teenage girls under massive pressure to do anal :(

Isn't internet porn part of a bad sex culture?

Before there was porn, there were toxic attitudes: girls were either sluts or prudes, sex was currency, being raped was your own fault. Etc. Stamping and shrieking about porn is a way to not fix the corrosive problems of bad sex education and bad sex culture.

Nicked i agree with your point but also see what Gin means. IMO there is not one single contributing factor to this issue. Although as images are so easily availlable it seems to make it more acceptable .I have overheard teenage girls I work with over the last couple of years talking about it in my classroom quite unembarrassed.This would not have happened before such easy access.

Porn has been around long before the internet, yes, but the internet makes it much easier to access and by a much younger audience. The internet might not have started the popularity of porn, but I think it does contribute.

The fact that internet porn is completely accessible to teenagers on their phones and utterly skews their perceptions of sex appears to be matter of shoulder shrugging indifference to porn apologists everywhere too................

The sexual coercion of teenage girls is something that needs to be eliminated, of course, but yet another article going 'Waaah Blame Everything On The Internet and Internet Porn' isn't going to fix things.

Sex education here and in the US has been utterly disastrous for decades. It's either all about disease and preventing pregnancy, or it's about fetishizing virginity in a way which spreads the idea that only PIV sex is SEX. Which means a lot of teenagers and young people, over the decades, have done anal on the grounds that a) you can do anal and still be a 'virgin' and of course b) anal sex does not lead to pregancy. The fact that it's often painful and not much fun for women and girls (especially if penetration is being achieved by a clumsy, inexperienced and over-enthusiastic teenage boy) has been a matter of shoulder-shrugging indifference for centuries in a culture that regards sex as something men do to/get from women, whose role is to hold out for marriage/commitment and whose pleasure is irrelevant.

And the old 'Waah Blame The Internet' sections about social media leading to insecurity is a bit suspect, as well. It wasn't the internet that started a whole genre of entertainment which features people begging for popular acceptance and being repeatedly humiliated. It wasn't the internet that started the practice of reporting any and every incident involving a woman or a girl by including a description of how 'attractive' the women or girls concerned are.

There is still a fairly strong desire among many politicians to be able to spy on and regulate internet use, and the easiest way to achieve public support for net censorship is to shock and frighten the public with InternetPornMostEvilThingEver type stories.
Funnily enough, there wasn't any internet porn when Jimmy Savile and Granville Jenner and all those other rich, powerful, white, well-connected men were raping and assaulting all those children...

'every hole is a goal' That is really awful, Superexcited (I know its not your expression). It makes me want to cry that it is even a thing.

Yes, I agree that it is awful. I don't know if it is just a phrase used by Northerners but it is very common up here. I hope I can educate my sons to not use such phrases or to view women as something to be sexually conquered. Hopefully by educating them and my husband setting good examples (which he always does) I can raise my boys to be decent men who respect women and themselves.

I'd never thought of it that way Cailin, you're so right. Not only is it treated like a mundane thing, it's often treated like an inconvenience.

Re self esteem: I am 36 and my self esteem is still massively linked to social approval, even Facebook likes on occasion I am now going to try and feel good about myself today because I have given birth! (Sorry for self helpy tangent)

I said nothing at all about motherhood, saintly or otherwise. I talked about pregnancy and giving birth, which is a necessary part of every human being on the planet on is undertaken, in every case, by a woman. It is incredibly risky, especially in developing countries, inconvenient, uncomfortable and the end of it can be and often is excruciatingly painful and highly dangerous. And women do it, all the time. And it's treated like a mundane thing, which it is not.

I think that's a slightly separate although valid point dad.

The point being made was that childbirth etc are huge. often traumatic endeavours undertaken by women (sometimes unwillingly. Courage and tenacity is required.) But this is not fit for discussion in polite society whereas the lauding of male heroics (battles, Senna etc) is absolutely the stuff of our culture, our media and our society.

The fact that some women cannot or do not give birth is a whole other issue and I completely agree that a saintly version of motherhood can be fetishized in an unhealthy way to the detriment of childfree women.

