Tag Archives: sexualisation

Beyoncé’s Bum and the World’s Lamest Outrage

Comment, Moral Panic, , ,

Is there really a mass outcry across Britain about Beyoncé’s divine and gyrating bum at this week’s Grammy Awards? As far as I can tell, it is, once again, an attempt to manufacture an outcry by a couple of media outlets and busybodies.

Predictably, the Daily Mail led the charge with some pearl-clutching editorialising  in the headline: “Is this really what little girls should aspire to, Beyoncé? Parents attack ‘vile’ display at Grammys“.  By outraged “parents”, the Mail means one quote attributed to an unnamed parent who finds it “sad when our children can’t even watch the Grammys.” And “hundreds of others who took to the internet to express their disgust.” Hundreds. Out of how many viewers?

Latter-day Mary Whitehouses, Pippa Smith of SaferMedia, and Vivienne Pattison of Mediawatch-UK, were also quoted with tedious “won’t someone think of the children” moans.

Beyoncé dancing with her husband in a “really skimpy outfit” means boys could have trouble relating to women as anything other than sexual beings, according to Pattison. And, weirdly, Smith is complaining about “a husband and wife … behav[ing] in such an obscenely sexual manner.” Imagine that, boys and girls. A couple who have conceived a child together are sexual beings. Well, I never…

Metro, meanwhile, shared a few snippets of social media reaction and didn’t bother to run the story on their clickbait Facebook page, and the Guardian (despite leading the charge on assorted Lose the Lads’ Mags and No More Page 3 campaigns) and the Telegraph both seem to be refreshingly nonplussed about it all. The Daily Mail article only attracted 172 comments. By Daily Mail standards, that is a mere drop in the ocean of bile, a disappointing response to something which fits their confused agenda of creating outrage while still running plenty of sexy pictures just so you know exactly what you’re meant to be outraged about.

I don’t buy that there is an outrage in Britain about Beyoncé’s bum. Hell, there isn’t even a storm on Mumsnet. People may be raging about Beyoncé in the US but it’s just not happening here.  This is a good thing. This gives me some hope that we’re not descending into a nation of sex-scared prudes who seek to hide all flesh from public view for the good of the children.

It’s great we’re being so chilled out about Beyoncé’s bum – but it means we are sleepwalking through the government’s plans to censor the internet, with very few voices in Parliament speaking out about the absurdity of this. We are also sleepwalking through telecommunications companies already doing the censorship for the government. Companies such as O2 are blocking websites – including my blog – and then making adult consumers jump through stupid hoops to access perfectly legal content. This is despite O2 offering parental control filters so kids can’t access adult content.

I’ve lived in a country with absurdly filtered internet. It doesn’t just mean that adult websites are banned. It means that websites which might cause political dissent are banned too. As long as we merrily let any government do the same thing in Britain, we will be faced with a situation far more damaging than Beyoncé twerking for her own husband.

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Concerns Raised Over “Child Protection” Conference

Events, , , , , , , , , , ,

The UK video-on-demand regulator, ATVOD, has announced a conference on child protection, to be held in London on 12th December. In an open letter, below, we raise concerns with the nature of the conference and some of the speakers to be featured. (UPDATE: a response was received on 19th November, and has been appended to the end of this post).

Jerry Barnett
SexAndCensorship.org

18 November 2013

Open letter to: Julia Hornle, ATVOD board member

Cc: Sue Berelowitz – Deputy Children’s Commissioner

 

Dear Julia,

I am writing with regard to the ATVOD-organised child protection conference taking place in London on 12th December. I am informed that you selected the conference speakers. I write on behalf of a number of people who are greatly concerned that the conference line-up is not altogether suitable for an event whose purported goal is to determine what best can be done to protect British children.

The concerns are twofold: first, the lack of expertise related to the effects of content on viewers, including children and teenagers, and second the inclusion of two speakers whose beliefs seem out of place at a conference dedicated to child protection.

On the first point: How children and teenagers are affected by what they see online is widely debated. A great deal of research has been done over several decades, and a good deal has yet to be done. There is still however no conclusive evidence to support how harm, if any, is done by  sexual, violent, or other material and it would therefore seem premature to suggest remedies until the existence and nature of any problem is properly understood.

For this reason, it is puzzling that the conference speaker list includes no expertise on this matter, and yet plenty of expertise does exist. It would seem suitable to include a child psychologist, or somebody who has directly tried to research the effects of viewing such material.

A number of suitable individuals come to mind, but we might suggest:

  • Dr Guy Cumberbatch is a chartered psychologist who has been commissioned previously by Ofcom to conduct research on this very subject area. It would seem sensible that the conference should be informed by an expert in child psychology before coming to any conclusions.

  • Dr Clarissa Smith is Professor of Sexual Cultures at Sunderland University, and (along with colleagues) is conducting the most exhaustive study to date into the effects of pornography on its users.

  • Sharon Girling is a former senior Police officer with national responsibility, now an independent consultant, and probably the UK’s leading authority on online child abuse imagery, and protecting abused children who are identified from such imagery.

It may be dangerous to rush towards policy-making without input, at such a critical event, from people such as the above. As history shows, rashly drafted laws and regulations might disrupt existing child protection activities, and thus have the reverse effect to that originally intended.

