger ages. Children are viewing increasingly violent and degrading pornography, typically before they’ve experienced real life sexual encounters. Pornography has become the primary means of sex education for young people, but what does it teach?

“[Porn] is creating an expectation”

Kiki, 19, told ABC she had experienced pressure from male sexual partners to replicate sex acts they had seen in pornography:

“My boyfriend at the time would just nag me and nag me and nag me at the time to do anal. I ended up having to turn around and stop and say, ‘No, I’m not going to do that’ before he retreated… it’s not kind of like ‘Hey, I’m curious about this.’ It’s like, ‘You should do this, I want you to do this.’ They push and push and push.” 

Kiki’s sentiments have been expressed by many young women who have similarly described experiences of coercion and unwanted porn-inspired sex acts instigated by male partners. (Read more here).   

Porn industry blames parents for children’s exposure to porn

Throughout the short video, various spokespeople for the pornography industry shrugged off responsibility for the harms to children who were exposed to hard core pornography, arguing it was up to parents to monitor their child’s internet access.

Ron Jeremy, one of the most famous male porn performers of all time, argued it was not the porn industry’s responsibility to depict healthy sexual relationships. Jeremy, who was a special guest at Sexpo, was last week barred from the industry’s own Adult Video News awards after multiple rape allegations. “Watch your goddamn kids,” he said.

But when the teens featured in the video were asked if they felt their parents could control everything they looked at on the internet, their response was a resounding no. “No, there’s no way you could. To a 13-year-old, parents say ‘No more internet’ so he takes his smartphone down to public wi-fi.”

It’s near impossible for parents to compete with the multi-billion-dollar global sex industry, one that aggressively markets and has successfully mainstreamed its product, and opposes any measures that may curtail its profits- such as age verification on pornographic websites.

Parents need to be educated, but at best, all we can really do is prepare our children for the inevitable.

Trigger warning: sexual abuse.

Melinda Tankard Reist as published on ABC Religion and Ethics. 

"A new angel has opened his wings!"

"We need more men like Hugh in this world today."

These passionate declarations from his Facebook page are among numerous accolades for the porn merchant Hugh Hefner, who recently died aged 91.

A charming trendsetter, brave visionary, legend, pioneer, icon, folk hero - the glorification is seemingly endless.

Big names joined the love-in. Rev. Jesse Jackson tweeted in praise: "Hugh Hefner was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement. We shall never forget him. May he Rest In Peace."

Then there was Larry King, Nancy Sinatra, Paris Hilton (who will "miss him dearly") and Kim Kardashian, who declared her love and gratitude for being part of the "Playboy Family" (she appeared on a 2007 Christmas cover, because nothing says Christmas like breasts spilling out of a red body suit).

He "wanted to make the world a happier, sexier place" gushed CNN. One conservative journal even stated that Hefner's "work celebrates the sexual complementarity that has bound men and women together since the dawn of time."

That a pimp and sexual predator could be glorified as an angel, a role model for men and indeed some kind of saviour figure leading us out of darkness, shows how successfully the Hefner/Playboy myth has been embedded in the popular imagination.

A serial collector of women who kept women as pets, like cute bouncing creatures in a petting zoo, is being hailed a hero. A man whose harem of wives, girlfriends, mistresses and rotating cast of Girls Next Door was projected for the vicarious pleasure of millions of men, is, apparently, a modern secular saint.

While many think Hefner's entire genre involved dewy young women smiling topless in a cornfield, he legitimized and mainstreamed the sex-trade and provided the economic, cultural and legal structures for the current multi-billion dollar market of today and its more hardcore and gonzo evolutions.

By popularising the selling of female flesh through his global industrial masturbation complex, Hefner gave men permission to see woman as existing for their own pleasure - that treating women as sex objects was, indeed, what sophistication looked like. Valuing sexual conquest over intimacy and tenderness has affected probably every woman and girl on the planet ever since. (I have previously documented the experiences of girls with porn-conditioned boys.)

