Rape porn: a ban is not the answer

Content note: This post discusses rape

There have been a fair few debates about rape porn since campaigners have called for it to be banned. It is a thorny topic, and one where, unfortunately, a lot of people are saying some dodgy shit.

One of the biggest problems with this conversation is everyone seems to be talking at cross-purposes about what rape porn actually is. As far as I can unpick from the original statements, the campaigners have been talking about porn with simulated rape scenes, rather than filmed images of rape and abuse. The latter is already highly illegal, and I cannot in good conscience refer to what that is as “rape porn”, much as I wouldn’t refer to images and video of child abuse as “child porn”. To do otherwise completely elides the nature of what it really is: a cinematic trophy of a violation. There is nothing defensible about such double vi0lations: the rape, and then the publicising it.

Rape porn, the simulated stuff, is distinct from this, as it can be consensual. I am not saying it always is, as goodness knows there can be a terrible attitude towards workers’ rights in the porn industry which is something that needs tackling (and cannot be tackled with stigma towards the work that they do. When it is not consensual, it falls under the category above). However, it can be consensual. In private life, people explore rape fantasies fully consensually. In porn, this fantasy is also explored, and porn performers are perfectly capable of consenting to the work they do, about as much as anyone is capable of consenting to anything under capitalist patriarchy.

But what of the audience? As Emily Rose points out, it’s not just rapists who get off on rape porn. And does rape porn really contribute to a culture of normalising rape more than anything else? I am not so sure: part of the way rape porn is packaged is often with the hook that this is wrong, and this is taboo, and that is what is supposed to make it sexy. And yes, of course, our culture is steeped in rape, a background drone of violence and a dismissal that any of it is a problem. I am not sure why the focus of this campaign is on porn with simulated rape: why single this out when one cannot turn on the TV without seeing rape everywhere, when one cannot load up the internet without seeing jokes about rape, when one cannot walk through Bloomsbury without seeing posters advertising a conference organised by rape apologists? I do not see why there is more of an objection to people getting off on fantasies about rape rather than laughing about it, rather than trivialising it, rather than dismissing it as an entirely normal part of sex. Sexual violence is fundamentally about an expression of power rather than the sex itself.

I am not suggesting we should ban all of these things along with rape porn. Sadly, things will never be as easy as a simple demand to ban this or that. It changes nothing, it just pushes it out of sight. Furthermore, bans on specific types of porn do little to actually stop it from happening. The first porn I ever saw, when I was wee and the internet was a newfangled thing to have in one’s house, was of a man having sex with a cow. This is illegal in the UK, but it was quite literally the first thing I stumbled upon when I went looking for porn. The way that the bans are deployed to often as a weapon against people society doesn’t much like anyway. The queers and the  kinksters and the porn performers themselves. For a fine example of this, look no further than the recent fisting trials. So I am highly dubious that a ban would do anything to solve the problem of cultural acceptance as rape, and, if anything, may exacerbate problems for those who society would rather look the other way from anyway.

So what might work instead? My ultimate solution is the same as ever, and the one which is unpopular among liberals: we need that fucking revolution. Capitalism, rape culture, patriarchy, they all need to go. I understand that this might take a while, so I also have a transitional demand.

When people play with power dynamics, negotiation is utterly crucial. A conversation beforehand about what everyone involved wants, what their boundaries are, a safeword when “no” and “stop” are to be ignored. These are measures which are vital for safety of everyone playing, but they are also pivotal in helping everyone involved enjoy the scene as such negotiation ensures that people are getting what they want. Often, BDSM porn features an interview with the participants before and after, talking about what they want and what they enjoyed about the scene. Sometimes, the process of negotiation is shown.

Showing this process of negotiation would go far to mitigate some of the problems within porn. And not just in the edgy BDSM porn, but to extend this practice to vanilla porn. To normalise the process of negotiation and enthusiastic consent by embedding it in the porn we watch. For the stuff wherein non-consent is the fantasy, this can go at the beginning. And in vanilla porn, wouldn’t it be nice to see the ongoing process of enthusiastic consent through communication during sex? The performers could decide what they would and would not like to do, and we would all be party to this dialogue and begin to use it ourselves.

