Porn is no substitute for good sex education - LOUISE MCCUDDEN

Accessed 5^th September 2013

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/porn-is-no-substitute-for-good-sex-education-8799429.html

LOUISE MCCUDDEN

Thursday 5 September 2013

Porn is no substitute for good sex education

Girls are learning their sexuality is something they perform for
others, instead of something they own

A study by the NSPCC has found that porn is negatively impacting young people – especially girls.

The study found that nearly a third of pupils (aged 11-18) surveyed said porn “dictates how people should behave in a relationship,” and 32 per cent said it “affects how they act” with their partner.  But the most troublesome finding is summarised by the NSPCC’s Claire Lilley, who warns porn is teaching “boys that girls are for sexual gratification, whilst girls feel they have to look and perform like ‘porn stars’ to be liked and valued by boys.”  

As people react to the study, the focus, as usual, ends up being on porn itself (“Can porn be feminist?” “Why are we so squeamish about porn?” “I like pornand I’m a good person!”), but the porn debate isn’t the point. The point, according to this study, is that because of whatever porn they are watching, too many girls are learning sex is about impressing boys – as opposed to, say, having a good orgasm. Girls are learning their sexuality is something they perform for others, instead of something they own. They are learning that sex is about being an object, not an agent.

Feminists get asked about objectification a lot. Or to put it more accurately, we get a lot of sneering assertions that objectification doesn’t exist, usually in the same breath as unashamed ignorance about what the word actually means.

Porn isn’t new but young people having this level of access to it is, and the line between porn and other media has become so blurred it isn’t always clear to adults, let alone kids, which is which. Porn and the pornified entertainment industry are taking the place of informed sex and relationship education.

The NSPCC survey found young people are three times more likely to seek out their sexual education online than to ask questions of their teachers, parents, or carers. How curious that the people who call us prudes or sex-haters for questioning whether a sex education that consists of face-spunking and songs about bubble butts really gives the healthiest understanding of sexual consent are so often the same people to reach for the smelling salts when we suggest the radical idea that parents make sure they discuss sex properly with their own kids. 

Of course, not all parents will, which is why all this needs to be part of the school curriculum, too. And by “all this” I mean SRE that includes not just saying yes and saying no, but also hearing and accepting both yes and no, without judgment. SRE that includes enthusiastic consent, pleasure, and the importance of the clitoris. Again, there may or may not be porn like that. But that’s not what young people are watching, and it’s not the message they’re taking from what they do watch.

This survey by NSPCC – a children’s charity, by the way, with no particular axe to grind against porn in general - shows that young people are learning objectification. Objectification isn’t about sex or nudity. The difference between being an object and an agent is the difference between Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video and the Ask First (Consent is Sexy) riposte.  Objectification isn’t actually a tough concept. You know what an object is. Perhaps you are one of these people who thinks it’s about wanting women to be chaste or cover up? That inability to distinguish between a culture that nearly always shows women posing for you to look at, and a culture that embraces women expressing our own sexualities perfectly exemplifies the mess we’re in.

Before you leap into the “porn debate” to talk about how the only alternative to mainstream, repeated conflation of sex with objectification is covering women from head to toe and calling us sluts, remember that the NSPCC didn’t find girls are becoming more sexually liberated, or enjoying more sexual pleasure. They didn’t find that girls are no longer shamed as “sluts” because porn broadens everyone’s minds.

They found that girls “feel they have to look and act like porn stars”, for the pleasure of boys. In fact, if anything, the consumers of porn, lads’ mags and strip clubs are often the worst offenders for calling women “sluts” and “whores”. If that surprises you, it shouldn’t –after all, “slut” is just the other side of the same sexist coin that calls women “frigid” or “prude”. And if young people pick up the message that there’s an automatic correlation between consuming porn and taking a progressive attitude to sex, if young people get the impression that sexism and objectification are an essential, normal part of sex, that’s not surprising either. They’re getting those ideas directly from us. 

