The Face I Can't Forget

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Treat 'Em Like A Lady

I don't know how far the story of 'Roast Busters' has spread. I don't know if anyone outside of NZ has heard this phrase or all that it entails, but for those of you who are currently sitting there with bemused expressions wondering if I am talking about some sort of comedic toasting of the rich and famous, here is the brief outline of what has happened recently in my little ole country:

It came to light a few weeks ago that two teenage boys were running a Facebook page called 'Roast Busters'. This is in reference to roasting a pig on a spit. This will become clear to you later will disgust you. Be warned. These two young men have been, for the last two years (!!!), getting young girls drunk, often under age, and then having group sex with them, filming it,then naming and shaming the girls online (understand the pig reference yet??). There have been some girls who have come forward to the police and have been told that their behavior led to the incident so it was taken no further. It has also come out that one of the young men is a police mans son. No charges have been laid as of yet.

That is the short version. I am cutting out the outrage that has been sparked across the country, the women that have come out speaking against, and for, the young men's actions, and the plethora of comments that have implied, or outright said, that the girls were asking for it by getting drunk. Never mind that sex with a minor if illegal anyway. Never mind that this is coercion. Never mind that the boys involved acted in a despicable manner.

But this is not another rant about that, there are many other people who have said all that and much better than me. I am praying that the outrage will cause some kind of action at a political and legal level.

What I am interested in is how these boys think that what they did was ok?

And this got me to thinking - have we as a society ever taught them any different?

Children in this secular society are brought up being told that each to their own, every body is allowed to believe what they want, act as they want, have their own morality. Our tv shows teach that women are property, that they are sex objects that are only worth the amount of sexual desire they inspire. Porn is now a norm for our teenagers, it is abnormal to find a teenager that hasn't seen porn, and these videos, often violent, show women being degraded and enjoying it and these videos are the first sexual education our children are receiving. Advertising teaches girls that they have to be sexy, dress provocatively, and be cute, rather than smart, to get attention. Tell me which a teenage girl is going to choose book work over a cute boy? Boys are taught to be strong, to go and get what they want, and that "boys will be boys". Girls are sluts if they have sex, boys are legends. Fathers who would kill any boy that comes within ten feet of their daughters will turn around and pat their sons on the back when they lose their virginity.

This is what those two boys were brought up with. And then when they live it out they are destroyed for putting it into practice.

Can we really be that shocked that this has happened? Angry, yes. Disgusted, absolutely. But shocked? And should we be angry at two young boys who are products of their society or at the society which created them? How many 'Roast Busters' have to happen before porn is made illegal and taken off the Internet? How many girls have to be humiliated and destroyed before the legal system becomes victim friendly rather than disbelieving? How many young boys become distorted and destructive men before we wake up and realize that we need to do this very differently?

I don't care what religious persuasion you are, all of us can realize that this behavior destroys our humanity. And it highlights the importance of community, and the responsibility we all have to each other. Where were these girls friends? Parents? Why are their parents silent? Do their parents know? What is happening at home that they will act like this at such young ages? Are the schools aware of at risk teenagers? Are the neighbors? When does it stop becoming 'their issue' and starts becoming OUR children, our country, our world that is being destroyed by this? 

I am so angry at this situation I can't even express it. It makes me feel physically sick. But I am just as sad for the boys as I am for the girls. They have ruined their lives beyond their understanding. They have destroyed something about their humanness by acting in such a way. They have made a country hate them and will, if justice exists, spend time in prison. All because they acted out what they learned.

Maybe boys will be boys because they were never taught to be men...

The Victimless Crime....

If you watch porn

You're an abuser of humans

May as well raise your fist

And make your partner the victim.

We hate rapists

And call porn a 'victimless crime'

No,

You just make it consensual in your mind.

You think those people 

get a choice in what they do?

You think they love

Rather than hate you?

Christ said to think

Is as bad as to do.

What have you done

To those people you view?

Would you be locked away

If you acted it out?

What would your parents say

If they ever found out?

You are a victim

Even as much as she

A victim of greed 

Of an industry

That takes and breaks

And destroy's all that is good

Making you a slave

When you know that you should

Walk away, run away

And never return

Yet instead you watch in secret

And in the darkness you yearn.

If you are ashamed

Then should it be done?

They are children of God,

As are you,

So run Child, RUN!