And then we smash everything, because that revolution still needs to happen.

Things I read this week that I found interesting.

Things. I read them.

For Iain (Roz Kaveney)- Raise a dram for Iain M Banks as you read this poem.

Thin Blue Crimes: On ASAB (sadkant)- Are all soldiers bastards? A thought-provoking structural analysis.

Edinburgh sauna raids highlight the invisibility of sex workers (Claire Askew)- A crucial analysis of the situation up in Edinburgh and what it means for sex workers.

Press needs to take a hard look at itself after attack on Lucy Meadows (Jennie Kermode)- Reaction to the role the media played in the death of teacher Lucy Meadows.

life won’t begin when you’re thin & thoughts on community. (Arched Eyebrow)- A gloriously uplifting and very welcome dose of body positivity.

What I Would Tell a Person New to Kink (The Buzz)- Some advice about kink and the kink community which often one ends up learning a little later than ideal.

Why your hymen isn’t going anywhere (Sarah Woolley)- Sarah busts some myths about hymens and highlights the need for better sex education.

Love and Afrofeminism: 5 Core Self-Care Principles Every Activist Should Live By (Spectra Speaks)- Important advice. We need to look after ourselves in this revolution.

20 Things Never to Say to a Friend Who Confides in You That They’ve Been Sexually Assaulted (Feministe)- Read. And then don’t say these things, FFS.

Rape Porn: Rapists by Proxy? (Musings of a rose)- A frank and honest post from a rape survivor who enjoys rape porn.

Gender Trouble, Racial Salvation and the Tragedy of Political Community in ‘Game Of Thrones’ (The Disorder of Things)- A critique of problematic elements in seasons two and three of Game of Thrones. So good, I wish I’d written it myself.

And finally, an inexplicable corgi lobster.

“What are you doing, except snarking on Twitter?”: Ableism and activism

This has been pissing me off for a while, and it continues to piss me off. When receiving criticism, an altogether-too-popular retort is “Well what have you done lately? You’re just sitting there snarking on the internet.” From the dick-swinging manarchists deflecting from sexism, to the liberals upset that you criticised their precious petition, the war-cry is howled across digital space with alarming regularity. And there is not one thing about this silly little statement that is OK.

Let’s deal with the fact that it is an obvious deflection first. Rather than an attempt to address any criticism of tactics or ideology, asking “well, what have you done?” is a clumsy sidestep, an admission of having no actual answer or will to engage, and about as strong an answer as “I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?”

Secondly, and I cannot stress this enough, it makes you sound like an undercover cop. If you ask someone to list their activist credentials, I find it very difficult to believe that you are not attempting to gather intelligence and will add any answers to a dossier. In its own clumsy way, it is a fairly decent tactic for the undercover cop to employ, the request to produce an inventory of personal involvement in activism being such a ubiquitous demand. It can goad people into divulging information that it is not necessarily safe to divulge in a climate of surveillance and a hard line against anyone who dares to oppose the murky forces of the state.

And, to further the comparisons with the police, saying “what are you doing, except snarking on Twitter” is ableist as all fuck. The advent of social media was a boon for a lot of people, finally broadening the possibility of involvement to people who had been excluded from many more traditional channels of engagement. The fact of the matter is that for some, it is only possible or safe to get involved through social media. And is that a problem? No, not at all. As this case study from Zedkat shows, Twitter feminism has real, tangible results.

And the intangibles are just as important too. What is dismissed as snark is something which too many privileged people fear: criticism. Social media allows for instant accountability, which is one of its strengths. Unfortunately, a lot of privileged people don’t really like this instant accountability, which leads them to be so dismissive in such an ableist way. Yet it is criticism which makes us stronger, and criticism which means that we can get our theory and our tactics in order. We absolutely should discuss the problems with what we are doing, and criticisms which come from those whose voices have been silenced are perhaps the most important. The voices of the people who are “only on Twitter” are ones which have seldom been heeded throughout history, and now is the time to listen.

