What’s Current: #NoAmnesty4Pimps — Join the Global Day of Social Media Activism protesting Amnesty

amnesty action

October 23rd is the No Amnesty For Pimps Global Day of Action! Join Amnesty Action online, using the hashtag or in person if you’re in London. Call on Amnesty International to support the human rights of women and girls!

This badass young woman created a program to bust sex trafficking pimps using publicly available data on the Internet.

Dad lets son play with toy kitchen or a Barbie doll, and is all nbd about it.

Heather Brunskell-Evans on Playboy Feminism.

“In an Orwellian trope, pornography has become ‘The Ministry of Truth’ where language and concepts invert reality: objecting to pornography and its name-calling of women as ‘sluts’ is deemed ‘slut-shaming’; in contrast the actual shaming of women by pornography’s lingua franca is deemed liberating and fun, not only for the ones being paid to fake it, but for the rest of us too. Nor has the ironic reclaiming of such language, as in the ‘slut-walks’, changed women’s sexual social status by one jot.

All the nice guys out there who wouldn’t dream of making a sexist comment, who find revenge pornography objectionable, and who would never force a woman to have sex, can rest easy. The dominant ideology is that you need not trouble your conscience in masturbating to pornography or witnessing the violence therein (even if it’s not your particular ‘bag’) because women are just gagging to be called sluts, brought to their knees, and ‘face-fucked’. The double-standard so objected to by some feminists is retrenched by pornography with a normative ferocity unimaginable in the 1960s. What is new is the idea that sexually ‘cool’ and fun-loving women take pleasure in it. I can hear some resounding comments: ‘They do! They do!’”

Why your father’s Playboy can’t compete in today’s world of brutal hard-core porn:

“Today’s average porn user — typically male — would most likely die of boredom before he got to the centerfold, given the intensity, violence and brutality of acts that he has become so accustomed to as he clicks his way through pornhub.com or youporn.com.

As academics, we have studied porn for many years as a cultural and business phenomenon that shapes our society in deep and insidious ways, with negative impacts on gender equality and public health. We’ve also brought our expertise to bear in advocacy and legal struggles.

Our analysis of the evolution of the porn industry suggests that Playboy’s move really represents the triumph of mainstream porn and not a victory for women.”

Take Back Halloween!

Susan Cox

Susan Cox is a feminist writer and academic living in the United States. She teaches in Philosophy.