The truth about pornography: It's time for a rude awakening - ARCHIE BLAND

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-truth-about-pornography-its-time-for-a-rude-awakening-8735043.html

 

The truth about pornography: It's time for a rude awakening

Not everyone who is interested in sexual images wants to see violence. But, since that's now the norm, how can we shame ourselves out of this?

ARCHIE BLAND 

SUNDAY 28 JULY 2013

This is a piece about how pornography is like a plastic bag. It is also a piece about the fact that I watch pornography. The first of these statements may seem surprising. The second absolutely should not.

More precisely: to make the second statement may be relatively unusual. But if I gave you my particulars – 29 years old, male, with a reliable internet connection and a working knowledge, gleaned as a teenager, of my browser's "delete history" facility – you could have guessed the underlying detail with a high degree of confidence. I suppose it's possible that I'm an outlier, exposing myself as a total creep by saying this, but I don't think so.

We know that men watching pornography at least occasionally is an absolute given among my peers, who are, I like to think, at the relatively well-adjusted end of the spectrum. In the course of writing this piece I've checked with at least 10 of them, and they all agreed that the same could be said about their friends outside of my own circle. (Sorry, guys.) A Twitter and Facebook trawl of about 45,000 people also turned up a vanishingly small number of men – six – who never watched porn. The tone of several exchanges I had on the subject made it clear that those few conceived of their habits as being in sharp opposition to the mainstream.

These are frustratingly unscientific methods of assessment, partly enforced by the relative paucity of data on the subject, itself the consequence of our embarrassment. Still, there are some pointers available. On Friday, a traffic analysis found that British people click on porn sites more than they do on social networks. A 2008 study found that 86 per cent of young adult men watch porn, 69 per cent at least once a month. And when, a year later, the University of Montreal tried to conduct a study into the views of men who never watched porn, it failed to find a single candidate.

The truth is, even the necessity of doing this sort of groundwork feels a little ridiculous. It seems to me uncontroversial to say, as an absolute minimum, that it is not unusual for men to watch porn. If you were feeling just a little bolder you could surmise that, in fact, a significant majority of men watch porn; that quite a lot of women do, too; and that, among young adults, exposure is nearly universal.

Now the Government is trying to catch up. Last week, David Cameron announced that the major internet service providers had agreed to the introduction of "default-on" porn filters. The months-long debate leading up to that step has felt like a significant moment in the collective understanding of how profoundly our relationship with pornography has changed since high-speed internet became the norm. Apparently, a lot of people who grew up having no option but grot mags at the newsagent have had a nasty shock. They are only now discovering, mostly second-hand or by searching for "sex video internet" on Google, just how accessible, varied and repugnant this stuff can be.

And yet, many speeches and gallons of ink later, we don't seem to have got very much further than the principles that children shouldn't see pornography, and no one should see images of child abuse. We can't even agree on whose responsibility it is to enforce these axioms, on whether it's technically possible, or on whether The Sun should be subjected to the same rules as YouPorn. We certainly haven't managed a mature conversation about what sort of moral framework we want to apply to pornography. To me, the explanation for this seems obvious. Everyone is willing to say: pornography is everywhere. Almost no one is willing to say: and I have seen some of it.

So, um, yes. I have seen some of it. I don't say so with any sense of pride. Also, in the interests of preserving at least a wisp of dignity, I should like to add that it's not, y'know, a hobby. Even so, I guess I know more about it than most of the wide-eyed ingénues who have formed such strong opinions about its impact of late. This is why it seems worth mentioning. In most areas of controversy, the views of the ignorant are at least occasionally balanced by plaintive corrections from the better-informed; in this one, the ignorant, or pseudo-ignorant, have the field almost unopposed. With a very few exceptions (such as the New Statesman's Laurie Penny), no one says, well, you haven't got that quite right, because to do so reveals greater familiarity than we are generally willing to admit.

