The compliance extends to being in full cahoots with the celebration of phenomena like "Bratz".

Who buys these miniature tartz for their daughters or as presents for their friends? It's women who purchase them, just as it's women who purchase clothing for toddlers and young girls that would be more appropriate on pole dancers.

Women embrace the consumer paradigm with eagerness. How many women stop to think or to talk to their girls about the pitfalls of slavishly following whatever advertisers have conjured up as "fashion? Women don't have to buy these things for their girls. They do it because they're comfortable shelling out for whatever helps their kids fit in - and in doing so they perpetuate cultural mores that demean womanhood.

Do men buy these dolls for their daughters? Not usually. So why blame men for a phenomenon that women aide and abet by wielding their purchasing power and freedom of choice?

Poirot,
you make an excellent point.
I have an 11 year old girl who collects Bratz and she and my 3 year old daughter play with them together for hours on end, as well as watch the Bratz tv show. You're right, it's the mothers who drive the market and the mothers who let their little girls go out dressed like prostitutes. I live in a fairly conservative place but it's still commonplace seeing girls from say 13 up semi-clad in highly alluring outfits and stuccoed in make-up.
It's just to easy for feminist to blame this vague institution known as "patriarchy". The challenge seems to be again for feminists to defend this phenomenon, and if they can't do that to start explaining their own contributions to kiddy porn via the shopping malls.
I also have a nearly 16 year old daughter who lately nearly always has her nose in her smart phone (she works 6 or7 hours a week). Meanwhile I have three boys, two on the brink of adolescence and the oldest looking like getting some work too. He'll also want a phone, and all he has to do then is type in "red tube" and up will pop endless pages of glorious porn. Except it's not that glorious. Females are overwhelmingly portrayed in demeaned and omni-penetrated-defiled situations, and males are depicted as indifferent sexual automatons.
I'm no prude but as a parent this not just disturbing, it's an absolute affront and a mental assault against my children that I'm powerless to prevent.
Thankfully all my kids are modest creatures by nature, but what sort of effect is exposure to this unspeakable feast going to have.

Going back to Poirot's post; why are women grooming their girls for this kind of role play?

'I'm regularly disaffected by ornate twaddle being passed of as cogent rhetoric.

I say it's rather compelling to watch the ladies make the case against bullying by swaggering onto the thread - Killarney in full battle dress, and Athene using an over-sized thesaurus as a soapbox.'

Poirot will you marry me. I have not heard a more accurate or cutting summary in all my time on OLO.

' time someone called them out on their methods.'

Looks like the reverse has occurred. Look away from the mirror girls.

People who agree don't often post in any forum, whether it be news articles or opinion sites. The act of posting is more likely a action of dissent.

Killarney and Athene are like a little weedy guy being held back from fighting a 120KG Adonis yelling, if these guys weren't holding me back....! If you have objections to the points people have posted,.....um........ refute them! Oh, and preferably giving some kind of reasoning other than 'you just don't understand the patriarchal powers that must be taken as gospel'. Specifically refute arguments.

The stage is yours. We're all ears here.

I put it to Killarney and Athena that 'bullying' consists primarily of
' patriarchal denial.'. ie if any poster dares even question the righteous universal victim positioning of women (and we have a great case study right here don't we), that dissent is bullying in itself.

'If a discussion can stay with that premise, fine. But more often than not, it will not proceed beyond that point as the patriarchal shutters clamp down hard against any further exploration of the topic.'

I'd say the reverse is happening. You're on the other side of the shutters. Maybe you could embark on a brave journey to that dangerous world where discussions don't stay within a convenient comfortable premise that women are always the victim, and contemplates whether men's sexual desires and mores should be controlled by women's interpretation of and reaction to them.

I'm sure if men posted articles about how vibrators hurt our feelings we'd be considered controlling and dominating women and their sexuality.

Just when I thought the day was not interesting enough…

You're wrong, Houllebecq… This is the best one, two punch: "Athene is in danger of putting her audience to sleep with her grandiloquent and turgid prose. Killarney is more likely to plant a left hook on her opponent's rhetorical chin while simultaneously fanning her offended sensibilities with the other hand."

The high-five still goes to Poirot though.

Vibrators have never hurt my feelings, I'll have you know, but they have loosened a couple of teeth.

You'll have to excuse me because my Bratz Boys Alek, Zack, Braden, Cade and Koby want me to go and make a fuss… or a quiche or something.

'Females are overwhelmingly portrayed in demeaned and omni-penetrated-defiled situations, and males are depicted as indifferent sexual automatons.'

This is standard dictionary feminist definition of 'porn'. For a start, porn is a broad church. Just like feminism avoids any universal condemnation by trotting out 'broad church', so can porn. There's art, erotica, and the lazy voyeurism that is porn. Just as we have reality TV, and we have grief porn, and even home improvement porn.

Just because that chick on Better Homes and Gardens porn shows how to make ugly trashy trinkets and rubbish for the house doesn't mean my good taste is going to change.

The 'objectification' critique I find astounding, given we're talking about a representation in a visual medium. If you are anti-objectification you must be anti-audiovisual technology. It's a matter of context, and when the context is a visual representation, not a breathing person in front of you, it's an object! Adobe makes darn good tools, everyone knows that!

They are images. Just like a painting, to be built upon and dissected by the individual, the topics and content motivated by already existing tastes and it's about as damaging as putting people in front of gay porn and worrying they'll turn gay.

'I'm no prude but as a parent this not just disturbing, it's an absolute affront and a mental assault against my children that I'm powerless to prevent.'

This is after they search for MILFs or after they aren't turned on by MILFs but see the fantasy depicted and it suddenly turns them on?

'It is a gloomy view that holds that humans, and women in particular, are so suggestible that an airbrushed thigh will cause them enduring emotional pain.': Helen Razer.

Ditto porn. Men see real women, we love real women, you know, actual people we know not actors playing a part, and we have dirty fantasies that are OURS, in our own world, we sometimes like to see them acted out, just like women like to see Hugh Grant being a vulnerable weed, and dimples on celebrity thighs.

I didn't get that far Trev I was laughing so hard I had to post immediately. I was wondering where you were quoting from until I scrolled up again, and you're right though, grandiloquent and turgid prose fits the bill.

'Vibrators have never hurt my feelings, I'll have you know, but they have loosened a couple of teeth.'
Perhaps you're not using them correctly. I have no problem with vibes, I just like to see the reaction of women when their sex aids and their sexual activities are given an equivalent analysis as feminists use for porn....

If the feminists critique of porn was directed towards the sexual habits of women, to be consistent, it would have to go something like this...