We are facing a seemingly insurmountable enemy, a hydra with many heads, and ultimately our struggles all intersect. The class struggle is bound to other oppressions, and every liberation struggle is connected. As such, we need a diversity of tactics. But this does not mean we should be uncritical of tactics used: far from it. We need to be open to criticism, rather than dismissive. What is thrown away as an irrelevance is crucial. It is essential our revolution is done without pissing on those already pissed on by this vile state of affairs. And for that, once again, we need to listen to this criticism. If your response to criticism is this flavour of ableism, you’re probably a bit of a bellend, and you should try not being a bit of a bellend.

And so, let’s stop hearing this risible demand, this feeble deflection bound up in ableism. We should be better than that.

Things I read this week that I found interesting.

I read some things. I found them interesting. Maybe you will, too.

Alien vs Predator fight over intersectionality (Flavia Dzodan)- Aside from the brilliant title, this is a really important piece about erasure of women of colour.

Tea Flasks and Fascists (Graham’s Grumbles)- That thing where the EDL were won around by tea? Here’s why that’s unlikely to work elsewhere.

The Kumbayah Myth (Southside Remittances)- Related to the above, in a way. On why the “why can’t we just all be nice to each other and racism will stop” is a nonsense.

Stephen Fry, suicide, and the cycle (Secret Life of a Feminist Depressive)- TW for suicide, but this piece is a beautifully-written articulation of feeling suicidal.

Taking sides (Sam Ambreen)- On why it’s bullshit to talk about taking sides.

Anti-fascists should be free to stand their ground against the far right (Dan Trilling)- Important piece on the worrying trend of police arresting antifascists.

Neurokink; or, the time that I turned a board game into a sex toy (Project Neurokink)- OMG OMG OMG this is like the awesomest, geekiest project ever, and I look forward to seeing more of it!

And finally, something nice to do with a creepy adult doodle pad.

Do women not want to be friends with sluts? A review of a study.

Is there a word for studies which confirm existing prejudices so are trumpeted everywhere as there now being scientific backing for such prejudices? If not, there should be.

The latest that has come to my attention is a study which is being reported as showing that women don’t want to be friends with women who have had a lot of sexual partners, while men don’t mind as much if their male friends are getting a lot of sex. Entitled “Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness“, the study claims to provide some support for a sexual double standard and suggests these findings might have an evolutionary basis. Male and female participants were provided with a profile of a fictional person, and asked questions pertaining to friendship with them. The only difference between the profiles was how many sexual partners the fictional person had had: two, or twenty.

As with most of these prejudice-confirming studies, though, there are a few problems with how the authors reached their conclusions. As with so many studies of this ilk, there is a huge issue with sampling, and the generalisability of this study. Participants were US college students, the overwhelming majority of whom were economically privileged–only 11% rated themselves as working class or lower middle class. But most importantly of all, gay and bisexual participants were excluded from the study to ensure that none of the results reflected any sort of sexual attraction (because, apparently, queer folk are unable to just be friends with heterosexuals). The findings, therefore, can only ever be generalised to heterosexuals and be applied to heterosexual culture. This is something which has not been reported in any media discussions of the study, probably due to a combination of the fact that journalists tend to regurgitate press releases rather than read studies, and a hefty dose of good old-fashioned heterosexism.

There is also a major problem with the stats used in this study. When conducting statistical tests, we use a probability that the finding was down to chance. The conventionally-accepted figure for a statistically significant finding is that there is only a 5% possibility that this finding is due to chance, and it’s important to report the values of this probability as a p-value, where we convert the percentage into a decimal. For example, p=.04 is statistically significant, meaning the result is unlikely to be due to chance. Meanwhile, p=.09 is not significant as it’s more likely that the findings were just chance. In this study, several findings were reported as being “marginally significant”. The threshold for this was p<.08. “Marginal significance” is a phrase which pisses me the fuck off, as it means it actually isn’t significant by any conventions which are used, it’s just kind of close and the authors wanted something else to talk about.

