surprising to see a video essay that is actually critical about the sex industry & uses critical thinking, its really refreshing. i want to boost this video & this woman's channel
just watched an episode on a serial rapist where a 18 year old girl was told by a policeman he’d put her in jail himself if she was lying, so she quickly changed her story & was fined $500. Years later a serial rapists computer was found where he documented all of these eapes & a photograph of her in the circumstance of her story was right there. “False reports” well I wonder how many “false reports” are true. & men are more likely to be raped than falsely accused also.
For more information about this issue, check out Victim/Suspect (trailer) a Netflix documentary that follows the investigation by journalist Rachel de Leon on the disturbing pattern of young women going to the police to report they've been sexually assaulted, only to find themselves charged with the crime of making a false report.
End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI) has an informative publication on this issue called "Raped, Then Jailed: The Risks of Prosecution for Falsely Reporting Sexual Assault", which includes the case example of the 18-year old OP is referencing:
Sexual assault (SA) crimes are difficult to investigate and substantiate, and the police are pressured to "close cases", the easiest method for SA reports is to get the victim to recant her statement, thereby providing evidence for them to charge her with a false report which is a 100% slam dunk way of closing a brand new case.
Men can not be rehabilitated, as psychologist Rebecca Myers found out after many years of hard work.
Rebecca Myers has dedicated her life to trying to change the most brutal of Britain’s serial rapists and abusers. When people hear that, they always want her to reveal the “worst” thing she has heard.
Go on, they say, as though it’s an episode of The Killing or CSI. Myers, who is a forensic psychologist working with deviant criminals, will give away a few things, such as the fact that she can’t look at a table knife casually left in the butter over breakfast after her prison housed a man who stabbed his girlfriend in the bath and left the knife behind, stuck in. Or that the theme tune to Coronation Street gives her chills. One of her first cases was a man who went on a three-year raping spree, breaking into the homes of single women while wearing an animal mask. On one occasion he hid behind the sofa of his next victim in his terrifying costume as she, oblivious and happy, watched her favourite soap opera.
The actual worst thing? She won’t tell me that — she is scared it will contaminate me too. “I have never told a soul, and never will.” That’s her job, to suffer so that others don’t, to save other women.
One of the worst things she has heard wasn’t exactly a crime. It was after a lifetime of getting into the heads of these men through a gruelling and expensive rehabilitation programme for sex offenders that thousands of male prisoners in this country undertook over a two-decade period, at a taxpayer cost of an estimated £100 million. She personally started working with the Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP) when she was 22, soon after she joined one of Britain’s most notorious prisons, known for the number of inmates convicted for sexual or violent offences. She worked with them, including the mask-wearing rapist, out of idealism and trust.
Then, in 2017, after Myers had spent 16 years on the front line of the SOTP, the results of a national evaluation came in. The SOTP didn’t work. It was abruptly abandoned. She had spent so long attempting to change people who had done horrible things, and when they were released they went out and did them again at just the same rate as the men who hadn’t attempted any change.
“It was gutting,” Myers, now 49, says to me. “Just shocking. A massive disappointment to so many people that had invested decades of their lives, totally and utterly driven by wanting to stop these people from doing it again.”
The worst thing she has heard was not a murder. It was this news that seemed to kill hope. The costs, emotional and financial, hadn’t been worth it. Her memoir Inside Job gives the reader an authentic account of what it is like to work with maximum-security prisoners, including when a headless pigeon is lobbed at her from one of the cells (ripped off with the man’s teeth?), splattering her shoes with blood. “Whore!” the prisoner shouts as Myers stares at the pigeon’s still-flapping body, its spinal cord protruding. “Slut!”
She will never know who did it, whether it was because she gave them an unfavourable parole recommendation or it was just a man who hates women. “There are plenty of them about.”
When I meet Myers over Zoom I can tell how she holds her own as one of the few women in such a hostile environment. She speaks in the North Yorkshire accent of her home town with seriousness and common sense. She began in prisons months after graduating from a psychology degree. She was, she describes, “slim and blonde”, and understandably naive. She was given a tour of the prison officers’ quarters, with pictures of topless women on the walls, their breasts covered with NSPCC stickers.
Sinister disembodied eyes press against each cell’s viewing holes as she passes. “I wish I had not worn a skirt,” she writes, and she never made that mistake again, switching for ever to work in a baggy outfit of loose trousers and poloneck covered up by a jacket, even in summer. “My face and hands are the only flesh I allow them to see.” Her psychological armour in prison is represented by her perfect nail polish, which she wears to see me too.