Letter from Ex-Porn Editor

I stumbled across this article today and thought it worth you guys reading! It is written by an ex-'lad's mag' editor who, after advocating for 'soft porn' for years, had a child and within the year quit his job and now advocates against porn!

Have a read and a think:

The lads' mag I edited turned a generation on to porn - and now I'm a father I bitterly regret it: A remarkable confession from the longest-serving editor of Loaded

By Martin Daubney

PUBLISHED: 20:51 GMT, 8 June 2012 | UPDATED: 21:43 GMT, 8 June 2012

The day that summed up the sheer ludicrousness of what it meant to be the editor of Loaded, the most notorious ‘lads’ mag’ of all time, is one etched on my memory. 

It was January 2004, and my team had been through our rivals’ magazines doing a ‘nipple count’ — meticulously tallying the number of bare nipples that appeared in one issue.

To our dismay, we’d been trumped by Maxim, who’d weighed in with a hefty 83 (which included one bare-chested man, but we let them have that).

‘Damn, they beat us this month,’ I announced. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

When one wag responded, ‘Why don’t we print 100 pairs of boobs, over six pages, in glorious close-up?’ we all whooped with delight and reported to the pub to celebrate.

So it was that we did a ‘We Love Boobs’ special, which notched up a then-record (although by today’s standards relatively tame) 200 nipples.

As an extra layer of schoolboy comedy, we decided to caption each picture with a jokey term for breasts. From ‘aardvarks’ to ‘Zeppelins’, we had it covered.

Sitting around a boardroom table with six other university-educated men trying to think up 100 comedy words for breasts summed up just how low British men’s magazines had sunk.

It was an intellectual low-water mark, but we’d spent a lot of time and money talking to our readers in research groups, and they’d repeatedly said Loaded’s winning formula should be ‘more birds, less words’. 

The average Loaded reader — largely white, working class, 20-something blokes — had a simple palate, so we gave them what they wanted. 

To me, it was harmless fun, dictated by market forces.

What’s more, I was paid more money than I’d ever earned in my life to do it. I’d always dreamed of editing Loaded and vowed to do whatever it took to stay there. 

I never stopped to consider issues like the crass sexualisation of women. 

Moral naysayers were party poopers, and if they attacked me, I’d attack them back — harder.

It was knowingly mindless, and for a while it was fun — and extremely successful.

When our We Love Boobs issue (which had George Best’s wife, Alex, as the cover star) hit the news stands, our readers bombarded us with thank you letters and sales soared.

A few months later, I was crowned New Editor of the Year by my company and my bosses popped more corks than the Queen’s Jubilee sommelier.

Back then, it never once occurred to me that we were objectifying women or doing any harm. I fiercely denied that Loaded was a ‘gateway’ to harder pornographic magazines.

It was in my own interests to do so. If we were classified as ‘top shelf’, we’d have been put in opaque plastic bags like the pornographic magazines, which would have been commercial suicide. 

But such thoughts came home to roost five years later in 2009, when I finally grew up and became a father. 

It had such an effect on me and changed my views so forcibly that within a year I’d quit a dream job that, for me, had become a moral nightmare.

When I look back now, I see we were severely pushing the envelope of what was considered decent. 

We were normalising soft porn, and in so doing we must have made it more acceptable for young men to dive into the murky waters of harder stuff on the internet. And, for that, I have a haunting sense of regret.

I edited Loaded for eight years — the title’s longest-serving editor — and its titillating mix of topless girls and decidedly non-PC humour attracted the wrath of feminists, MPs and, once, even the Pope (when we photo-shopped a pint of lager into his hands). 

In my time, Loaded won eight industry awards for journalistic excellence, but its massive success —it sold more than 500,000 copies a month at its peak — was always down to pictures of scantily-clad women.

When I became editor in 2002, I realised all our readers really wanted was acres of flesh. 

The trouble was, the more we gave them, the more they demanded — and the racier we had to become in order to satiate their desires. But it was the arrival of mass broadband internet in the mid-Noughties, fuelling a massive and uncontrolled access to hardcore porn, that changed everything. 

Now young boys — for there were, and still are, no effective age restrictions on access to online porn — were spared the expense and embarrassment of even buying a magazine. 

Worse, they could do it without their parents ever knowing.

Loaded’s sales plummeted, so we turned up the volume even further in a desperate bid to stay alive. Smiling, end-of-the-pier-style pictures were replaced with oiled torsos and fake lesbian orgies.