Then we run into another problem. When multiple tests are run, the possibility of a false positive increases. At a significance threshold of p=.05, if a researcher were to run 100 statistical tests, five would come up as significant just by chance. So it’s important, when you’re doing a lot of statistical tests, to adjust for this. The authors of this paper didn’t. The good news is, there’s enough data there for me to undertake a quick and dirty* adjustment called a Bonferroni Correction. As I said above, the generally-accepted significance threshold if p<.05. A Bonferroni Correction takes this significance threshold and divides it by the number tests run. Charitably discounting the 64 descriptive stats tests run, I count 160 tests undertaken (though I may have missed a few). p<.05 divided by 160 gives us the significance threshold of p<.0003, and from the data tables, it looks like there isn’t much that’s significant by this measure. Some findings are reported as p=<.001, although we cannot conclude from the information available whether they manage to reach the revised threshold.

For those of you whose eyes glazed over during that dry statistical excursion, take the findings of this study with a hefty pinch of salt.

If you did read the stats paragraph, you’ll notice I’m feeling charitable today, so now it’s time to talk about something I found really interesting in this paper, and I’m a little sad the authors didn’t examine more. Along with filling in questionnaires which largely formed the basis of the analysis, participants were also invited to write down things they liked and disliked about the fictional person. Almost everyone, men and women, had something negative to say about sexuality, even when it was the fictional person who had only had two sexual partners. These negative things included negative statements about extramarital sex and stigmatising phrases like “whore-like tendencies”.

Conclusions

We cannot draw the conclusions the authors and overexcited journalists have drawn–that women don’t want to be friends with slutty women. What we can see, though, is that among heterosexual US college students, there is still a pretty dodgy attitude towards sexuality, with people holding views which are generally quite negative even when a fictional person has had relatively few sexual partners. This is something we need to work on as a society: sex is a thing a lot of people do, and it’s much nicer to do it without judgment from peers. We need to support others in having safe sex rather than think unpleasant things about them, accepting people. We’ve all internalised a lot of shit, living as we do in a society with a decidedly wack view of sexuality. And that needs to change.

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*Why do I find Bonferroni Corrections quick and dirty? Because I’m a Monte Carlo Simulation gal. Far more fun, you just get to leave a computer running while you go out for lunch and it feels like you’re working. Also, it’s more robust, or something, but mostly it’s the fact you get to pop out for lunch.

Why I don’t want a woman Doctor right now

The guessing game cycle of working out who the next lead in Doctor Who is upon us again. You know, the one where we shout out names of actors we like and then when the character is finally cast look baffled and go, “Who? Who even is he? My show is RUINED FOREVER!”

I use he/him pronouns here, because despite much of the wishlist of dream castings being women, the role will almost certainly go to a man. Which, at the moment, is probably a good thing.

Now, I fervently disagree with the Daily Mails and Louise Mensches of the world, adding their voices to the cavalcade of squawking from the misogynistic fanboys that the Doctor has to be played by a man. These whines about a potential threat to male supremacy, dressed up as false concerns about political correctness and the integrity of canon are nonsense. They’re completely fucking nonsense. A woman Doctor could be really, really fucking cool. Or, indeed, a genderqueer Doctor, a non-binary identified Doctor, or anywhere across the beautiful rainbow of gender. There are so many actors I would love to see in the role: Tilda Swinton as a circumspect Doctor; Sue Perkins as an exuberant Doctor; Judi Dench completely schooling the children in how to get shit done.

However, this all depends on the writer and who’s in charge of deciding the Doctor’s destiny.

And unfortunately that person right now is Stephen fucking Moffat.

As you might gather, I am hardly the Moff’s biggest fan, thinking him something of a colossal sexist. I can see, nightmarishly clearly, just how badly he would fuck up a woman Doctor. She would regenerate, and upon realising she is a woman, announce proudly “I’ve got boobs! Marvellous, exciting boobs!” She would take up with a male companion, because I cannot see Moff allowing women to travel space and time without some male supervision. And she’d fall in love with this male companion, because that’s how women work on Planet Moff. The fact she had regenerated as a woman would become a great, plot-driving mystery, as women are mysterious on Planet Moff.