We agree that it seems strange, with hindsight, to think that such a young woman was the right fit for the job. Myers explains that forensic psychologists are not usually like Robbie Coltrane in Cracker — in the UK 80 per cent of them are female. In the 1990s money flooded into prison rehabilitation programmes with a surge of Blairite optimism. Britain’s sex offender rehab became an international flagship, she says. In practice, that meant an “influx of fresh young female psychologists straight out of university entering the prison to deliver programmes”.
“It’s an interesting notion isn’t it?” Myers says, pondering. “The damage is done to women yet it is mostly women trying to fix it.”
The Silence of the Lambs, featuring Jodie Foster as a student psychologist at the FBI Academy trying to outsmart Hannibal Lecter was how some of Myers’ friends conceived of her job. “It was the cool thing at the time,” she tells me. “But now I completely steer away from anything of that nature. I find crime on TV distasteful. I worry about it being glamorised. It’s as far from glamorous as you can get.
“Clarice Starling I am not,” she writes in her book. “Real-life serial killers are far less exciting and more stubborn and smelly than those portrayed in the films.”
Almost immediately she was left alone with them in unguarded rooms. “In terms of how things are portrayed on television, that is one of the biggest misconceptions,” she says. “That the men would be handcuffed, that there would be officers there. There simply weren’t. You were left on your own. I was surprised at the time.”
Was that because it was considered low risk? “I don’t think it’s low risk. In the book I describe a hostage situation with a female prison officer.”
This hostage-taking goes on for 12 hours, the “decent, kind-hearted” woman held at knifepoint in a cell by a man who had been a serial rapist of elderly women in their homes. Myers is rushed to the scene in the middle of the night and helps to assess the man as highly unlikely to surrender. The officers charge in when he begins an assault on the prison officer. “So it’s not low risk,” she says. “You never turn your back. But I didn’t question it, I just followed the culture.”
The book follows closely her first treatment group of sex offenders, including the masked rapist she names “Wayne” in the book. She is not allowed to name the prison for legal reasons, and she blurs identifying details for the sake of the victims’ families. When she first reads through Wayne’s crimes she has to vomit in the toilets. In person, though, he presents as a polite, even endearing man who likes custard creams dunked in his tea. This is a hard lesson society is still learning: sex offenders are husbands, dads, people holding down respectable jobs. Even police officers, as the Sarah Everard case showed.
Each psychologist was paired with a prison officer or two for the treatment programme, which took groups of nine men through more than 200 hours of therapy that lasted up to a year. In a twist that makes her book seem even more like a Jed Mercurio TV drama, a young Myers falls in love with the prison officer she is paired with on her first treatment programme. It’s an ill-advised romance that begins and ends in the dark hours they spend debriefing each other on what they have heard about the rape and torture of women.
It’s wrong to say the treatment had no effect, because it certainly affected the staff. Myers is covert about her personal life, but she has two children and is often talked out of overprotective parenting by her husband, who does not work in the same world. “He says: ‘It’s fine, they’re going to be OK.’ ”
A serial killer once made a joke to her about picnic blankets, how they are useful to roll up bodies. She is for ever sent into high alert by lone male picnickers. The two male prison officers she worked with are mentally scarred too. One stopped being able to give his little daughter a bath. The other, then her boyfriend, couldn’t drive past a lone woman on the street without fretting over her safety. The pair would wake up together after “murder dreams”.
One core aspect of the SOTP was trying to awaken empathy with victims, to the extent of asking the perpetrators to re-enact their crimes from the victim’s point of view. They’d use pens in place of penises, and flick water instead of urine, blood or semen. It sounds like highly risky territory. Indeed, in that first group Myers is aware that one of the criminals is becoming sexually aroused by the re-enactment.
“They were very powerful, but I think they also had the potential to be shaming, difficult and potentially dangerous,” Myers says of the exercises. “We started to see from the research that an increase in victim empathy didn’t necessarily decrease recidivism.” She spent more than 200 hours with one man who was in jail after a rape and hammer attack. He told her all the right things, and she marked him down as a success. Later she saw the man on the news, convicted of a rape and hammer attack.
“I don’t know what the answer is to stopping male violence. I wish I did,” she says.
It is a minority of released sex offenders who reoffend, but each one feels like too many. The sex offender rehabilitation schemes that replaced the SOTP have yet to be evaluated. Myers is no longer involved in frontline treatment. This gets us to the question that hangs over this book. Does she despair? Why not just give up?