That squeamishness about detail isn't merely a matter of sociological interest. It has real consequences. It means that the argument about pornography becomes binary: on or off, consensual or exploitative, arousing or repellent. And then, because most of us are instinctively opposed to censorship, we sigh that it's a fact of life, and we just have to put up with all of it. Consider Cameron's speech last week, which featured, among the easy (and, it turned out, ill-considered) applause lines about child protection, only one moment of engagement with the granular detail of porn, in his vow that depictions of rape would be banned – as if there were anything bold or controversial about the idea that videos which normalise so reprehensible a crime should be beyond the pale.

Because he is a politician, and has therefore never seen any pornography ever at all ever, that's about as far as Cameron can go. Probably that's for the best: the really important debates about pornography should not be about legal principles, but ethical ones. Here's where my – oh, God, there's no other word for it – expertise comes in. I can tell you, for example, that if you're interested in watching two people having sex (and see no moral problem in that interest) but not so interested in watching women being treated badly, your options are pretty limited. I can tell you that it is quite common to have 18-year-old girls dressed up in school uniform and filmed in a classroom. I can tell you that condoms are rarely sighted, and that performers in the US – who will simply not get work if they insist on them being used – have contracted serious illnesses as a result.

There is lots more of this detail, but it only gets more specific, and you probably don't want to read about it over your breakfast. Still, it's enormously important. A few years ago, I interviewed The Sun's agony aunt Deidre Sanders, who told me that the biggest change in the make-up of her postbag since she took up the role in 1980 was the precipitous growth in letters from men and women whose relationships had been affected by pornography. I feel pretty confident that I have always been able to keep fantasy and reality distinct, but there will certainly be some people for whom that is not true, and, even if these default-on porn filters delay children's exposure a little, there will certainly be more of them in future. One study found that 90 per cent of content on the most popular porn sites featured physical or verbal abuse against women, and you don't have to be Mary Whitehouse to find that concerning. We need to do something about it, and since we are not going to outlaw pornography altogether, we need to figure out what that might be.

Here's one suggestion. In my own consumption of porn, I have always tried to avoid those tropes that I find unsettling. But in the writing of this piece, I have realised that I am not careful enough. I avoid the misogynist video, but I may be careless about avoiding the site that hosts it; I feel bad about the unprotected sex, but I don't bother going to the great lengths it would require to find the alternative. I am really ashamed about this, and I'm going to take a great deal more care in future. The source of my shame, straightforwardly enough, is not some new-found moral clarity, but the fact that you are now reading this, and so my behaviour has been exposed. For me, at least, the use of pornography has become a semi-public fact.

In isolation, this doesn't mean very much, except that everyone I know is going to laugh at me for a while. More widely, it might mean quite a lot. What if we ditched the stigma carried by pornography in general, and instead attached it, loudly, to the pornography that we consider to be unacceptable? We have seen this principle applied in so many other areas. People are, basically, too lazy to make ethical choices. The only way to get us to do so is to incentivise us with a little bit of shame.

Think of battery farms, of sweat-shop clothes, of – yes – the fight against plastic bags. Pornography is not immune from the behavioural economics that shifted all those battles. If enough people said they sometimes watched porn, and also said that they hated the misogyny that accompanies it, some entrepreneurial spirit would surely intervene. And if there was a porn site that promised me I could surf it without any risk of coming across anything I needed to worry about (there are some out there, but none has reached critical mass), I would visit it exclusively, with enormous gratitude to its creators for taking the effort out of doing the right thing.

It is, I suppose, a call for a wanker's code: a contention that being interested in sex is not the same thing as being interested in violent misogyny, and an appeal for a proper conversation about splitting the one off from the other. Because, yes, we are wankers. But that doesn't mean we have to be shitheads.

The man who made Femen: New film outs Victor Svyatski as the mastermind behind the protest group and its breast-baring stunts - GEOFFREY MACNAB

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/the-man-who-made-femen-new-film-outs-victor-svyatski-as-the-mastermind-behind-the-protest-group-and-its-breastbaring-stunts-8797042.html

The man who made Femen: New film outs Victor Svyatski as the mastermind behind the protest group and its breast-baring stunts 

GEOFFREY MACNAB

TUESDAY 03 SEPTEMBER 2013

It’s the Ukranian feminist group that embarrassed President Putin. Its activists have staged many protests against sexual and political repression by stripping to their waists in carefully choreographed media stunts.

