Tag: Abuse, rape, and domestic violence

The Ugly Side of "Alternative" Porn

tekanji

On my thread about NOW’s use of American Apparel (AA) products, I got into a long debate with reader Anika, who felt that I, and many other feminists, had unfairly singled out AA and ignored other companies:

I have yet to see any retailer or manufacturer be subjected to this level of scrutiny – to the extent that a well meaning person such as yourself demands that NOW boycott their products.

Well, just for Anika I have created a new category called “Companies Behaving Badly”. I wanted to call it “Bad Company!” in tribute of a site my mom used to run, but I decided that it sounded too much like a dichotomy that left no room for a mixture of good and bad. So, in honour of my new category, I’ve decided to plough headlong into a critique of another company, Suicide Girls (SG).

Now, I had known for a long time some of the sketchy business practices that the company engages in. I had heard the complaints from the models about poor treatment, the allegations about their journals being censored (when the company profited off of the “uncensored” nature of those same journals), and all that. It was maybe a year or two ago, and I started a personal boycott of the company. I would certainly speak out to any sex-positive organization that was taken in by SG’s “grrl power” hype.

Recent kerfluffle is that 30 models have left over what they feel is bad business practices. The problems range from financial disagreements, to unauthorized modification and censorship of journals, to termination of models who shot for other companies, and even verbal abuse by Sean Suhl, a co-founder of SG. The first two grievances are the same I remember from before, but the last one is quite shocking. I’m going to address it later, but first I want to give a little background on how SG presents itself as a company.

The message of business-side female empowerment hasn’t hurt either. “The perception that women had an important/equal role in the administration of the site probably made it more attractive to some people who might not have visited a porn site otherwise,” d’Addario said.

Two of the ex-models say they were attracted by the empowerment message, too. “I liked that you had a journal and voice, you had the chance to make your own (photo) sets,” said “Dia,” a 30-year-old former model who doesn’t wish to be identified because she now works outside the porn business in Northern California.

“I looked forward to making great art,” added Dia, who has unsuccessfully tried to get her photos off the site.

She and other models say that contrary to its image as a women-run operation, SuicideGirls is actually controlled by a man — co-founder Sean Suhl. They accuse him of treating women poorly and failing to pay them enough. (According to the site’s FAQ, SuicideGirls models get paid $300 per photo set.)

“The only reasons I’m doing this and I’m sticking my neck out is that people, especially females who are 18 years old and want to be a SuicideGirl, need to understand who they’re representing,” said 28-year-old ex-model Jennifer Caravella of San Francisco, who said she goes by the name “Sicily.” “It’s certainly not a group of women who are working together for this.”

[From SuicideGirls Gone AWOL by Randy Dotinga on Wired News]

It should be noted that Missy, the other founder of SG, disagrees with the claims about her co-founder because the majority of the office workers are women. I would like to point out that, as with AA (whose upper management, according to Anika, is 60% female), employing women is only one part of creating an egalitarian office space. I have to say that I’m less concerned with a man being a co-founder, though, and more concerned that a company that purports to have equal representation of women in the administration could shaft its models so badly on important areas like pay and free speech. I can understand not wanting models publishing journal entries that criticize the company, but I think that it’s unethical (if not illegal) to ghostwrite a journal without the original author’s permission.

I also get the feeling from various things the ex-models have said, that the “standard” contracts don’t do much in the way of protecting the models’ rights. Some of my biggest criticisms of the porn industry treats its workers (and, indeed, how society in general views and treats sex workers as a whole) is that they are often times put at risk, denied access to certain rights and benefits like a fair wage, and seen as objects for purchase rather than people selling a product (sex). The last point is illustrated by Suhl’s belief in his right to verbally abuse the women who work for him and can be seen in other areas such as stripping, ala. Robin’s Tales from the Boobiebar.

