Benjamin Cohen, Pink News and Tik Tok

[Mollyollydolly]

This has enraged me today. This is the acceptable face of trans rights activism in the UK and it's so disturbing. How is this man regularly featured on mainstream news programmes as a voice of reason. Pushing this agenda on Tik Tok, aimed at teenaged girls with no hint that it's not all rainbows .. it's just so wrong. I will never understand how normally sensible people cant see it.

And sorry it's my mistake it's Snapchat .. not Tik Tok.

I saw the same story and had to do a double take. It's Stonewall who buddied up with TikTok:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10344445/Children-brainwashed-TikTok-videos-cool-trans-surgery.html

divamag.co.uk/2021/02/09/charity-stonewall-announce-a-ground-breaking-new-partnership-with-tiktok-for-lgbt-history-month/

You might find this poll and thread of interest too.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4497682-AIBU-to-think-Snapchat-and-pink-news-should-not-be-promoting-top-surgery-to-vulnerable-teenage-girls

PinkNews is really big on Snapchat www.journalism.co.uk/ampnews/pinknews-ceo-ignore-snapchat-at-your-peril-/s435/a879114/

Ben Cohen interviewing Claire Balding at a Snapchat event twitter.com/benjamincohen/status/1443242910229700610?s=21

"in an accessible style for audiences discovering their place in the world". So it's specifically aimed at naive young teenage girls.

Shocking

"Lollipops!" and the rainbow ribbon covered cage.

Screenshot the evidence for when the court cases start

Horrendous.

He’s also been busily posting about how we’re all funded by Russians

Dangerous, deranged individual.

I was wondering what the lettering reminded me of and of course it's Smash Hits and some other 80s teen pop magazines. This is what teenage girls are being sold instead of Smash Hits these days.

Cohen's Wikipedia page is illuminating. One of his sites was called 'hunt4porn.com' which sounds suitably grubby. "In his 2001 book Dot.Bomb, Rory Cellan-Jones wrote: "Whatever you may think of Benjamin Cohen, you have to admire his ability to manipulate the media. The increasingly outlandish values put on his flimsy company merely reflected the mood of the time." The choice of the name 'Pink News', so closely resembling the long established 'Pink Paper' and piggybacking on its reputation, sounds rather like his iTunes namealike grift.

Emotions running from sad......very angry

Very angry. A site set up by a middle-aged man aimed at teenaged girls that starts off, day one, with promoting double mastectomies (quick, quick, we've got to get them to take the irreversible and lucrative plunge before the girls grow up a bit and realise their discomfort is not with their own bodies but the way sexist males leer at them).

@IvyTwines

Very angry. A site set up by a middle-aged man aimed at teenaged girls that starts off, day one, with promoting double mastectomies (quick, quick, we've got to get them to take the irreversible and lucrative plunge before the girls grow up a bit and realise their discomfort is not with their own bodies but the way sexist males leer at them).

I think it goes beyond being uncomfortable with leering though.

I don't mean that's not a real thing, or that we shoudl not discourage leering.

But I do think even without that, many young women who are developing breasts and other markers of puberty feel disassociated from their bodies simply because they no longer look like the bodies they know. You hear similar experience from people who have changes in their bodies due to illness, accident, ageing, etc. It is very disconcerting and can take quite some time to integrate. Even in a perfect world.

But there is also male sexual attention that is not inappropriate - just the fact of girls suddenly noticing that men see them more as women rather than children. Which is not only inevitable but it's not pathological either, it's just part of becoming an adult. Girls at that age are themselves starting to notice men for similar reasons. And it can be scary and new and confusing.

I think it's important to realize that girls (and boys to some extent to though it happens a bit differently) need to be prepared to understand that this is all normal and that over time it improves.

That man's got an enviable waist.

"Top surgery". A cutesy little name for an irreversible surgery bring performed on immature breasts.

I just cannot fathom how there are surgeons who will happily do this on girls are young as 13.

I know it shouldn't shock me anymore but it still does. Every time.

And promoting it on social media? Beyond reprehensible. Shame on Pink News.

The pose of the person in the photo, right arm behind head, sucked-in tummy, unsmiling face, is strikingly similar to the one used to illustrate the Wikipedia page about an earlier type of body 'modification' website aimed at young women.

Another interesting thing about that Wikipedia page is that it doesn't seen to have had any updates added since around 2012. It's like young women found something else from then on...

Yep I know a woman, spent her teens cutting herself, her twenties fighting eating disorders, now in her thirties and just started on testosterone and saving up for 'top surgery.' I have nothing but contempt for people like Cohen. Vultures.

@IvyTwines

Another interesting thing about that Wikipedia page is that it doesn't seen to have had any updates added since around 2012. It's like young women found something else from then on...

Not sure which page you mean. Could you post a link?

@SallyMcNally it's one of those things we're not allowed to say out loud on here, but it was what happened when something a few teenage girls and young women did found the internet, and it then came to public notice, and people wisely recognised the link between these online sites encouraging it to ever greater extremes and the increasing number of girls now caught up in it, and the sites were clamped down on to a degree.

Think three letter word with an o in it (not unlike 'joy', I guess!) and an abbreviation that sounds like a girl's name.