AUSTRALIA: NEW INITIATIVE AGAINST PORNOGRAPHY

CATH NEWS REPORT: A compelling and confronting new book, Big Porn Inc, was recently launched in both Melbourne and Perth. The publishers, editors, some of the Australian contributors and those endorsing the book spoke of the launch of this book as a “landmark publication”, writes Anna Krohn (pictured) on the Catholic Women's League website.

“Big Porn Inc: exposing the harms of the global pornography industry” (published by Spinifex) is a sharply up-to-the-nano-second analysis of and protest against the “colonization” of the world’s markets, cultures and interpersonal relationships by exponentially violent, dehumanized and dehumanizing pornography.

The book has been edited by the social commentator and writer, Melinda Tankard Reist (Collective Shout) and the Perth-based social justice academic, Dr Abigail Bray. The editors have gathered together into a persuasive and unified front, 40 diverse contributions which include commentary, research, strategy and moving first-hand narrative from those hurt by porn.

Big Porn Inc. includes papers from a world-wide and multi-cultural array of men and women, activists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists who pursue the trail from brutality, trafficking, child abuse, female objectification, self-harm, and a tidal wave of misogyny back to electronically pervasive and industrialised porn.


Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University, added his strong commendation of the book. He said that much of the contemporary media, advertising industry and “huge industries who are considered respectable” are collaborators in the perpetration of the“dark desires” which are wrapped around the “look, the style and the attitudes” of porn. Pornography, he said “brings prostitution into every home.At the Melbourne launch, women’s researcher and Spinifex publisher Dr Renate Klein commented upon the parallel “pornification” of mainstream fashion, music and advertising cultures with the explicit degradation of women, children, teenagers, boys and animals in porn influenced behaviour.

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=28780

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