On the second point: we note with concern the inclusion of the following two speakers:

  • Paula Hall is billed as Chair of the Association for the Treatment of Sex Addiction and Compulsivity. However, there is widespread skepticism among mental health professionals that “sex addiction” is even a genuine condition, or whether it simply stigmatises normal sexual response. Although “hypersexuality” was previously accepted as a psychiatric condition (as once was homosexuality), it has now been removed from the most recent manual of psychiatry, DSM-V. It is worrying that you consider what many believe to be quack psychiatry to be relevant to this discussion.

  • Julia Long is a spokesperson for the morality group Object, which campaigns against all forms of sexual expression, whether consumed by children or adults. Object frequently attempt to link adult material to sexual violence, although they have no evidence to back this point of view. They have claimed (without evidential foundation) that adults are harmed by accessing pornography, reading lads’ mags and visiting strip clubs. Again, their inclusion seems incongruous at a conference aimed at protecting children, a subject in which Object and Ms Long herself appear to have no expertise or prior interest.

The anomalies in the conference line-up have led to questions as to whether this event is about child protection or Internet censorship. I look forward to your response, and hope that you can put minds at rest regarding your goals in setting up the conference panels.

Regards,

 

Jerry Barnett
SexAndCensorship.org

 UPDATE: the following response was received on 19 November:

Emailed on Behalf of Julia Hornle

Dear Mr Barnett,

Thank you for your letter and suggestions for the joint ATVOD-QMUL conference on 12th December.

We have finalised the composition of the panels and speakers.  I’m familiar with the work of the speakers you suggest and have no doubt that they also have interesting contributions to make, perhaps at a different conference.  Please let me know if you are organising such an event in the future.

Kind Regards,

The Sexualisation Panic

Politics, , , , ,

As the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin said, “A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth”. So it is with many of the Porn Panic stories that have emerged over the past few years, each designed to frighten us into believing that a free and open Internet is a threat to our children and the very fabric of our society.

In 1984, Britain introduced the toughest video censorship regime of any democratic nation, following several years of media hysteria which is now better known as the Video Nasties moral panic. The British public were told that horror films on video were turning children into potential rapists and murderers. The architects of the panic further claimed that we could not leave parents to decide what their children should watch, because Bad Parents were allowing their children to watch scenes of horrific sex and violence. Therefore, the only possible way to save our society from imminent collapse was to empower the BBFC to censor videos before the public could be allowed to buy them. As a result, even today, British people cannot (legally) buy many DVDs that are available in most of the free world.

Those who are familiar with the Video Nasties panic have seen an almost identical copy of it emerge in the past five years or so: the Sexualisation Panic. We are told that our children and our very culture have been “Sexualised”. This time, the blame is mostly put on online porn, along with lads’ mags and other “Sexualised” media. Although parental control systems work perfectly well, the panic architects tell us that more must be done, because (wait for it…) Bad Parents are refusing to protect their kids!

There is something uniquely odd about British culture. Most countries don’t experience these intermittent panics. Just as Britain was the only European country to scare itself to death over horror videos, now it is the only European country to get itself agitated about online porn (which, don’t forget, has been with us for almost 20 years).

But is there any evidence that Sexualisation is real? In a word: No. The architects of this panic have failed to provide any, opting instead to create a drumbeat of fear via Britain’s newspapers. As with Video Nasties, journalists and editors have simply repeated the scare stories without ever asking for evidence from those who are banging the Sexualisation drum.

The Sexualisation myth originates largely from two government papers; the first was published by the outgoing Labour government, and the second (in 2011) by the new Coalition government. This second report, known as the Bailey Review of Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood, is the prime root source of the panic that has unfolded.

And yet, the Bailey Review is not a study of Sexualisation at all, but merely a study of what the public thinks about Sexualisation. The sex researcher Dr Brooke Magnanti analysed the Bailey Review and found that it contained no evidence to back the idea that children were being Sexualised:

It does not summarise any academic evidence regarding sexualisation…

It does not conduct new evidence seeking regarding the effects of early commercialisation or sexualisation…

It does offer the results of questionnaires and focus groups…

It does make a number of recommendations, purportedly based on the results of the questionnaires and focus groups; however, close examination shows that in many cases, the responses do not support the changes suggested.

It is also worth noting that Reg Bailey is not a child psychologist, but in fact is head of a large, international Christian organisation, Mothers’ Union. Why did the government pick a religious leader to undertake this study? Why has the press swallowed Bailey’s opinions and regurgitated them as fact? Because moral panics don’t exist in a vacuum: they are created to justify censorship, and just as the Video Nasties panic culminated in the Video Recordings Act 1984, so this panic is aimed at legislation to introduce Internet censorship.

We need to also stand up for our children, and ensure they are treated with the same respect as children in the rest of Europe. We do not create caring adults by treating children as idiots who cannot be trusted to use the Internet, or by denying parents the right to control what their children see and hear.

As for Sexualisation? The evidence suggests that teenagers are becoming more, not less grown-up about sex and sexuality. In Britain, teenage pregnancy rates are the lowest since the 1960s. The Internet, with its free and open access to information has created a more sexually mature generation of young people than we have ever seen before.

There is no cause for panic, but there are powerful vested interests that want to close off the British public from the outside world, just as they tried to do when video appeared in the 1980s. This time, we need to stop the panic before Britain loses access to a free and open Internet.