Enough is enough: from TV’s “crime porn” to endemic violence, the assault on women has to stop
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/enough-enough-tv-s-crime-porn-endemic-violence-assault-women-has-stop
Violent images of women onscreen fuel violence against women in society. Actress Doon Mackichan explains why she now has a zero-tolerance policy on taking part in any storylines that use violence against women as entertainment.
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Rape is a human rights violation and has been defined as a form of TORTURE by international criminal courts. I would argue that TV and film are exacerbating this issue with increasingly hardcore elements. Once seen, you can’t unsee it, and like abuse, it’s insidious, attacking women’s confidence and self-esteem.
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...The so-called trickle-down effect of porn into our culture is now nothing less than a tsunami and I would argue that we’re in a state of emergency, or a human rights scandal as Amnesty International says – and boundaries of acceptability no longer exist.
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Porn is everywhere. Girls say they feel embarrassed, awkward – does it affect their idea of sex? Shaving pubic hair, getting breast implants, requesting labial surgery seems to say yes. Girls may feel that they are expected to be treated as sex-objects, and that they just have to live with it. Explicit material is way too accessible and the extreme has become normal. Rape is OK. When I spoke to my daughter about this – she was about 16 at the time – it became clear that of her generation, who have been so exposed to so much hardcore material, quite a few of her peer group were saying they were “bisexual” for safety, as if they felt they were expected to perform some of what they had seen. The links in the media, and on TV, to abuse in the playground and then straight to domestic abuse is NOT DIFFCULT TO SEE. School is the most common setting for sexual harassment. Humiliating and degrading girls at an early age is commonplace, and sexist bullying an integral art of school life. Anti- sexism activist and filmmaker Byron Hurt says that feminism is the solution to countering the masochistic culture which is so prevalent amongst young people in London and leads to the terrifying knife crime that kills mostly black boys. “Men are drip-fed through media, religion, sport, family, culture, porn, prostitution and TV to devalue, exploit and stereotype women and girls. Men are in denial about the level of violence against women.”
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The percentage of women directing, writing, producing and shooting films has been in decline since 1998. In Hollywood, only five per cent of directors are females, and 15 per cent of writers. If you have all white males working behind the scenes, then where are the people saying NO? Enough is enough? Oscar voters and the industry top brass are overhwhelmingly white, male, and middle-aged. The film Bridesmaids is a fluke, a one off, just like The Hurt Locker. It hasn’t encouraged a flurry of films starring or directed by women.
more at link: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/07/enough-enough-tv-s-crime-porn-endemic-violence-assault-women-has-stop
Depressing, but should be read by all.
If I were a young single woman today I think I would be gay.
= new reply since forum marked as read
(And someone had called them "dead chick" shows"
what I noticed, was that nearly every dead women who wasn't a random serial killer victim, had some sort of "moral" failing; she was a prostitute, a cheating wife, a woman after money, a rejected women, a woman who rejected.
When found, the bodies often seemed posed ever so slightly in a sexual manner (unless sex was involved, then posing turned into unapologetic quasi-porn.
That's not the part I meant I saw. There was a story line in one of the shows where some crazy asshole was kidnapping women, kept them in a cellar prison, raped them until they were pregnant, and having them cared for by the previous kidnapped and raped woman, who had an earlier child. That woman caregiver was then murdered after the birth of the baby and he went off to start the cycle again. I can't remember what he did with the kids. I think he kept the boys and dropped off the gilts or something. I can't remember how many kids or women.
But that was it, I had had it with those bullshit shows.
I like a lot of weird stuff, old Italian horror movies, "revenge" movies--I've read my share of deliberately misogynistic/misandric "horror porn" (it doesn't pretend to be anything else and has absolutely no redeeming qualities except an incredible sense of the ironic) I even watched "The Human Centipede" part one--- but I was through.
These shows aren't a personal quick-- these are mainstream TV, or mainstream movies that fetishizes this bullshit, and spoon feeds it to the general public. Who then, of course not realizing exactly how easily manipulated they've been, will defend their 'right' to watch it (well fucking of course) and then deny it affects them in any way.
Which is, of course bullshit.