“Our mission is protest, our weapons are bare breasts,” runs their slogan. Now, a new documentary screening at the Venice Film Festival has revealed that Femen was founded and is controlled by a man.

Ukraine is not a Brothel, directed by 28-year-old Australian film-maker Kitty Green, has “outed” Victor Svyatski as the mastermind behind the group. Mr Syvatski is known as a “consultant” to the movement. According to the Femen website, he was badly beaten up by the secret services in Ukraine earlier this summer because of his activities on behalf of the group.

However, Ms Green reveals that Svyatski is not simply a supporter of Femen but its founder and éminence grise. “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers. The prettiest girls get on the front page... that became their image, that became the way they sold the brand,” she says.

Today, several of the original members of Femen – among them its best known campaigner Inna Shevchenko – are due in Venice for the launch of Ms Green’s documentary. In recent days some of its original members have moved abroad to escape persecution in their home country, claiming that they have been “systematically harassed, severely beaten, kidnapped, and repeatedly received threats” from the authorities, while in June two French and one German member were jailed following a topless protest in Tunisia.

Until now, the full extent of Mr Svyatski’s influence over Femen has not been realised. The film claims it was he who sent Femen activists on one of their most terrifying missions to Belarus where (according to testimony in the film) they were arrested by secret service agents, stripped, humiliated and abandoned in a forest close to the Ukranian border.

Ms Green accompanied them on this trip. She told The Independent that her footage was stolen by the KGB and that she was abducted, “kept in confinement for about eight hours,” and then deported to Lithuania.

In the documentary, Ms Green pays tribute to Mr Svyatski’s organisational abilities and charisma but questions his influence over the group.

“He can be really horrible but he is fiercely intelligent,” she said of Mr Svyatski, who is interviewed on camera in her film. Ms Green spent a year living in a tiny apartment in Kiev with four of the Femen members and filming their stunts. “I would shoot their protests and they would take them and put them on their website,” she said.

Only gradually did she become aware that Mr Svyatski was pulling the strings behind the scenes. “Once I was in the inner circle, you can’t not know him. He is Femen.”

 Initially, Mr Svyatski refused to allow Ms Green to film him but she was determined that he should feature. “It was a big moral thing for me because I realised how this organisation was run. He was quite horrible with the girls. He would scream at them and call them bitches.”

When the Femen founder finally spoke to Ms Green, he sought to justify his role within the organisation and  acknowledged the paradox of being a “patriarch” running a feminist protest group. “These girls are weak,” he says in the film.

“They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.”

Mr Svyatski insists to Ms Green that his influence on the group is positive. However, when he is asked directly whether he started Femen “to get girls”, he replies: “Perhaps yes, somewhere in my deep subconscious.”

One of the Femen campaigners talks of the relationship between the women and the movement’s founder as being akin to “Stockholm syndrome”, in which hostages feel sympathy for their captors.

“We are psychologically dependent on him and even if we know and understand that we could do this by ourselves without his help, it’s psychological dependence,” she says.

Vasily Petrenko, says women distract orchestras. A mezzo-soprano disagrees. By Sarah Connolly

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-business/10283699/Flustered-by-our-sexual-energy-Just-keep-your-eyes-on-the-score.html

Flustered by our sexual energy? Just keep your eyes on the score

Vasily Petrenko, principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, says women distract orchestras. A mezzo-soprano disagrees.

By Sarah Connolly

We should be celebrating that on Saturday night, Marin Alsop will conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra for the Last Night of the Proms, the first time in the event’s 118-year history that a woman will have held the baton on this prestigious occasion.

Instead, women – and men – throughout the classical music world are talking about female conductors for quite a different reason. Like me, they will be shaking their heads with disbelief and embarrassment following the statements made in an interview last week by Vasily Petrenko, principal conductor of the National Youth Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.