Loaded won eight industry awards for journalistic excellence and sold more than 500,000 copies a month at its peak

When you go down that road, there’s no turning back. The magazine was getting grubbier to the point where even I didn’t want to be seen with it on the Tube.

Pretty soon, we were accused of being pornographic, and there wasn’t a month when a minor Lib Dem MP or feminist lobby group didn’t try to make a name for themselves by demanding we were placed on the top shelf, or banned altogether.

Constantly under attack as a public standard-bearer for moral depravity when the anonymous internet porn barons were nowhere to be seen, I became a skilled defender of the indefensible.

By quoting scores of carefully-selected global government reports and PhD papers that ‘proved’ porn wasn’t harmful, I successfully out-manoeuvred two female members of the Labour Party at the Durham University Debating Society, lambasting the proposition ‘the house argues that pornography is degrading to all women’.

I was then invited to the Oxford Union Debating Society, and argued in favour of topless girls in tabloid newspapers, which my opponents proposed ‘had no place in a decent society’. To a packed house that night, I won by a margin of 3:1.

Then my life changed for ever. In May 2009, I became a father to Sonny. A month later, I turned 40. Almost overnight, my world view changed.

My partner, Diana, had always supported my career, but at gatherings with the new friends we’d made at National Childbirth Trust classes, I’d cringe with embarrassment as other parents teased me by asking ‘would breastfeeding be a turn-on or a turn-off for Loaded readers?’ For the first time, I became secretly ashamed of what I did for a living.

My life had become a charade, switching between diametrically-opposed extremes — nipples by day and nappies by night.

I started seeing the women in my magazine not as sexual objects, but as somebody’s daughter. Some of Loaded’s models had children themselves, and I’d think ‘what’s your kid going to think of you when they’re old enough to understand Mummy used to get her boobs out for a living?’

To think that the girls who posed for our magazine had once had their nappies changed, had once been taught to take their first steps and had once been full of childlike hope . . . it was almost heartbreaking.

I was confronted by the painful thought that maybe Loaded was part of the problem. Was it an ‘enabler’ to young teenage boys who’d consume harder porn later, in the same way dabbling with cannabis might lead to stronger addictions to cocaine or heroin?

Then, in July 2010, it was announced that terminally-wounded Loaded was to be sold to a small publisher with a murky reputation. It was the excuse I needed to leave. I woke up and thought ‘I can’t do this any more’ and quit.

The prospect of having to tell Sonny — and his friends’ parents — that I worked for a company linked to pornography was pivotal. As the father of a young child, working in such a place would be indefensible.

I suddenly wanted to vanish and do something decent with my life. I became a house dad, which fulfilled me more than Loaded ever had.

Now, nearly two years on, I am ashamed at the way I used to defend my magazine. 

Offering excuses for pornography when Loaded was attacked left me feeling cheap and hollow. I became a person I wasn’t, and, looking back, one I didn’t like. Today, I find myself agreeing with some of my fiercest former critics. 

When I edited Loaded, I’d often get asked ‘Would you want your daughter to appear in topless photos?’ and I’d squirm, but feel obliged, but ashamed to say ‘yes’.

Fortune gave me a son, but not on my life would I want any daughter of mine to be a topless model. 

Looking back at my old job, I think it kept me and my team in a morally-retarded state. We became numbed to nudity. We treated our models as crude sales devices.

In truth, the editorial team had little interest in the girl content, and viewed it as a necessary evil. But our readers demanded ever more, and by responding to the rise of pornography on the internet, we pushed the line too far.

I can say with 100 per cent conviction that all the girls who appeared in Loaded wanted to do it. Their role models were self-made millionaires like Jordan, and the rest of us shouldn’t condemn them because their aspirations didn’t tally with our own. But it’s not a huge leap into the world of pornography — a world devoid of aspiration.

Anybody who coerces a woman, or, worse, forces or threatens them to take part in porn should be jailed for many years.

Let’s be clear: you can’t ever ban pornography. Like tax and Tory U-turns, it is painfully unavoidable and lots of consenting adults consume it of their own free will. But we must tighten up the current laws to make it unavailable to children, as it can be so damaging.

It sells boys the debasing view of women as one-dimensional fakes: fake boobs, fake hair, fake nails, fake orgasms and fake hope.

