The fourth and last in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). This post details some daily rituals that women can start doing to interrupt damaging beauty culture scripts. 1) Start enjoying your body as a physical instrument. Girls [...]
This is the third installment of a four-part series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. (See Part 1, Part 2.) There are four damaging daily rituals of objectification culture we can immediately stop engaging in to improve our health. 1) Stop seeking random male attention. Most [...]
This is the second part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. (Part 1 can be found here.) Sexual objectification is nothing new, but this latest era is characterized by greater exposure to advertising and increased sexual explicitness in advertising [PDF], magazines, television shows, movies [PDF], video games, music videos, [...]
Last week, U.S. district judge Lynn Hughes set an important legal precedent in the fight against human trafficking in the U.S. He ruled that five teenaged survivors of sex slavery in Houston will receive the entire proceeds from the sale of their traffickers’ property. As U.S. prosecutors have until now been mostly unsuccessful in getting traffickers’ assets seized, this [...]
The Hunger Games should serve as a wake-up call to Hollywood that women action-hero movies can be successful if the protagonist is portrayed as a complex subject–instead of a hyper-sexualized fighting fuck toy (FFT). In its first weekend, The Hunger Games grossed $155 million, making it the third highest opener of all time (behind the last Harry Potter film and The Dark [...]
The Texas cheerleader who sued her high school for forcing her to cheer for her rapist will not have to pay the school’s entire $35,000 in legal fees, according to a decision yesterday from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. This decision overturns a lower court ruling that deemed the case “frivolous” and required [...]
A new study from the Pew Research Center reports staggering gaps in median wealth–a person’s accumulated assets minus her debt–between whites ($113,149), blacks ($5,677) and Latinos ($6,325). That’s a 20-to-1 white-to-black ratio of wealth and a 18-to-1 white-to-Latino ratio. Essentially, all of the economic gains made by people of color since the Civil Rights Movement [...]
It’s been over a decade since the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA) was passed into law, and a new report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that astonishingly little has been done since. The TVPA defines a human trafficking victim as A person induced to perform labor or a commercial [...]
I traveled to Silsbee, Texas five times in the past six months, with conservative blogger Brandon Darby, to investigate why, despite the volume of evidence, a grand jury did not indict two football players accused of raping a high school cheerleader (who was later kicked off the squad for refusing to cheer for one of [...]
Sexual Objectification, Part 1: What is it?
This is Part 1 of a four-part series on sexual objectification–what it is and how to respond to it. The phrase “sexual objectification” has been around since the 1970s, but the phenomenon is more rampant than ever in popular culture–and we now know that it causes real harm. What exactly is it, though? If objectification [...]