“No, because we can’t just do nothing. We don’t have the death penalty, we release people. We’ve got to carry on.
“I know the research showed what it showed, but I like to believe that I have averted crimes. I have to believe that over the last 25 years I have made a difference. I have to believe that or I couldn’t keep doing it.”
That gives meaning to your life? She sets her face with determination.
“Absolutely. I do believe that people can change,” she says. She can never know a woman she saved from being attacked, she says. It could be me, it could be her even, but she hopes they exist, and this hope is the best thing about her job — which, by the way, is a question few ask. “I can’t think of anything more worthwhile.”
Inside Job: Treating Murderers and Sex Offenders. The Life of a Prison Psychologist by Dr Rebecca Myers is published by HarperCollins, £8.99
I find it more than a little ridiculous that we are treated to this statement regarding Myers' work "That’s her job, to suffer so that others don’t, to save other women."
Only to conclude with the following statements from her:
“No, because we can’t just do nothing. We don’t have the death penalty, we release people. We’ve got to carry on.
“I know the research showed what it showed, but I like to believe that I have averted crimes. I have to believe that over the last 25 years I have made a difference. I have to believe that or I couldn’t keep doing it.”
I'm sorry, but that sounds like profound intellectual dishonesty for the sake of preserving her own feelings about men. Many women know that predatory men cannot be fixed or saved, not from study or interviews or gathering police data, but from lived experiences with these men, being hurt by them, watching other women be tortured and murdered. I do not think highly of the priorities of a woman who has the opportunity to study the depth of this issue, draw the conclusion from the facts, and persist in supporting these programs and release of "reformed" predators back into the public because "we have to carry on". That is not "suffering to protect women", that's upholding the status quo of valuing men's "potential" over the lives and safety of women.
Benefits of describing prostitutes as prostituted women instead?
Not sure what the context is for this.
I would say that as the term 'prostitute' is a patriarchal categorisation: a symbolic and distinct 'type' of woman, separate from the non-prostitute - the 'normal woman'. The existence of this classification is useful for the patriarchy for two reasons:
A woman being a 'prostitute' marks her as essentially un-rapeable; the whore to contrast the madonna. This alleviates male guilt;
The concept of the 'prostitute' being separate from the 'normal woman' exists as an ever-present threat - stay in line, behave, put up with abusive behaviour, or else you risk leaving your safe domain under the supposed protection of one man, and so becoming her.
Note there is a contradiction there: the prostitute is sold under patriarchy to men as an un-rapeable woman, but is sold to women as a threat of rape. Men intrinsically understand that the prostitute is raped - but they use their symbolic framework to shift the classification of rape from 'psychological and physical terror' to the symbolic 'corruption' of some essential essence of the woman's soul. The 'prostitute' under the patriarchal pornographic ideology is un-rapeable, not in the sense that she cannot be subject to terror, but rather she is uncorruptable as she is already corrupted by her prostitution. The reality of rape is thus disguised through this symbolic framing, and furthermore pornographic ideology believes the 'whore' to represent the true essence of women's sexuality: a masochistic desire to corrupt oneself and submit as the animal below male humanity. It's convoluted, but it has to be, because patriarchy requires these symbolic categories - for without them, there would be no justification for rape, for violence, for hierarchy. To categorise a woman as a 'prostitute' would be to engage with a patriarchal framework that is specifically used to supplant the reality of rape with symbolic corruption.
However, 'prostituted woman' emphasises that she is a human being first and foremost - she is coerced under patriarchy into prostitution i.e. she is prostituted. So it is both a more accurate description of her situation and also re-emphasises that she is not a distinct category that we as 'normal women' can feel separated from, but rather she has been victimised in a way all women are vulnerable to.
Not to get too hopeful, but we as feminists frequently and vastly underestimate how much we got done in barely a lifetime. In countries like the United States, a babygirl born in the 1900s would’ve been forced to become voiceless property barely after reaching her late teens, but instead, by the 1990s, she could’ve gotten to die as a woman with completely recognised human rights, able to have remained single, able to have gotten a job while legally protected from discrimination and harassment, able to have opened her own bank account, able to have travelled alone, and able to have worn pants and short skirts and tattoos and piercings and a shaved head if she so wished, amongst so many endless things. We used to not be able to vote! It’s almost unimaginable how the turn was so sudden and so radical in the whole West and good parts of the East, as well, and we should always remember that whenever discussing our current problems and affairs
An analysis and infographic of 10,000 porn stars and adult films, revealing what the average adult performer looks like and does on film.