How will these tainted children be able to interact with real women later in life if the first ones they ‘meet’ are on-screen mannequins? By allowing children free access to pornographic images, the next generation of young men are becoming so desensitised, I genuinely fear we’re storing up an emotional time-bomb.

Porn objectifies women, demeans and cheapens them, because it sells a fantasy where men are always in control and get what they want. 

But real life isn’t like that. In porn, women cry, ‘yes, yes, yes!’ but in real life, they often say, ‘no’. Not all men have the intelligence or moral fortitude to understand they cannot take what they want. 

Today, it’s never been easier to get your hands on porn of the most grotesquely graphic nature, yet absolutely nobody admits responsibility. 

And most shocking of all is the total lack of moral accountability displayed by the internet pornographers when it comes to supplying their product to minors.

If, as a magazine editor, I strayed outside of the rules, I’d be taken off sale, fined and lose my job. 

Likewise, if a newsagent sells an over-18s magazine to a minor, he can expect to lose his licence and be closed down.

Yet the internet pornographers laugh in the face of this, and the internet service providers (ISPs) wash their hands of the problem.

It’s like saying supplying a drug is ok so long as you don’t manufacture it. There’s no accountability, and it needs to be cleared up, fast. Isn’t it time the ISPs were held to task?

If found guilty of being the highway that gets porn to children, they should face massive fines and risk of closure.

The Mail has been campaigning for new rules forcing all internet users to opt in if they want access to pornography — and I couldn’t be more emphatic in my support. We also need to make sure that these controls apply to smartphones as well as computers.

Looking back, I think magazines like Loaded did give young men a ‘taste’ for soft porn that led to deeper and darker desires. But we operated in a bygone, almost innocent age compared to today, when internet pornography is being pumped out on an industrial scale — straight into the bedrooms of our children.

The internet and its morally redundant pornographers have changed all that. It is time our policy-makers cried ‘enough!’ and banged them to rights. 

Two years after my exit, I can finally admit that I was part of the problem. By speaking out, in some tiny way I hope to be part of the solution.

50 Shades of PORN

If you have been living under a rock for the last few months you may not have heard about the phenomena of the book "50 shades of Grey".

It is a fairly recent book that has received worldwide fame and sold more books than the Harry Potter series! 

And it is porn.

Seriously.

The main story-line goes something along the lines of woman meets man, man is attractive, man introduces the woman to his red room, red room is a place where they get to go sadomasochistic on each other and cause pain for sexual arousal, woman falls in love, more pain inducing sex.

And this obviously deep and meaningful plot line is the best selling book of our era.

Have to say the most brilliant pic I saw recently was one that said "anyone who says that 50 shades is excellent literature needs to be beaten with the complete works of Shakespeare". But I digress.

My issue here is not the writing style of the author or even the subject which she chooses, but the fact that it has been so phenomenally successful.

Sex sells.

Porn sells even better.

What is the difference between porn and sex? Is there one?

I think there was a more defined line in the past. Selling sex was about using pretty woman and men and product placement to insinuate a connection between the two.

Now it is much harder to define as selling sex often means just that. Barely clothed woman and men, often in compromising positions are used to sell, often barely mentioned, products. People don't want to see what they could be any more, they want to see what makes them aroused.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is porn.

Interestingly enough there are dictionaries that don't even mention sex when defining porn. For example:

television shows, articles, photographs, etc., thought to create or satisfy an excessive desire for something,especially something luxurious: the irresistible appeal of foodporn; an addiction to real-estate porn.

 "the excessive desire for something".

Porn, the sexual gratification kind, not the real estate kind, has a grip on this generation like nothing else. It is easier to ask a group of people 'who hasn't seen porn' that it is to ask who has as the numbers will be easier to count.

It is instantaneous gratification that is accessible anywhere if you have the right kind of phone with web capabilities.

It forgoes the issues of having to build a relationship (see my last post "Give me love!") and skips straight to the sex with no need to call them the next day, or to even know their name!

And it is so unbelievably destructive that I would rank it near the top of why there are so many failed relationships.

If you watch porn a lot it desensitizes you to the need for love in sex. It forms your ideas about what a male or female body should look like (and trust me NO natural body looks like that) and it puts in your head desires for sex that you may never find anyone actually willing to do, submitting you to the possibility of only finding sexual gratification through porn.

And it demeans and objectifies people in a way that makes them something rather than someone.

Every time you watch porn you are making those people less than human in your eyes.