For it has emerged that Petrenko believes women are far too distracting to stand on the podium. We’re too “cute” to be conductors, creating too much “sexual energy” among the male members of the pit. We are Delilahs to the Samsons in the strings, Salome in her seven veils dancing before the Herods in the brass.

Good grief! In Petrenko’s opinion, it seems every performance is like Carry on Conducting, with Sid James, dressed in black tie, ignoring his snare drums to gawp at Barbara Windsor giggling over her baton. It is pathetic.

Having stood in front of orchestras as a mezzo-soprano for 20 years, I can honestly say I have never felt judged like that. No musician, male or female, would want to be evaluated for their looks. We are, as we expect, judged on the sound we produce.

How appalling that any woman performer who perfects her art with hours of daily practice should find the critical judgment of her colleagues reduced to what she looks like on the night.

When I sing, it is to the very best of my ability; I engage with the orchestra; I perform. I simply can’t imagine any of the male performers hoping I get booked because of my looks.

The most attention my appearance ever attracted was at the Last Night of the Proms four years ago, when I led the Rule, Britannia! finale dressed in an admiral’s uniform. Wearing trousers on stage is not unusual for me – I wore them in a competition when I was younger and, when told I ought to have worn a skirt, I replied: “Whatever for?” In the end, nobody cared. My voice, my music, was enough.

So I can’t believe that sexist comments such as Petrenko’s are still in circulation today. Particularly irritating is his remark that: “When women have families, it becomes difficult to be as dedicated as is demanded in the [classical music] business.” As a mother, I know that my career has not been impeded or my commitment lessened at all; why should it? The decision to have children is up to the woman and her partner. No one else has any right to discuss it.

Yet Petrenko’s remarks are not useless. They highlight the lack of women conductors. While most orchestras are now 50:50, there are still not enough women on the podium. It takes a lot of confidence, personality and charisma to conduct, and more than just determination. You have to earn the respect of an orchestra and its members. Technique can be learnt, but few also have the ability truly to draw out the poetry from the score.

And women do make great conductors. Marin Alsop, principal conductor of the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, Jane Glover, artistic director of opera at the Royal Academy of Music, and Sian Edwards, former music director of English National Opera, all work hard at being role models for younger women interested in taking up the baton. I know they would be horrified by Petrenko’s remarks. But his words were insulting not just to women. What is he saying about the men in the orchestra? Does he really think experienced musicians are going to lose focus during an intense performance of Mahler, say, just because the conductor is “cute”?

Perhaps Petrenko is simply out of step with the world. He told the Norwegian paper Aftenposten of his comments: “If this had come up in Great Britain, I don’t think people would have reacted in the same way.” If he thinks we are all sniggering like Sid James, he needs to learn more about British culture. And thank goodness he didn’t make these remarks in New York. He would probably have been sued.

He will certainly have a lot of explaining to do next time he stands on the podium in front of a pit full of cuties.

Femen was founded and is controlled by a man. Exactly zero people are surprised By Meghan Murphy

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://feministcurrent.com/7963/femen-was-founded-and-is-controlled-by-a-man-exactly-zero-people-are-surprised

September 4, 2013

Femen was founded and is controlled by a man. Exactly zero people are surprised

By Meghan Murphy

Femen, aka, CLASSICAL FEMINISM IS DEAD ALSO LOOK AT OUR BOOOOOBS, turns out to have been founded and controlled by a man named Victor Svyatski.

“Outed” by Australian film-maker Kitty Green, she says: “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers. The prettiest girls get on the front page… that became their image, that became the way they sold the brand.”

I swear I don’t want to go all “I TOLD YOU SO SUCKERS” but seriously. We talked about this.

We talked about the fact that the whole point of Femen was to capture the male gaze, thereby capturing the attention of the media. We talked about the fact that we should be skeptical “anytime anyone makes reference to a “new face of feminism” and that face is either lingerie, something about pole dancing, or boobs.” We talked about the fact that “if a dude posts a photo of boobs and tells you it’s feminism, it’s not.”