Get the latest stats and data trends from pornhub insights! Offering you an inside look of the data behind porn’s biggest site.
I included a link directly to Pornhub because it's pretty shocking how open they are about what depravity is popular. Enter at your own risk.
The Unapologetic Resistance of Women against Pornography
The
The
Pornography has become a primary source of sexual education. At the same time, mainstream commercial pornography has coalesced around a rela
Adult (>18 years old) exposure to pornographic media is connected with: Believing a rape victim enjoyed rape Believing women suffer less fr
Let’s say that there’s an industry out there.
Let’s say that the annual revenue of this industry in the United States alone is about $13.3 b
Sample LIVE SEARCH results on PornMD.com to experience the hottest FREE porn videos on the Internet. See what other XXX fans are craving in
^^ Enter at your own risk. I included this because the kinds of things they search for are the most solid anti porn evidence I've ever seen.
This is a lecture Dr. Gail Dines gave at the Nova Scotia Women’s Summit in 2012. It’s about how women are portrayed in the media in general, but about halfway through (40 minutes), she starts talking about the research she’s done on mainstream porn. Said research is complied in her book Pornland, which I really recommend. That there links to a full PDF.
This is a group of articles titled The Protection Project by the Journal of Human Rights and Society. Long read, but it talks a lot about how porn contributes to sex trafficking.
This is a TED Talk by Ran Gavrieli about quitting porn that has 20 million views
Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin
Anonymous on Pornhub's Parent Company Mindgeek
Hot Girls Wanted is a documentary about the "amateur" industry
I analyzed how often men search for "teen" and other CSA terms in 2016
What ACTUALLY helps women leave the sex industry, from a prostitution survivor
Financial assistance- grocery gift cards, preloaded transit cards, rent and utility assistance, etc
Community connection- support services, women’s spaces, recovery groups (SLAA, ACOA, Codependence Anonymous, One More Day, NAMI, + others)
Individual assistance- help with resumes and job applications, offer childcare so she can attend work/school/support groups, assistance with filling out government forms, offering transportation to medical appointments, offer to be a reference or sponsor, connect her with your connections
Personal connection- buy her a coffee on a cold day or water on a hot day, keep some single bills in your bag, treat her like a real person, offer to help with small tasks, recommend nearby resources
Take time to know her. Build rapport. Don’t assume you can “save” her. Don’t expect an instant connection. She likely has her guard up, and may be opposed to any random help offered.
Outreach to homeless women. Ever wonder why you mostly see homeless males outside? Because we’re usually working. Or with a “manager”.
Finally, and this a hard one, get comfortable working with religious organizations. Right now, most exit orgs are religiously affiliated. Many government run programs expect her to either work with police, narc, or go into detox.
So until we have feminist exit organizations, you’ll have to get used to working with religious groups. The exit org that helped me was Christian-affiliated. They saved my fucking life and never made me go to church.
These are all things that have helped ME and many women I’ve worked with (both while I was actively involved in the industry and now on the outside). YMMV.
cannot stop thinking about how good the fabrication of consent in squid game was… like yeah, the participants consent! over and over, from agreeing to the slapping game to ringing up the number of their own accord to meeting at the location to signing a separate sheet once more upon arrival… they can even disband the game if the majority decrees it. but this is all performative. because of course they’ll agree - of course they’ll come back.
the second episode is even all about addressing this ‘consent’, and that potential audience superiority: “so why don’t they just leave???? if they can??? why did they even do all this to start with?? it’s so extreme, to do all that just for money, i would never”
because, the show says, look at what they’re returning to. look at the life that’s offered as their alternative. debt up to their ears, money-brokers beating them up, poverty at its worst. do you see? do you see how yeah, joining that game is optional, but it’s optional in the sense of choosing to be stabbed or shot: theres consent, but not actual desire. that theres agreement, but under exploitation. there’s a reason only poor people are chosen to compete and it’s so obvious but i fucking love how the show handles it and addresses any audience superiority anyway
When will y'all start having this conversation about prostitution too? Y'all believe these vulnerable women choose to do it? Y'all truly believe that sex by coercion is not rape? Y'all think that consent can be bought?