But saying that not all women give birth is just the same as saying that not all men go to war (in fact most don't). And almost no men become famous racing car drivers. That doesn't stop our society lauding those achievements and remaining almost completely silent on women's daily experience. By the way, in case there was any doubt, saintly motherhood is not most women's daily experience.

We are something to be conquered. Says it all really.

'every hole is a goal' That is really awful, Superexcited (I know its not your expression). It makes me want to cry that it is even a thing.

Loving your work on this thread cailin.

Also there is massive irony that you say "I would prefer to see a woman defined by what comes out of her mouth" when you're dismissing everything women are saying here. Is it the case that you want to see women defined by what you decide they should be defined as?

Child-free by choice, here, and let me take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to you, Dad, because I am just so nose-blowingly thankful to finally have a man speak out for me! How else could my experiences hold any meaning? Without your voice, Dad, I am speechless, formless, I am smoke in the wind, I am as nothing. If only I were capable of appreciating the pain and sacrifice women go through to give birth, while at the same time being able to commit to my own personal decision not to put myself through that. But alas, women are a hive-mind, feminism can only envision exactly one definition of what it means to be a woman, and it's up to men, yet again, to point out that, yes, NAWALT.

I don't understand the idea that because some people can't do something we can't celebrate it. Does that mean we stop the Olympics because some people can't be olympic athletes? By your reasoning all WWII commemorations should be torn down DWH because plenty of women wanted to fight but weren't allowed to.

For every single one of the billions of people on this planet there is a woman who spent months of her life in danger, discomfort and worry to grow them. Every single person put a woman in danger to be born. It is amazing that women do that, that they give up their bodily autonomy, and their safety to carry on the human race.

We commemorate wars when millions of us (thankfully) have never experienced war. However, every single one of us is here because a woman risked her life to grow us and give birth to us. It is entirely universal.

Women and only women do something amazing - they grow new humans and put themselves at great risk to do so. And all we ever hear about it is what the new thing is we can't eat, how fat or thin pregnant celebrities look and how mothers are failing in so many ways. How about for a second saying "wow, isn't it fucking amazing that women do this for the world?" Just for a bloody second.

Ok, it is amazing, but I do not see the particular connection and I find your idea flawed, I would prefer to see a woman defined by what comes out of her mouth (or keyboard) than what comes out of her vagina. Around 10% of women discover they are infertile (as did my close relative and two long-time friends) and the invoking of motherhood, while indeed an achievement, is decidedly unhelpful to them. Other women simply choose not to have children, like my previous partner, but suffer social disdain chiefly from other women, being seen as somehow aberrant in their choice, which is something sections of feminism agitate to overcome. Then there are the women who simply do not enjoy being mothers who rack themselves with private guilt but stay silent lest they be racked with public guilt, deadbeat dads have it easy in comparison. That is the danger of invoking the universality of womens experiences like a rallying cry (or mens for that matter), its often quite a breadth of conflicting individual experiences and attitudes.

There was a mra activist on This Morning earlier this week, he was in to discuss how the decline in people getting married is the fault of women. It became clear the more he spoke that he blamed women for a lot, and I think the problem was not so much the decline in marriage, but people declining to marry him.

At one point he said men have always had it tough and it's just getting tougher, he pointed out that men didn't always have the vote, that men were conscripted to war, and never mind the wage gap, what about the life expectancy gap, and as I watched I wondered why feminism was to blame for that? women were not stopping all men having a legal right to vote, women were not conscripting men to go fight, and women don't make men die at a younger age so why the anger and blaming towards them?

I'm going off thread, it was just the war comments reminded me, I'll try start a new thread with a vid link if I get time later.

Wars such as fighting ISIS in Syria are necessary due to male violence. Our constant problem is male violence. So why is nothing been done to tackle it?

I don't dispute that sausage. What I object to is the constant glorifying and memorialising of war. Shouldn't we as a species be ashamed that we kill each other in such numbers? Why are there monuments everywhere to killing and absolutely none to the giving of life?