All feminists who are smart and unfooled by the self-objectification-is-empowermentcrap and who haven’t come down with a bad case of burlesque-brain like the rest of the third wave also knew better than to fall for the Femen garbage. So now is the time we all join together and rub this news obnoxiously in the faces of every dumbo who fell for this crap. WE TOLD YOU AND WE ARE RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING FOREVER AND ALWAYS. Oh do we sound gloaty? Do you not like that? DON’T CARE. Feminism needs smarty-pants gloaters more than porn-loving FEMINISM IS ABOUT LOOKING HOT AND SEXYAND DOING WHAT WE WANT FUCK YEAH mush-brains. Also! Feminism isn’t here to give you a boner. If it is giving you a boner you may want to question whether or not that’s because this “feminism” is actually porn in a very  shoddy disguise.

Green recently made a documentary about Femen (which is currently screening at the Venice Film Festival); leading her to discover Svyatski’s influence over the group. He sounds like a real gem, too.

The Independent reports that “Initially, Mr Svyatski refused to allow Ms Green to film him but she was determined that he should feature” and quoted Green as saying: “It was a big moral thing for me because I realized how this organization was run. He was quite horrible with the girls. He would scream at them and call them bitches.” “He is Femen,” she said.

Svyatski admits, in the film, that maybe somewhere in his “deep self-conscious,” he started Femen to “get girls” and seems to think the women are incapable of doing feminist activism without his leadership.

Creepily, one Femen activist in the film is said to have compared the relationship between the women and Svyatski as being like a kind of “Stockholm syndrome.” You know, like when a bond forms between victim and abuser? Or like how people who have been kidnapped develop an emotional connection to their captor?

COOL, RIGHT?

New headline: “Abusive man sells new brand of feminism under banner of boobs. All media falls for it, as per usual.”

Subhead: “Dear media, stop selling us out. Love, actual feminism.”

Pay close attention to this one, defenders of “Go Topless Day,” Slutwalk, “feminist porn,” burlesque, and sex-work-is-an-empowering-and-sexy-choice-for-sexy-empowered-women. Feminism isn’t a sexy thing to look at. Nor is it a brand. Feminism isn’t fun and sexy despite the fact that many fun and sexy feminists exist. The fun and sexy part is maybe a sidebar, but it isn’t the main event. The main event is a lot of decidedly unsexy activism and law-changing and fighting and hard conversations. The main event is about ending violence against women and rape and incest and objectification and harassment and the practice of men paying to abuse women and girls under the guise of free speech and all that very, very unsexy stuff that dudes don’t like taking pictures of or jacking off to.

Maldives girl's 100 lashes sentence overturned - BBC news

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23792120

22 August 2013 Last updated at 09:34

Maldives girl's 100 lashes sentence overturned

A 15-year-old girl who was sentenced to 100 lashes for engaging in premarital sex has had her punishment overturned by a Maldives court.

The High Court ruled on Wednesday that the girl, whose stepfather is on trial for raping her, had been wrongly convicted by a juvenile court of having premarital sex with another man.

Premarital sex is illegal in the Maldives, a popular tourist venue.

The case caused outrage among rights groups who welcomed the latest ruling.

"We are relieved that the girl will be spared this inhumane 'punishment' based on an outrageous conviction, which we hope has also been quashed," said Polly Truscott, Amnesty International's deputy Asia-Pacific director.

Masood ImadSpokesman for Maldivian President Mohamed Waheed

"No-one should ever be prosecuted for sex outside marriage in the first place."

Ms Truscott said that flogging amounted to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. She called on the Maldives government to annul all outstanding flogging sentences.

In its ruling the court said the sentence of the lower court was based on a confession that the girl made while she was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. It said that she had been "unfit for trial" after the alleged rape.

The Maldivian government appealed on behalf of the teenager following international outrage in February to punish her with 100 lashes when she reached the age of 18.

The girl - who cannot be named for legal reasons - was only charged after police investigating the rape allegations discovered that she had been having consensual sex with another man.