Sicily, a former SG model, speaks about her experiences with Suhl [emphasis mine]:

i have seen sean working hard on this project and know that it has been a huge frustration for him. my only grievance over the dvd is that i was lied to and told things like, ‘the dvd sucks because you guys are a bunch of vapid idiots’ and ‘an ass sex video wouldn’t have paid you as much’.
This leads me to the constant verbal abuse and threats that sean dishes out to models, or anyone who gets close enough to experience his personality. i have heard him call everyone in the office “fucking morons and idiots” on numerous occasions. i have heard him call models, “sluts”, “whores”, “junkies”, “stupid”, etc…this list is longer that i care to write. in fact the burlesque tour girls had an on-going joke about this, and actually wrote and taped a piece of paper that read “YOU SUCK! – from sean” on our costume bin. sometimes ya gotta make light of the ugly stuff. i have watched girls (my friends) cry themselves to sleep at night (on numerous occasions) due to his verbals insults and downright mean behavior. i have also heard sean laugh about it later…amused at his own demeaning antics.

[From Suicide Girls: More Sad Tales, quoted text by Sicily]

As any survivor of verbal abuse knows, insults like the ones attributed to Suhl are used to dehumanize and control those that they’re used against. They also constitute sexual harassment under US law and are inappropriate in any setting, much less a workplace that is supposedly “equal” and “empowering”. Every person deserves their right to personhood to be protected by law, but more often than not I read stories where victims in the sex industry are blamed for their abuse by police, news organizations, random people who hear about the issues, and even the government itself.

Sex workers deserve the same rights and respect we give any employees. I’m going to make the same criticism that many of the posters on this situation have made: SG isn’t “alternative porn”, it’s mainstream porn with a new face. There’s nothing subversive about that.

Read More on the Issue:

Via feministe.

And the rest was… Silence.

tekanji

I can’t seem to scrub that “part-time hypocrite” stamp completely off my forehead. I made a personal category, yet I’m still loath to use it. When I first started this blog, I made an “abuse” category. I’ve used it once for its original purpose, and even then it was just posting excerpts from an article because I was too chicken to involve my personal experiences. I don’t want to air my dirty laundry, but what else is having a blog for if not to be a space where I can express my opinions and experiences? Even as I write this, I’m not sure I’ll ever post it.

About seven years ago, I was in the middle of a year and a half long emotionally abusive relationship. Now, anyone who knows me for long enough will likely know that. If it comes up, I mention it. If not, I don’t. But very few, if any, of the people close to me really understand what happened. It is, after all, such a simple thing to say I was abused, but such a hard thing to actually talk about.

For a year and a half, I bore all the pain he gave me in relative silence. My family and friends knew he wasn’t good for me, many knew that I felt I couldn’t leave him, but I kept most of it for myself. I want to say that it was out of some misguided nobility to not want to burden them, but that would be a lie. The reality is more selfish and more stupid: I loved him. I knew if those close to me knew all of it that it would damn him irrevocably in their eyes; at least if they were in the dark they could only hate him for the things they could see.

After he dumped me, I still kept quiet. This time it was because I didn’t want to appear weak. I could handle it on my own, I told myself. I was strong. Everyone said so. Everyone still does. I moved on. When he came to my house to return my belongings, he gave me the “let’s still be friends” speech. I had learned long before we broke up to understand exactly what he meant under the ostensibly friendly words; he wanted booty call without the emotional attachment, leaving him free to use me while breaking in a new victim. Outwardly, I was strong. I told him with increasing volume to get out of my house. But he knew me well, too. I still loved him. His hold on me was gone, but not forgotten. Eventually my dad had to come down and throw him out because he and I were at an impasse. My dad lauds me for my courage that day, to stand in the living room telling him to get out. I still curse myself for my weakness. I was not strong; I was stubborn.

I did not always want to be silent. There was a time, soon after I became involved with my second boyfriend that I wanted to speak out. Even after six months the wound was still fresh. At that point in time, my abuser was still harassing me from time to time, pouring salt in the wound as it were. My boyfriend saw the pain it caused me, saw how panicked I would get. In the beginning, he tried to help me. He did what he thought was right. But how can one inexperienced person cope with something that I myself still cannot?

