A young woman stands in a room with several men around her. She tells the men that she is taking women’s studies at university.
They respond by grabbing her throat to silence her. They move onto slapping her and pulling off her clothes.
The scene that follows is too graphic to recount. After the men finish, they ask her: “What do you think of feminism now?”
The woman in this film later stated she was not comfortable with what happened.
Apparently, though, this was not sexual assault but a form of sexual expression – pornography.
Indeed, depictions of sexual violence are often promoted as an expression of women’s rights.
“You could do a porn where a girl is getting choked and hit and spit on, the guy’s calling her a dirty slut and stuff and that’s okay. That can still be feminist,” says Joanna Angel, self-described feminist porn actress.
Such pornographic violence is symptomatic of a broader, global trend.
This trend ranges from the brutal opportunism often seen in the wake of economic and environmental disasters, where vulnerable women are specifically targeted with violence or coerced into sex slavery; through to the proliferation new forms of sexual objectification, such as labiaplasty, men extorting younger girls to send pornographic images, child-on-child sex assault and new technology for global sex trading; through to the ever-widening gender pay gap and the increasing feminization of poverty.
In Australia, most violent crimes have been in decline, but the rates of domestic and sexual violence are soaring.
Gendered violence has escalated to the point that now two women are killed each week – twice the historical average.
As at the time of writing, 35 women have been killed in Australia this year alone, the majority of them by male partners. Continue reading
- Laura McNally is a psychologist, consultant, author and doctoral candidate.