Posts by Emma Hart
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My guess is that the Listener's covers are targeted at a particular demographic: the supermarket newsstand browsers.
But isn't that "professional women 18-54"? ie the same demographic they're offending? THAT's what puzzles me. I'm not confused by Coke Zero and Lynx making ads offensive to women, for instance, because their target market is men.
(Okay, actually... I do have some issues with those ads being degrading to _men_, but I feel I am in danger of turning into a Whining Machine.)
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I guess an additional argument could be had about focusing on imagery, even when it's as daft as those covers.
I get stuck about here. Your cover image is your chief marketing. Why are you marketing stories that are well-written and well-balanced by using imagery which is offensive to your target market for those stories?
So yes, while I can accept the idea of "you should get past your prejudices on the presentation and actually read the content", from a marketing point of view, it just seems incomprehensibly stupid to me. I'm perfectly ready to concede that I'm missing something that more media-savvy types understand.
I ripped the cover off the Stiletto issue because it annoyed me every single time I picked the Listener up.
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I decided, for reasons of my mental health, that it was possibly best for me not to read it.
Well, the story itself wasn't all THAT bad, certainly not as bad as the cover would lead you to believe. Just like the "Why are so many Christchurch women BRUTALLY MURDERED stiletto" cover. They appear to be deliberately trying to sell magazines by making the covers (rather than the content) really offensive. I don't understand it myself.
We constructively discuss and offer worthwhile advice and guidance. Right?
Man, I must have been drunker than I thought.
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I do have one complaint about last week's Media 7: it was too short. Gemma was pulling out those exact three Listener covers that Megan and I had been endlessly bitching about just a couple of weeks earlier, and suddenly we were done.
Sad Face.
Karl was asking for some kind of QI-style XL extra content version on-line. I mean, I'm sure there are Reasons, but Sad Face anyway.
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OMG look! We got SPAM on the copyright thread. That's so beautiful, on so many levels.
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(OK, the one study)
Gnnnrgh... it's not one study, Jolisa, it's a study of a whole bunch of studies, two of which (US and Japan) I've linked to here before more than once. I know I said I wasn't going to engage (because of course I'm okay with trafficking, that's a totally fair statement to make), but that's just a straight factual error.
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Richard: what Russell said. Which I think might be my last word on the subject.
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Colour me deeply confused!
I'm not saying I'm convinced by the argument, I was trying to explain what the argument was. Also, the usual "porn as monolithic", all the same, all straight, all misgynistic, which is simply not the case.
But then you have to explain why, as the availability of porn goes up, sexual violence decreases. And this has proved true across a number of different cultures.
I feel I should explain why I gave stats about Swedish sex worker attacks and didn't back them up. My very favourite site for this, a collective blog by Swedish sex workers in English, appears to have disappeared some time in the last couple of months. The data was not from attacks reported to the police, but had been collected by the Swedish equivalent of SWOP (the US Sex Workers' Outreach Program).
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I'm really not clear on the distinction that's being made here, except that it seems a bit wishful.
Okay... relating to my own experience and that of women I've read about, I believe this is the distinction. The argument is that blaming the porn lets the abuser off the hook. So if your partner is demanding that you perform a particular sex act and is prepared to force you to do it, how much does it really matter where he got the idea, and how much is the important thing that your partner is a massive, massive fuckwad? It's a counter to the "porn turns perfectly nice guys into arseholes" argument, which I'm not sure that anyone is making.
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In short, harm to those ostensibly being protected has increased.
And this matters to me more than any ideological viewpoint, and in fact it's what annoys me the most: the individual women who get ground up in the 'experiment'.
Also, it turns out "taking a stand" for the good of all womanhood, so that everyone understands that Women are Not for the Taking has exactly the opposite effect: since the law change in Sweden, sexual violence crimes have increased by a third. That data is nearly a year old now, and would certainly have been available in the Icelandic debate as it has been in the English one.
Just like people who work in the gambling industry know the most about it, so they are the first ones we should consult about regulating it?
Bzzt. Thank you for playing.
Richard, a woman from the NZ Prostitutes' Collective recently went to England and was on the winning team at the Oxford Union debate on prostitution. Or perhaps you'd like to consider Georgina Beyer's speech on the Prostitution Law Reform Act. But actually yes, if I wanted to know about the patterns of problem gamblers, what they have in common, what makes them stop a session, how you recognise them, croupiers are one of the groups I'd want to talk to. Why does that seem so insane to you?
Indict a feminist initiative for failing to solve the entire problem at once: ergo, this feminist initiative has failed.
Um, that's not what it's doing. It's challenging not the initiative itself, but the idea that the initiative is a feminist victory.