He did so much for me just by loving me as a partner should, by so obviously thinking the world of me. Through him, I saw myself as a human being. I saw myself as someone who was not only worthy of life, but also capable of achieving my goals. I will be forever indebted to him for that.

But in the end I had to be silent around him, too. He could not understand and whenever I tried to explain it would just make things worse. His disbelief that I stayed with my abuser for so long, indeed even after I was aware of what he was doing to me, fed into my own shame on the matter. After all, it wasn’t even me in the end who got out. He dumped me. For all of my talk about partnerships, equality, for all my feminism I couldn’t get out. I had a responsibility to get out. I was at fault.

My silence was not absolute. At the most inappropriate times it would come bursting forth from me, manifesting as wracking sobs or irrational anger. My boyfriend didn’t understand what was happening to me; he took the burden onto himself and refused to listen to any explanation I tried to give. He did not want to hear about my abuser, or my time being abused. Since I could no more keep silent than he could hear what I needed to say, we worked our relationship around the triggering points. We remained very emotionally close until the end, but our intimacy suffered greatly because of our problems.

My life went on. Changes happened; my boyfriend and I parted company, I decided to rediscover joy in myself and my sexuality, but my silence remained constant. It had become a habit. I used that silence to create an invisible wall between me and everyone I cared about. It was so easy by then. Easier, for sure, than facing the truth. It took me a little over a year to recognize the wall. I wanted to overcome it. I wanted to be whole.

I chose the wrong people to help me, and I suffered from it. Suddenly I was the abused girl all over again. I lost two of my friends, one of whom had been my very best friend, right before graduation because of the situation. In truth, the whole fiasco cost me most of the self-esteem I had built up in the intervening years. And still I get ridiculed by some of my remaining friends on how my lack of friendship with my ex-friends is “stupid”. Fuck, if I wanted to be called stupid I would have let my first abuser stick around.

I want to talk about my experiences. I need to talk about them. But I’m afraid. Every time I speak up, I get punished for it. No one wants to hear the truth. No one wants to know how fragile I am. How much I’ve suffered. They want to think of me as the strong one, but I’m not. For once, just for one time, I want to be able to share a painful moment and be supported. I don’t want to be told that I’ve ruined my second boyfriend’s life because of my freakouts. I don’t want to be told I’m stupid for my feelings. I don’t want to be told that I’m strong and therefore can handle things. I don’t want to be “supported” only to be left high and dry when I need support the most.

But, most of all, I don’t want to be silent any more.

Pitching Harassment [Girls & Game Ads, Part 2]

tekanji

For this part of the series, I’m going to mainly be using World of Warcraft for reference, as that’s the company I’ve had my most recent (and bitter) experience with. I also think that the company’s marketing and design choices have provided me with a clear link between sexist marketing and the creation of a gaming culture hostile to women. Keep in mind, though, that this is a phenomenon that pervades gaming culture as a whole.

First off, I’d like to point out that I’m not the first one to make the jump from advertising and how the actual players treat women:

Further, many of the marketing strategies and magazines are directly exclusively toward guys. I stopped reading Electronic Gaming Monthly a few years ago after I got sick of seeing yet another article on a “girl gamer” with a few squares of cotton stretched over her fake boobs. Those interviews usually focused on whether or not she played naked rather than what was currently spinning in her system. What I find particularly sad about this is not that it tends to alienate their few female readers, but that a large chunk of their target audience is younger boys… so these melon-chested interviewees (surrounded with drawings of the same, ripped from the games themselves… see Dead or Alive) come to represent women for these kids. Sexist attitudes are reinforced. Girl gamers are shunted aside by a new generation as fluffy sex kitties who prance about playing The Sims and giggling behind a hand.

[From Girls, games, and a culture of hostility by Legendary Monkey]

One of my main beefs with Blizzard’s treatment of women was that the advertising that involved female characters always showed scantily-clad, hyper-sexualized female avatars. Ever since Warcraft III one of their main “poster girls” has been a busty Night Elf vixen; she is by far their most visible woman, prominently featured in the background of their website and the most visible female in their game loading screens. Check out, if you will, their official wallpaper section and compare the females’ representation to that of the males’.