What Hefner achieved was not liberation. It was objectification on an industrial scale. The fact that his magazine was prized more as a masturbatory prop than for its highbrow articles is reflected in the comment in the documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel. Says grinning singer Tony Bennett: "He gave us some of the best literature of our time ... when they got past masturbating they sort of read more ..."

So progressive was Playboy, in fact, that men were also offered women of colour for their onanistic satisfaction. Somehow, objectifying black women as morsels on the masturbation banquet is heralded as a revolutionary step in the civil rights movement rather than just objectification in another colour. Jennifer Jackson was the first black Playmate in 1965 - two years after Martin Luther King's "I have a dream speech." That, it seems, is what breaking down racial barriers looks like: men can ogle naked black bodies as well as white. What a great achievement for African Americans!

All the same, Hefner himself admitted that blond, white women made up most of the models in his pages. "We try to get some ethnic diversity, but we do seem to lean in the direction of blonds," he said.

The brutality of sex with Saint Hef

So, was he really a man who merely loved women? A look inside the Playboy Mansion tests the theory. Beneath the glamorous image, Hefner's playmates testify to filthy rooms, urine soaked carpets thanks to nine dogs, bunnies having to line up and watch and wait for their $1000 a week allowance until Hefner had collected the dog faeces, and strict curfews and iron gates to keep the women in check.

As for the sex, there was no protection. Bunny girls were offered Quaaludes, which Hefner himself called "thigh openers." Although disgusted at the prospect of having sex with him, the "girls" understood that it was "part of the unspoken rules." "It was almost as if we had to do it in return for all the things we had," said one.

Our quintessential romantic needed girl-on-girl action, aided by porn playing on a loop and Viagra, to keep the romance alive.

On her first experience of sex with Hefner, Holly Madison recalls:

"I have never had a more disconnected experience. There was zero intimacy involved. No kissing, nothing. It was so brief that I can't even recall what it felt like beyond having a heavy body on top of mine."

Hefner was a man who, according to his valet, liked to see women suffer:

"He was more interested in watching. He would hire famous male porn stars, including John Holmes, with huge penises and watch them have sex with different girls he brought in. Hugh sat there in his favorite chair, smoking a joint and eating red licorice and watching. I had to go into the room afterwards and if the girls couldn't walk, I would have to escort them to the bedrooms so they could recuperate. Hef sometimes gave bonuses to the women because the sex acts were so painful."

And while Hefner kept the local cosmetic surgery practice in business, too bad if your breast implants burst:

"Hef wasn't a kind man ... He was very brutal to his girlfriends and sex partners. He made sure they had breast implants. In those days, the implants were new and they would shift and burst and I witnessed many women who had this done begging and crying to Hef to help them and he would put them back in the hospital and then discard these women. He didn't care. They were disposable."

A high number of Playmates have died young from drug overdose, suicide, homicide, or some other unnatural cause, including Bill Cosby's particular favourite who later ended it all with a bullet to the head.

Playboy: A paedophile playground

It wasn't just official Playboy bunnies who were expected to serve Saint Hef. Laurin Crosson, a fellow activist and sex industry survivor who runs a safe house for women escaping prostitution in the United States, shared this on her (personal) Facebook page:

"But especially thanks for asking me if your 'photographer' could take a picture of my vagina for your 'private collection', you asked this in front of a room of people, all seeming to laugh at my uncomfortable stutter. I was 16. I was scared and felt so pressured."

Hefner liked to display the charms of the younger members of the female species. They were used as centrefolds and playmates, diversifying the masturbatory mix on offer to his loyal followers. This truth relating to Playboy's girl-child centrefolds and bunny-eared girl children has not been properly acknowledged - certainly not by the writers of rosy obituaries. How could this practice go unremarked by so many?

