Agreed. If people are doing what appears to be a senseless and self-destructive act you can either:

a) Try and stop them doing it
b) Try and understand why they are doing it
c) Let them get on with doing it

I favour b), though c) has its place sometimes. But the subtext of all the reforms proposed by the religious and moral Right is: "I don't want to see that: therefore you should stop doing it." Well, tough.

'I have not read of either of these campaigners offering alternative representations to those they critique, so I'm beginning to conclude they don't have any. Perhaps they really don't believe there can be any such thing as an acceptable public representation of female sexuality, like the Taliban.'

I don't think it's at all to do with women really. It's to do with men.

MTR in particular resents men ever being 'gratified' (Without permission). She thinks any time a woman is displayed in a sexual way it is by definition purely for male 'gratification', and she really gets quite upset about men ever being gratified. Most men are sexually attracted to women, and enjoy their beauty. This is the problem. Men are the dirty sexual ones, women are the pure asexual ones that men corrupt via their dirty lust.

So I don't think there is any situation where a woman can express her sexuality (being as it is commonly directed at those she is attracted to and wanting attention from ie men) without a man being gratified.

Once a man is gratified, in the MTR leap of logic, the woman has been objectified and sexualised. So one can only conclude that.

a) Women are asexual.
b) Being a man, and being attracted to women is by definition objectification and sexualisation of women.
c) There has to be an element of Dom/Sub for an acceptable relationship between men and women. ie (A man may only gratified if/when a woman gives him permission)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O86emr9QTMQ

'Public displays of female flesh lead inevitably to a culture of exploitation and rape, turning sane men mad'

That about sums it up.

'In the world these campaigners inhabit, not only are all women too stupid to know if they're being exploited, all men are too base to think about a woman as anything more than a root, a drunken root if possible, or if it's KanYe West we're talking about, a dead root.'

Amen

"A woman has a responsibility to take care of herself."

Isn't that obvious?

Well, apparently not: some of our socialist friends here claim that for a person to take care of themselves is an "elitist" and "reactionary" behaviour, that "responsibility" is an evil trait and that those who do behave responsibly and take care of themselves are "the lowest caste of all, the self-satisfied minions of the system".

I suppose that those getting raped while drunk deserve a medal for supporting the revolution and serving the working-class in the true spirit of comradeship.

Go figure.

You go girl, sock it to them.

Tankard and others like her, do not want to take responsibility for the consequences of their own behaviour, because to do so would mean looking at ones self very deeply, so whilst they continue to blame men, they do not have to confront their own demons.

Plus there is some thing much deeper going on, Why would a woman knowingly drink herself into stupor, with the full knowledge that she may wind up in certain situations.

There is something that drives people to partake in risk taking behaviour.

'It's insultingly reductionist to peddle the theory that because a man (or a woman) admires a lovely body, he or she automatically doesn't give a toss about anything else that human being has to offer.''

This I have long argued. Especially in the realm of porn. Now men don't read the articles, but they read the contrived biography about the woman, trying ever so hard to believe it to be real in an attempt to have a tiny insight into the woman behind the centrefold. Self-evidently, men require and seek out more than just the pictorial beauty. They want a piece of the mind. Now some might say they are interested only in what kinky fantasies and positions the model may enjoy, but isn't that what sex is all about.

I fail to see the 'objectification', when men demand via their marketed-to dollar, attempts to personalise and individualise the object via the 'interview' transcript that accompanies the pornography.

Furthermore, the most popular and fastest growing genre of porn is Amateur porn. Men are searching for authentic 'real life' depictions of everyday women rather than airbrushed models. This is so popular that companies are attempting to make 'amateur' porn with professional equipment and deliberately bad lighting, and pass it off as amateur porn or voyeuristic and candid.

One would never know this though, as these crusaders like MTR are constantly promoting that violent porn is the most popular genre. All the while ignoring the 'Clothed Women Naked Man' male humiliation web sites and the male submissive fantasies that are equally as prevalent but just don't fit their portrait of men as the dirty perverted violent beasts.

MTR's support for burqas begins to make sense.