Dead baby

President Mohamed Waheed said that he was "overjoyed" with the ruling, his spokesman Masood Imad told the AFP news agency on Thursday.

Mr Imad said: "It is the government's policy to protect victims, but we had to do it within the framework of the law."

The case was sent for prosecution after police were called to investigate a dead baby buried on the island of Feydhoo in Shaviyani Atoll, in the north of the country.

Her stepfather was accused of raping her and impregnating her, then killing the baby.

The legal system of the Maldives, an Islamic archipelago with a population of some 400,000, has elements of Islamic law (Sharia) as well as English common law.

Somalia: Women 'take weapons' to beach for protection - BBC news

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23681033

13 August 2013 Last updated at 10:53

Somalia: Women 'take weapons' to beach for protection

News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring

Somali women have taken to carrying weapons to the beach to ward off sexual harassment, it's reported.

They're plagued by men at the Lido resort, in the capital Mogadishu, according to theGaroweonline website. Describing the beach's "buzzing and pulsating atmosphere", the report says many women come with families, while others sell ice cream or drinks. It quotes one woman as saying they're always pestered by "rude men" and are often offended, angered or sexually harassed. Extra police have been deployed to the resort to protect young women, says the news outlet, based in the semi-autonomous Puntland region.

Sexual violence has been a growing problem in Somalia in recent years, with some of the 1.1 million people displaced by conflict - and often living in tarpaulin shacks - particularly at risk. Despite this, the authorities and media have been accused of not taking rape seriously. The founder of the Sister Somalia organisation, which runs a rape crisis centre in Mogadishu, told al-Jazeera news in January that it dealt with up to seven new victims a week. The UN recorded 1,700 rapes in the capital's 500 camps last year, many thought to have been carried out by security forces.

Georgia: Brides 'undergo virginity inspections' - BBC news

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23454707

25 July 2013 Last updated at 16:36

Georgia: Brides 'undergo virginity inspections'

News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring

Brides-to-be in Georgia are apparently undergoing "virginity inspections" before they tie the knot.

The independent National Forensics Bureau in the former Soviet state is offering the service for 175 lari (£69), or twice that if you want it done quickly, reports Imedi TV. That's more than it costs the average person to get by for a month, according to national statistics. The women are often accompanied by relatives, their prospective husbands or - often - their mothers-in-law, bureau medical expert Eka Chavleishvili told the privately-run channel. "In many cases, they leave very happy when they find out the truth - that is, if the truth is acceptable to them," she added.

Maintenance of virginity before marriage is deeply entrenched in the Orthodox Christian country, although not everyone's happy with the idea of it being documented. One young interviewee branded it "disgusting". She told the TV reporter: "I would say no if I were asked to do this... if I am to spend my whole life with him, he should trust me." Web users also mocked the inspection service, circulating a digitally-altered image of an ID card with an added "virginity status" parameter.

Iran: Female fans 'cut from live TV sport' - BBC news

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23004459

4 July 2013 Last updated at 14:28

Iran: Female fans 'cut from live TV sport'

As seen by......foreign media on key issues

Iranian TV has taken to cutting images of female fans wearing "un-Islamic" dress from live sports coverage.

Recent sporting successes - qualifying for football's World Cup and beating Serbia and Italy at volleyball - caused a dilemma for broadcasters, which are banned from showing women in "indecent dress" such as short-sleeved T-shirts and without headscarves. They've tried broadcasting "live" matches with a short delay, letting them cut to replays when cameras pick up problematic shots. But last week, Channel 3's coverage of Spain's football match against Italy caught Colombian singer Shakira cheering - shoulders bare - from the stands.

Days later, the same channel aired footage of female supporters as Italy hosted Iran at volleyball. It prompted Tehran MP Ali Motahhari to caution broadcasting authority head Ezzatollah Zarghami about the consequences of mishandling such live events. Zarghami - with one eye on Friday's volleyball match in the heat of Cuba - suggested the only option was to not screen it at all, according to reformist paper Sharq. He then claimed he'd "send a group to hand out tracksuits to ladies who do not adhere to the decent dress code".