Playboy linked "innocent children with strong Playboy orgasm-based stimuli" in the words of U.S. researcher Judith Reisman, who documented Playboy's treatment of pre-pubescent girls. Playboy, Reisman found, was deliberate in its eroticisation of girl children. In one year alone, 39% of Playboy centrefolds were of children under 12. Brooke Shields, then 10, was posed as paedo-fantasy material in Playboy Press 1975 publication Sugar N Spice, made up to look like an adult woman in a girl's body. Eva Ionesco, at 11, became the youngest model ever to appear in a Playboy nude pictorial. One image, depicting a girl lying face down naked with a doll on Disney sheets, is captioned: "BABY DOLL. It's easy to feel paternalistic toward the cuddly type above. Naturally, she digs forceful father figures, so come on strong, Big Daddy."

Then there were the child sex abuse cartoons, also documented by U.S. psychiatrist and feminist Linnea Smith. While denying it would ever publish such offensive imagery, Smith located published pictures of children in sexual (abuse) encounters with adults.

Sexual violence, and other forms of "Entertainment for Men"

Playboy rape cartoons, making a joke out of the gravest human rights violation experienced by women, were also popular. In 1986, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin appeared before the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography observed of the rape porn genre:

"When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute. You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else's freedom and someone else's fun."

Wife beating also fit within the magazine's "Entertainment for Men" subtitle. As recently as 2000, Playboy published a Romanian article entitled "How to Beat Your Wife... Without Leaving Prints," which provided instructions in carrying out wife battery without getting caught.

Behold, then, your hero of the sexual revolution: paedo-fantasies, girl children depicted being violated, rape comics, sniggers over sexual harassment in the workplace, wife battery as the stuff of humour - on these evils, Hefner's celebrity sycophants have nothing to say.

Hefner feminism: Exploitation, not empowerment

As if these crimes were not enough, Hefner also helped colonise the world with porn culture: his tentacles extending to Playboy-themed products for children - including baby jumpsuits and dummies - and young people. Just take, for instance, accessory store Diva selling Playboy-themed necklaces to girls (including "Playmate of the month" themes), Priceline selling Playboy makeup ("Hef's favourite lip gloss"), Adairs bedding store selling Playboy sheets, and Bras N Things with its Playboy range.

Bras N Things dutifully posted a tribute to Hefner on its Instagram page: "The man that inspired it all ..." On this we can agree.

Glosswitch, writing in the New Statesman, describes the depth and reach of Hefner's harmful impact:

"Hefner feminism is all around us. It's the feminism of pre-teen girls seeking designer vaginas; of men who rent out vaginas and wombs; of women who diet, shave, starve and never say no. We're not free from oppression, but oppression is no longer stigmatised. Isn't that enough?"

It is also the feminism of many young women known to me, who subject themselves to porn-flavoured photoshoots and post their images on Instagram with the hashtags like #feminism and #empowerment alongside - because this is how empowerment is packaged to girls in porn culture.

But Hefner was not about equality or empowerment for women. (The self-interested funding of abortion rights doesn't count - after all, pregnant bunny girls didn't make nice centrefolds and what self-made Playboy-aspiring man wanted to be saddled with some kid he'd unfortunately sired when all he wanted was sex?)

In a 1999 interview with Hefner, NPR's Terry Gross commented on the 52-year age and power disparity between Hefner and his "girlfriends," his life experience and the fact he has amassed a fortune; she observed: "They're not even out of college yet so it wouldn't be possible to function as your equal." Hefner replied: "Is that of some importance?"

Female equality was not important to him - so why are so many people saying it was? Hefner sold a commodified view of women, and branded it as a form of freedom. What he did was, more accurately, orchestrate a diabolically effective backlash against the perceived "womanisation" of America. It is no wonder, then, that "sexual freedom" came to look an awful lot like a male fantasy.

But this propaganda, outfitted in bunny ears and cottontails, has resulted in a putrid, retrograde and destructive legacy which no amount of post-mortem deification can sanitise.

In a final indignity to the most famous woman he famously exploited, Hefner is to be buried next to Marilyn Monroe, whose image he used on his first cover without her permission or payment. Though born in the same year as Hefner, she was dead at 36 after being "digested by the culture that consumed her." And it is this culture which is the house that Hef built.

As published on ABC Religion and Ethics.