One line of Blizzard’s official WoW wallpapers.

The focus in the above female featured wallpapers is on their perfectly round, gravity-defying, eye-catching breasts. Also notice the similarity in their body shapes: thin, small waists, similar shoulders, etc. When you rule out the obvious elements like their different races, opposing colour palettes, and hunched versus standing up tall poses, the similarities are actually quite striking, even down to their long hair and magical right hand as a secondary focus. Sure, if you look closely they have different face shapes (the undead warlock has a longer jaw), but I only realized that when I sat down to examine the row I selected. In stark contrast to the scantily-clad ladies, the dwarven rifleman is suited up with leather armour and a cloak and the focus is on his beard and face. I would definitely say that this fits my argument that women are turned into “cookie cutter” objects while men are seen as individuals through these kinds of advertisements.

I’d also like to address another noticeable issue of the gender split: character dancing. It isn’t advertising, per se, but it’s an example of Blizzard generated content that reinforces the misogynist culture the players engage in. While playing my Horde character (Troll female) I started noticing a disparity between the way women dance (sexy, hip-moving, arm-waving way) and the way men dance (active, much movement, often jumping, sometimes silly). The female Night Elves are the worst: they were described to me as “pole dancing without the pole” and when I saw my Night Elf alt dance, I couldn’t help but agree. But, they make a joke about it in their /silly command so it must be ok! (The joke command is another area that’s a bit of a sore point; I noticed that the girls make on average more sexual jokes than the guys, often focusing on their own bodies.)

So, I’ve shown how Blizzard buys into the same sexist marketing ploys as the rest of the industry, but what does this have to do with in-game harassment?

Well, I’d like to return to the quote I pulled from Legendary Monkey’s article: “a large chunk of their target audience is younger boys… so these melon-chested interviewees… come to represent women for these kids.” Granted, in this case she was talking about actual women, but the females in these games do to a certain extent represent actual women. One of the way we learn as humans is by absorbing messages in popular culture (news, advertising, books, games, movies, etc) and the message the video game industry is sending it’s target audience is clear: women are whores on display for your amusement.

Think I’m exaggerating? Hop on to any FPS (first person shooter) game that uses a mic (I recommend Halo 2, since the atmosphere seems particularly virulent there) and say something (or, if you’re a guy, have a female family member play using voice chat). Count how long it takes for the insults like “faggot”, “nigger”, and “pussy” to be replaced with vitriol thrown at the woman player like “whore” or “go back to the kitchen”. Or go onto a ventrilo/teamspeak server for an MMO guild and listen to the way they talk with their female members, chances are they’ll be a lot of talking about cybersex, how “hot” the girl is, boob-talk, etc. No “bad” name-calling there, though, because if she’s in the guild they “like” her.

Any time I bring up the offensive language (all that I cited above and more, not just the female-directed slurs) I’m told that I’m oversensitive, or it doesn’t mean the same thing in gaming culture that it does in real life. Sorry, kids, but I call bullshit. There is nothing harmless about an environment that uses verbal intimidation to dehumanize a group of people, whether or not the person using the language intends it to be so.

But isn’t dehumanizing a group of people exactly what the ads marketed towards these teenage boys do? By reducing the women depicted into not much more than a sexual object the companies are not only attracting people who already feel this way to play their game, they’re encouraging and condoning the objectification, and by extension the harassment, that goes on in their servers.

While stopping the hyper-sexualization of the female characters won’t fix the harassment problem, I truly believe that representing the women avatars in advertising and in-game as individuals/people on the same level as the males would be a step in the right direction. If the companies send the message that all people – regardless of sex, race, sexual orientation, etc – deserve respect, then not only will more people who believe this to be true be drawn to the games, but also it will help foster an environment friendly to all players. Who knows, maybe even the kids who grow up in a bigoted atmosphere might even learn something about tolerance.

Up next: Girl Power? – we all love girls who kick ass, but does showing mostly “sexy” women in these roles hurt more than it helps?

All World of Warcraft images copyright © Blizzard Entertainment.