Zarghami was joking. But he pointed out that viewers - already irritated by the censorship - would turn to foreign satellite channels if matches weren't screened. Mehr news agency reports that he questioned how Motahhari noticed Shakira, given she was only visible in slow-motion. Satirist Ebrahim Nabavi wrote on Roozonline website: "How could you notice an image that was broadcast for only four seconds in the middle of an exciting match...? Please let us know so that, from now on, we can also watch women in the stadium instead of the match."

Women could celebrate World Cup qualification in the street - not in the stadium

Women are banned from stadiums in Iran and many were dismayed at being turned away from a homecoming celebration for the nation's footballers, following their World Cup qualification last month. State-owned news channel IRINN, whose images showed both packed and empty sections of Tehran's 100,000-capacity Azadi Stadium, estimated 20,000 people had shown up. Vahid Online tweeted to 17,080 followers that fans were chanting: "The stadium is great. Women are missed."

Russia: Underwear protest targets drivers - BBC news

Accessed 4^th September 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-23695887

14 August 2013 Last updated at 11:23

Russia: Underwear protest targets drivers

News from Elsewhere......as found by BBC Monitoring

It takes scantily-clad women at the roadside to make some Russian drivers slow down, it seems.

Young women posed in underwear at the side of a motorway in Nizhniy Novgorod region, east of Moscow, holding speed limit signs in front of them. And Channel One TV says they had the desired effect - causing drivers to slow for a better look. It's unclear who was behind the stunt but the state-controlled station says it was "supported" by traffic police. Some locals are evidently fed up with drivers' attitudes, with one complaining: "I may have to take my clothes off just to cross the road because drivers don't always stop for you."

It's not the first such instance of young women being employed to improve Russian driving habits. Last November, TV stations reported on traffic police in the Baltic coast region of Kaliningrad sending out female officers dressed as angels - complete with white halos, wings, skinny jeans and stiletto boots - to flag down errant drivers. It came after the authorities launched a campaign to clamp down on drink-driving in the wake of a series of horrifying crashes.

Kiwi Blurred Lines parody taken off YouTube - Sarah Robson

Accessed 4^th September 2013http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/blurred-lines-parody-taken-off-youtube/story-e6frfn09-1226709719767 

Kiwi Blurred Lines parody taken off YouTube

Auckland Univeristy law students have made a feminist parody of Robin Thicke's hit single Blurred Lines.

by: Sarah Robson

From: AAP

 September 03, 2013 12:13PM

A FEMINIST parody of Robin Thicke's worldwide hit single Blurred Lines has been taken off YouTube, leaving the University of Auckland law students who created it mystified.

The comedy video - dubbed Defined Lines - was created for the annual Law Revue and netted more than 300,000 views on YouTube before it was taken down on Monday morning because it was flagged by users as containing inappropriate content.

One of the students behind the parody, Olivia Lubbock, told AAP the video was meant to be a bit of fun, but with a positive message.

"The message really is just that we think that women should be treated equally, and as part of that, we're trying to address the culture of objectifying women in music videos," she said.

The original Blurred Lines video features topless women, while critics have slammed the song's lyrics, which allude to the "blurred lines" between consensual and non-consensual sex.

The Auckland students' parody has Ms Lubbock, Zoe Ellwood and Adelaide Dunn performing their own version of the song with three young men dressed in just their underwear.

The lyrics, written by Ms Dunn, include: "What you see on TV, doesn't speak equality, it's straight up misogyny."

"It's just funny that the response has been so negative when you flip it around and objectify males," Ms Lubbock said.

"Personally, I do not think that that video was any worse than anything that is already on [YouTube]."

Ms Lubbock said they have appealed YouTube's decision to remove the video and they are waiting for a response.

"We've had so much support from friends and people we don't even know saying this is completely ridiculous, it should be put back up."

Ms Ellwood came up with the idea for the parody earlier this year after reading about some of the criticisms of the misogynistic lyrics in Thicke's original song, Ms Lubbock said.