I cannot see any way that a woman Doctor handled by the Moff would be written and characterised well. All I can see is car crashes.

So not yet, I don’t want a woman Doctor just yet. Not under Moff. He’s got to go before a woman Doctor would stand a chance at being anything other than simultaneously the butt of a joke and the Greatest Mystery In The Universe.

Poly Means Many: What is cheating?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at polymeansmany.com

This month’s Poly Means Many topic is on relationship ethics, and why what it is we do is not the same as cheating. To me, the answer to this seems fairly obvious, but then I look back to before I knew that poly was even possible, and I realise that perhaps it isn’t. And I think on my experience, and what I consider cheating and I find myself wondering exactly what cheating is.

My first experience of cheating was the breakdown of the relationship from that-one-time-I-was-in-a-mono-relationship-with-a-man-for-five-years. It ended because he cheated on me: to what extent, I do not know, but I know that it happened and I know that our relationship circled the drain for a few months and then ended and I spent a while moping around in a dressing gown crying and eating sweets. It wasn’t so much whatever had transpired physically or emotionally between my ex and that someone else which had bothered me. It was the dishonesty, the refusal to tell me anything.

I also have experienced the other end of cheating in monogamy. I once had sex with someone who was in a monogamous relationship. I knew. I didn’t care.

Have I experienced cheating in poly relationships? It’s hard to say. I once had a partner who had a rather poor attitude towards condom use. We were fluid-bonded, or so I thought–meaning we did not use condoms with one another, and as I understood it we would use condoms with other partners. He didn’t, not always. That was not OK. I sometimes wonder if perhaps I was not clear enough about what exactly it meant, the fluid-bonding, but at the same time he must have known that he was exposing me to risks without ever bothering to even mention it. It echoes back to that first experience of cheating I had: I might not have minded the behaviour itself had I just been given the information to make these decisions. Yes, I did cry in a dressing gown while stuffing my face with sweets for a while after.

What about my own personal set of relationship ethics? I am honest with my partners about what I do. I am less honest about my feelings, a lot of the time, because scars from bad things that happened sometimes tie my tongue and sometimes stop me from saying “Hey, I’m not OK” unless asked. But I’m honest when I’m asked, and I’m upfront about this particular shortcoming of mine and those who love me know to read the signs and check with me if there’s something up. And that’s why I love them. It takes a lot for me to open up to people, and I need handling with care until I am able to trust someone not to break me.

I suppose, as I reflect, I have come to the conclusion that relationship ethics largely boil down to trust, and cheating is a violation of trust through dishonesty, whether by omission or commission. Cheating is not inherent to any form of relationship, and poly people can cheat just as surely as mono people.

But to me, relationship ethics encompass more than mere honesty: my trust in people has been violated through other routes than cheating. Some people have violated emotional and physical boundaries. The bad bit of my brain always blames myself for not adequately enforcing my own boundaries; the rest of me knows this is a nonsense but still finds itself listening to the bad bit. It is honest to say “Oh, you have this boundary, do you? Well, I’m going to cross it, because that’s how I roll,” but it is not ethical.

Trust is a gift. Be careful what you do with it.

Things I read this week that I found interesting

Didn’t read much, because fascists keep showing up and I keep having to oppose them, but here’s some things I read this week that I found interesting, some of it not necessarily written this week. Please drop me more links I may find interesting.

Standing on the shoulders of giants (Reni Eddo-Lodge)- Reni takes us on a journey through the same argument that keeps being had, from Sojourner Truth to Audre Lourde, via bell hooks. Let’s stop this happening now, please.

White privilege? Check (Sam Ambreen)- Sam articulates continuing righteous dismay with white feminists.

Louise Mensch, take a lesson on privilege from the internet (Laurie Penny)- In which Laurie completely schools anti-intersectional commentators, explaining some basics and giving them no excuse to plead ignorance.