Cotton ceiling is the tendency of trans women to be excluded from the higher echelons of (cis-dominated) women’s and queer spaces — specifically within the porn industry, but also society in general. It is a manifestation of transmisogyny at the intersection of cissexism, misogyny, and the glass ceiling
I mean I don’t use it, and I don’t really understand it etymologically, and I think it’s couched in a lot of fancy language which means a lot less than it says, but… I don’t see what’s wrong with it, either…
the underwear being referred to ISNT the cis women’s; it’s the trans woman’s (or fat, disabled, nonwhite, etc. woman- the cotton ceiling often refers to radicalized bodies in general). the implication is that what is in the trans woman’s pants is excluding her from spaces and connections, and it’s something she needs to overcome. transphobes twisted the language the other way to demonize trans women.
Dude, I was around for the Cotton Ceiling Conference.
Like, literally irl around. It was hosted nearby, even, and I spoke with Morgan Page, one of the people presenting it.
It distinctly referred to the underwear of lesbians who refused to find trans women sexually attractive.
But hey, don’t take my word for it! Let’s hear from Avory Faucette, a trans activist involved with the Cotton Ceiling:
[T]he cotton ceiling [is] us[ed] to challenge cis lesbians’ tendency to support trans causes generally but draw the line at sleeping with trans women or including trans lesbians in their sexual communities.
Drew Deveaux, the originator of the term, is even more specific:
“The cotton ceiling is a theory proposed [by trans porn star and activist Drew DeVeaux] to explain the experiences queer trans women have with simultaneous social inclusion and sexual exclusion within the broader queer women’s communities. Basically, it means that cis queer women will be friends with us and talk day and night about trans rights and ending transmisogyny, but will still not consider us viable sexual partners.
The term cotton ceiling is a reference to the “glass ceiling” that second wave feminist identified in the workforce, wherein women could only advance so high in the workforce but could not break through into positions of power and authority. The cotton represents underwear, signifying sex.”
So right there from the horses’ mouth–
The cotton ceiling represents underwear, signifying sex, and the underwear in question refers specifically to lesbians’
Please, don’t try to retcon history to someone who watched it go down.
They are trying to backtrack and rewrite their own disgusting misogynist terms to make them more palatable to the masses. Nope. The cotton ceiling is most definitely rape culture rhetoric. Anyone who says otherwise is flat out lying because they know how disgusting it makes them look.
“Sexual exclusion”. What a rape-y thing to call women’s natural boundaries.
^ From the horses mouth (again)
^ “Breaking sexual barriers” (implying that the “cotton” part of “cotton ceiling” = women’s underwear to be “broken” through, as one would wish to “break” through a glass ceiling)
^ Even from a pro-trans perspective this sounds entitled and rape-y as shit!!
More examples here and receipts of trans people using the term unironically here.
There is still a huge lack of awareness that choking cannot be performed in a safe way, and its normalization through pornography is putting people at risk.
Three women tell of blacking out, feeling dazed and dizzy, and of ongoing memory issues and fatigue
For the hetero girlies out there who are desperate to be in a relationship:
I work in finance in a department that is all men, plus me. I work very closely with them.
Half of them are taken, have a beautiful wife with children or a girlfriend. I know they treat their partners very well, are super romantic and thoughtful by the way they treat them at business events, BUT:
The moment the women leave and we’re back to everyday life in the office, it’s boy locker room talk.
And I’m in the middle of it.
Your boyfriend let me scroll through his FYP on TikTok and Explore page on IG to prove his point that every man’s feed is full of næked women and soft p**n. Even though he’s not liking the posts, he stays long enough on them for the algorithm to learn that he likes that content.
Your partner is getting a hard øn just by the photo of an outlook contact by the hot colleague from the legal department and is constantly raving about how hot she to me.
Your man to whom you said yes to is started smoking just to go on smoke break together with the hot young assistant of his boss.
She’s very new to the office world because she can’t nail the business casual dress code yet but her taken boss doesn’t say anything against her baby pink frilly skirt that ends just under her butt cheeks.
Who are their female partners? I can tell you; I talked to them.
A college student in her masters program.
A doctor in training.
An entrepreneur who started her own business and has been the bread winner for 3 years.
A woman who gave her boyfriend or my boss three sweaters for me because I forgot to pack something warm for the group business trip.
A woman who left all her friends and family behind to move 500 km to be with her broke ass partner.
You’re not special, your future love won’t be special and that damn man won’t be either.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but being homophobic & mocking the women who try to warn you about these things won’t save you from male cruelty and betrayal. Also, op never explicitly mentioned her sexuality in the post. How do you know she isn’t straight?
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