You don't care about them, you don't care if they are drug induced, sex slaves that have been stolen from their homes and trafficked into the business.

You don't care that they may have been sexually abused as a child and found that this was the only job they felt they were good at.

You don't care that they carry STD's and are passing those to every sexual partner they have.

You don't care because they are less than human to you.

And they don't care if your marriage or relationship breaks up because of them. They don't care that you views on your partner may be warped because of them. They don't care

because you are less than human to them.

You are the one that gives this industry a reason to keep going.

You are the one that keeps them in business.

You are acting less than human by even watching porn.

I know a young man who said once that watching porn was the ultimate hypocrisy. He watched woman with no thought of who they were or respect for them and yet he believes in treating his female friends with dignity and respect.

It's because in his eyes, at that moment, those women were less than human to him.

As a woman who has been coerced into having pornographic pictures taken of her, the possibility that they are on the web and that some of the men in my life that I care about could maybe one day click on a link and see them fills me with a horror that I cannot begin to describe. It makes me wonder if the women in porn feel that sense of shame and disgust as well.

There are far more that just 50 shades of porn and it is becoming more and more apparent on everyday television and movies. 

Next time you think to watch porn, ask yourself

"What if this site shows me young pics/movies of my mother?"

Let's start to humanize people again and give them the respect and dignity that they deserve.

Chick Flicks = Girl Porn

In my last blog ("S-E-X") I mentioned how porn was dehumanizing and not honouring to God. I want to unpack that a little.

You would be hard pressed these days to find a teenager who hadn't seen porn at one time or another. I know plenty of guys and girls who admit to having a porn addiction at some point in their lives. It is one of the biggest industries in the world and employs/enslaves millions of men, women and children in the making of films and pictures.

The reason it is so powerful is because sex is one of the most primal instincts that we have. It a strong force and once those instincts have been aroused it is damn near impossible to get them to go back into hiding. Once you have those feelings and images in your head you will never get rid of them and, like a drug, you will want more and more to satisfy the feelings that have been awakened.

Porn is so destructive because it gives a false idea about what sex and humanity is about. It tells us that sex is a commodity, that people can be bought. It shows us that we don't have to care about people, we just have to use them for our gratification. It says that no matter what your darkest fantasies are, you have a right to be accommodated in enjoying them to the expense of someone else.

It also shows us that men are always virile, women are always willing, sex is never awkward or messy or not enjoyable. It tells us that a woman's personality doesn't matter just as long as she is fit looking and willing to do whatever you want. It is the size of the man's penis, not his mind, that matters.

And now I get controversial.

I would argue that chick flicks and romance novels (henceforth known together as romcomnov's) are as destructive and manipulative as porn.

Now before I get lynched by angry woman, let me explain.

Porn distorts the way we view others and can have serious detrimental affects on relationships because of these distortions. Romcomnov's do the same.

In the romcomnov there is usually a bad boy to be tamed, a stuck up woman who needs to loosen up, a man who sweeps a gorgeous woman off her feet, or a plain woman who actually is amazingly beautiful but no one ever noticed before.

All of these plots assume that there is a 'perfect' way of being. That being stuck up and job motivated is bad, but partying and having a good time is good. Bad boys are always actually nice on the inside and just need a woman to change them. Women are suppose to look and dress a certain way to get noticed and get the man. And in the end the perfect man will always turn up with flowers and romance.

This isn't real life. Some people are just assholes, men don't always sweep girls off their feet and really don't like women trying to change them. You don't wake up with make up on, sex isn't always pretty/sweat free/romantic. And no woman looks like they do on the movies.

So how is this like porn?

Porn distorts the way we view humans and romcomnov's do just as much.

Where porn may make you dissatisfied with your sex life or the way your partner looks, romcomnov's can make you dissatisfied with your sex life, how you look, how your partner looks, how your life is, who you are, your friends and everything else.

Women are being trained by the romcomnov to look for a certain type of romance, a man who acts in a certain way, and when that doesn't happen they believe that they must have not found 'the one' and so move on to the next man who needs them to change them.

Porn leaves you wanting something else.

Romcomnov's leave you wanting something else.

Both are as destructive as each other.

Both dehumanize the person.

Both are letting people live their fantasies on screen without anyone thinking of the ramifications.

Now I know there will be many disagreements to this and I would love to hear them. Please, feedback and start the discussion.