The Dictionary and Marginalised People (Womanist Musings)- You know that annoying thing where someone stubbornly rims their dictionary rather than engage in a discussion on social justice? Here’s why that’s bullshit.

And finally, GBC Legal are amazing, and have been doing invaluable work in the last week. They train legal observers and can send them when a protest is happening, provide information about rights and do support for people who have been arrested during political activism. They need money to keep doing the invaluable work they do. Can you help them?

Louise Mensch’s “reality based feminism”: whose reality?

Oh dear. Louise Mensch has been at it again with the Tory feminism. This time, she’s upset about people telling her to check her privilege, displaying a profound lack of understanding of intersectional feminism and the notion of what privilege is and cissexism, all of which she has somehow managed to conflate together because she understands it so little. Also, I think she’s watched The Life of Brian recently. Anyway, for the most part it is the same tedious anti-intersectional twaddle which tends to come from high-profile people who have had their fingers burned by being challenged on some dingleberries they’ve been spouting and lack the basic level of self-reflection to learn from the experience.

However, Louise Mensch has a solution to the problem! She calls for a reality-based feminism, which is basically this:

American feminism gets organised. It sees where power lies, and it mobilises to achieve it. It gets its candidates elected. Feminism here is about running for office, founding a company, becoming COO of Facebook or Yahoo. It is power feminism that realises that actual empowerment for women means getting more money, since money and liberty often equate, and being able to legislate or influence. Hillary Clinton shifted from First Lady to Senator. Before that she was a powerful lawyer.

…

And by the way, reality-based feminism – where you achieve, try to earn lots of money, run for office, campaign for measurable goals like defeating Sen. Todd Akin – is not a province of Conservative feminism alone. When I think of a true feminist of the left that I admire I think of Stella Creasy MP and her campaign against payday loans. She’s doing something. She ran for office. She got involved in the Labour party. She matters immensely. She will change things.

This is apparently what feminism should be fighting for according to Louise Mensch. The tiny number of high-paid positions which are near-impossible to attain due to material and social circumstances. Forget fighting for not having to live in fucking fear every day, forget fighting to be recognised as a human being, forget fighting for survival. In Louise Mensch’s reality, feminism is about getting a well-paid job, and fighting only battles on the lowest difficulty setting with an easy win guaranteed.

And I suppose it’s good for her that this is the only thing that she needs. Good for her that most of her problem is that people say she’s privileged on the internet, because if that’s her problem, then she really is staggeringly privileged. This privilege has bestowed upon her a staggering lack of empathy and imagination, a lack of any ability to see how impossible her vision is for the vast amount of women.

Louise Mensch thinks that everything she did was entirely her own doing, a shocking degree of egocentrism which most people grow out of by the age of three. There is absolutely no consideration that perhaps she lucked out at the life lottery in order to get where she is. She believes it to be possible to anyone, concluding with a somewhat frightening peek at her ideal future.

The picture at the top is of me at school aged 14. Big glasses, nerdy, feminist, ambitious, idolising Thatcher, and determined to be famous, to be an author, and to be rich. I was at private school my parents couldn’t really afford because I bust my ass and won a 100% academic scholarship. I always believed in myself and I had and have no intention of checking my privilege for anyone. I earned it. I hope the next generation of young women feel the same.

Imagine this future, where women squabble like a flock of pigeons, pecking at the scraps patriarchy chooses to throw us. A future utterly devoid of any solidarity, just women kicking down our sisters, piling their limp forms into a ladder to get that executive position. Imagine a future where we no longer dream of better and hope for better, hope for a change to a society which is inherently oppressive, crying out for an end to capitalism and kyriarchy. We would compete to be the chosen ones and turn a blind eye to continuing violence and horrors, never looking back just ruthlessly making sure that it is never us who are victims. Better someone else. It would be Mad Max in shoulder pads.

And if we won, we would mistakenly believe that somehow we earned it all, which is far better than the truth: we got lucky. If we lost, we would be blamed for our misfortune, our inability to play the game correctly.

