Collective Shout

Genderist campaigners have whinged about a Melbourne art exhibition, Colour Me Dead , by artist Philip Brophy.

A 20-minute video installation called T he Morbid Forest shows two men watching female actors - before images of their naked and apparently dead bodies are flashed on a big screen. Other apparent victims of the two men include a young toddler and a baby.

Centre Against Sexual Assault Forum spokeswoman Carolyn Worth said victims of crime might find the content of the exhibition distressing :

A clear warning would be appropriate. It might be very confronting and distressing for some people forced to confront that reality.

Women's campaigner Melinda Tankard Reist said:

Artists need to exercise responsibility by not reinforcing the sexualisation of violence, or using violence against women as sexual titillation.

Artist Philip Brophy said the images were intended to reflect a change in the perception of nature from something created by God to something darker .

Ian Potter Museum of Art director Kelly Gellatly said the imagery could be confronting for some people . But she said the exhibition was well attended and well received .

The exhibition is at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne until September.

James Franco is the producer of pornographic documentary Kink, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The title Kink refers to a BDSM porn website, where extreme violence against women and torture are the norm. Common acts include non-simulated actual footage of rope, metal and wood bondage, underwater suffocation torture, electric shocks, sex with machinery, gang rape, slave training and public humiliation.

Promotional material for the website:

In our videos you will watch as some of the best riggers in the business bind, torture and fuck gorgeous women.

paddled, caned and flogged until their bodies are marked and red.

Pushing the very limits of their endurance and pain tolerance.

Porn star Aurora Snow  shared her traumatic experience making a Kink film.

"They are a company that looks for the moment when a girl has been mentally and at times physically pushed too far; the borderline of tears and pain. Sometimes talent leaves with giant bruises that take weeks to disappear."

"The scenes will push a girl over the edge. It's standard practice on set to take breaks in between filming and during these breaks the talent is fawned, told how amazing they are, catered to, etc. It makes for a very confusing experience when trying to evaluate one's own feelings about what's really happening."

...read the full rant

The Australian nutters of Collective Shout! are getting well wound up by Lingerie Football League.

This is an outlandish bit of American razzmatazz being brought to Australia. Exhibition matches feature two American teams of female footballers playing in bras and knickers.

Unsurprisingly the extremist feminists of Collective Shout are unimpressed  and are trying to get the matches banned from the netball venue that more usually hosts the Queensland Firebirds in Brisbane.

All-Star exhibition games between the LFL's Eastern and Western conferences - the second is scheduled for Sydney next Saturday - are virtual dress rehearsals, test events to gauge whether franchises should be set up in Australia's four main cities next year.

That scenario appals Collective Shout representative Melinda Liszewski, who is spearheading the drive to banish the LFL said:

We have female athletes and female sporting groups in this country working hard to promote the equality of women in sport and to see women valued for their athletic ability and their skill -- not how they look or how sexually appealing they are to men.

The Lingerie Football League undermines that message by saying sure we'll let you play football but get your gear off.

It sends a really nasty message to girls: if they want to be recognised in their sporting field then they need to be exposing their bodies, posing for Playboy, running around in their lingerie.

Federal Minister for Sport Kate Lundy was also not among the LFL's reputed 65 million fans worldwide, labelling it a cheap, degrading perv .

Lingerie Football isn't just a distraction; it's an assault on sport. We can do so much better than LFL. And most importantly, our daughters deserve more.

Founder and chairman Mitch Mortaza launched the LFL in 2009. Contracts stipulate players will be fined $500 if they wear anything under their lingerie; they must also accept accidental nudity was an occupational hazard. Mortaza explained:

The athletes do it of their own free will - thousands of them line up in the States every year, he said.

They are all former collegiate athletes, remarkable women that want to be given an opportunity to play a sport and have it receive the recognition of major men's sports.

Telstra is not the boring government-owned phone utility it once was, the company now offers Telstra Babes softcore pornography over video-capable mobile phones.

We have a range of web pages offering different content for the many niche interest groups that make up our customer base, a Telstra spokeswoman said.

Campaigner Melinda Tankard-Reist of the nutter group Collective Shout said Telstra's attitude was disappointing and raised serious questions.

This is a mainstream communications company. When did they make a decision to go down this path? Was it at a corporate level?

The material is produced by Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. The telco said warnings were displayed and that the content was relatively tame. The spokeswoman said:

We have stringent guidelines pertaining to all content across our sites and in particular, the 'glamour' pages, which are among the mildest in the category among industry providers.

Tankard-Reist rejected that defence and ludicrously claimed that the companies supplying content to Telstra had disturbing associations:

Playboy isn't just your father's magazine under the bed any more, she said. Playboy hosts a range of hardcore, explicit, triple-X content across a range of cable television channels. You couldn't even print the names of the titles they show.

The Girls Gone Wild genre is harmful to women and girls and there have been allegations that girls have been made drunk to coerce them into filming sex acts or simulated sex acts for the camera.

Shareholders would be surprised to know the company is hosting and distributing pornographic content. It's a significant issue for its reputation.

A new play called That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play is opening at Darlinghurst's TAP Gallery theatre in east Sydney.

It is the debut production from Workhorse Theatre Company and it includes jelly wrestling by scantily clad actresses, bondage, rape and killing scenes and an extreme sexual assault featuring the use of a grenade, all in a black comedy labelled sickening in some overseas reviews. The story follows a pair of ex-stripper sisters who go on a killing spree across America, taking pro-life activists as their victims.

Workhorse co-founder and performer Troy Harrison admitted the work was chosen for its shock value and images of the more controversial scenes were deliberately used in the publicity material. he said:

Yes, we were looking at another play but we wanted to start with much more of a bang, this being our first production, so we did choose this play because it is very confronting.

However, Collective Shout, an organisation that campaigns against the objectification and sexualisation of women in the media, warned against the depiction of violence against women for entertainment's sake. A spokeswoman said:

Survivors of sexual assault or violence are often left traumatised as a result of abuse,

Sexualised representations of violence against women trivialise and undermine the very real pain and trauma they endured.

Update: More bollox from Collective Shout and the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney

Thanks to Michael
10th February 2012. See  article from  sydneycatholic.org

Speaking of the new play called That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play opening at Darlinghurst's TAP Gallery theatre in east Sydney, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney wrote an article:

Judging by the publicity for the play, including an explicit raunchy promotion, it is almost certain that if the play had been made into a film, it would have received an X-rating from Australia's Classification Board.

[What a load of bollox, the play does not feature real sex so simply would not be X rated, just R18+ rated. I thought christians had some sort of commandment against lying].

But while films are assessed and classified, there seem to be no such restrictions for live performances , says Caitlin Roper, state co-ordinator with the increasingly powerful and influential grass roots organisation, Collective Shout:

As far as I know there are no rules limiting what can be seen in a live performance and the press releases sent out to promote this play are particularly disturbing. The images which are also on Facebook include scantily clad women jelly wrestling as well as images depicting bondage, violence and sex, and are typical of porn-inspired male fantasies.

Boundaries are continually being pushed with violence becoming more eroticised. The suggestion women enjoy being aggressed by male partners is disturbing but to then show men inflicting violence on women, as seems to happen in this play, can not only make violence against women seem more acceptable but even desirable.

Caitlin is also concerned about the blatant flippant attitude shown by the theatre company producing the play and its disregard for women who have survived sexual assault, rape, violence and abuse.

These women are almost always deeply traumatised and sexualised representations of violence such as portrayed in the play's publicity, trivialises and undermines the very real pain and emotional distress they have endured, she says.