It would be quaint, Louise Mensch’s belief that there is a pure meritocracy and that circumstances do not affect it, were it not just the stick that is used to beat us again and again and again.

The current state of affairs has benefited Louise Mensch, and so she does not want to rock the boat and enact any sort of change to the system. This is why she wants to maintain her reality, stubbornly attempting to swat away anyone who reminds her that it a hefty heap of luck supplemented her hard work to get her where she is today. She decries those who are not rooted in her reality.

And yet, by insistent focus on how things cannot change, all she betrays is that she is stagnant, and set in her ways. She is disgusted by dreamers, those of us who see that the system is broken and should not survive, those of us who hope for better. We flow like a small mountain stream, clearer and brighter, while Mensch and her ilk are a set of foetid puddles, unmoving and separate. Will we one day roar into a river, we dreamers? I like to hope so, because I have something Louise Mensch does not: hope and a vision that things can be different.

Lose the lad mags: a round-up and something that’s bugging me

UK Feminista and Object unveiled their latest project earlier this week: telling shops to get rid of lad mags, or it might break equality law, constituting sexual harassment. Now, I’m not particularly convinced by the legal argument, with even the lawyers couching their analysis in “may” rather than “does” constitute sexual harassment or discrimination.

I’m also not particularly convinced by the arguments surrounding objectification of women underpinning it, and have similar reservations to those surrounding the No More Page 3 campaign.

However, I’m late to the party in critiquing Lose the Lad Mags. It looks like others have got there first and made some very good points, so I am going to link to a few things which are worth reading.

Dangerous Dolls: ‘Object’ and Lose the Lads’ Mags (plasticdollheads)
Is it cold outside Kat? (itsjustahobby)
Lose the magging sexism (Squeamish Bikini)

All of these cover many of the problems fairly well: that sexism in magazines are not a problem limited to Nuts and Loaded; that objectification arguments are missing the point by focusing solely on image; that lad mags are a symptom of the problem rather than a cause; that banning something isn’t necessarily the best way forward.

I have another quibble to add. The campaigners have made a statement, as have lawyers involved, but there are voices missing: the voices of women who work in shops where lads’ mags are stocked and feel harassed and discriminated against by being forced to handle them. It is their voices which should be front and central in the Lose the Lad Mags campaigns, not those of spokespeople drafting official press releases.

It is their voices, their needs and wants, that matter.

And I suspect my feelings about this campaign would be very different if it weren’t led by lawyers and professional activists. A group of women who work in retail, gathering together to organise against an employment practice that harms them is a different thing entirely to a top-down campaign organised by groups who exist largely to get rid of lad mags. What it feels like here is instrumentalising some possible concerns that workers may have about an employment rights issue, in order to push an agenda. I say “possibly” here because in all the noise, we haven’t heard the voices of workers who may feel harassed here.

There is a world of difference between people who are most troubled by an issue leading on finding a solution, and an edict about how to solve a problem coming from above. Such top-down organisation is inherently paternalistic, smacking of a perception of knowing what is best for those poor little women. Is this really a pressing employment rights issue for women who work in shops? Maybe. We don’t know, because we’re only hearing from activists and lawyers telling us what they think and how they imagine women working in shops should feel.

What this campaign should look like, if it is indeed a major problem affecting workers, is support. These big organisations should not be leading, but quietly providing resources and a microphone, as it is not their battle. This battle belongs to the women workers who feel harassed and discriminated against, who find themselves in already-precarious retail work with little to do. These issues of workers’ rights are all part of the class struggle. Unfortunately, Lose the Lad Mags has not connected these dots, nor has it provided any solutions:  I do not see any offers from Lose the Lad Mags to help with legal fees, no guidance in organising in the workplace in different ways which might work better–after all, with the cuts to Legal Aid a lawsuit is something potentially-affected women cannot afford.

And it is sad, because these may be women who need help, yet are being treated as little more than pawns, potential mouthpieces to legitimise the campaign.