This article is designed to be inflammatory the sort of technique used to inflame the emotions of the lynch mob and too convince them that someone should/deserves to be lynched.

A while ago I read about how perhaps violence against women will increase for a number of reasons, but mainly in reaction to the negative portrayal of being classified and vilified as a member of the abusing class.

So in reality if this happens and I hope it doesn't. It will become a self fulfilling prophecy.

I think Christine Hoff Summers was the one who wrote how in gender studies the students were taught how to stoke their anger. This was achieved by focusing on the crimes committed by some men agianst some women. Again a similar tactic to sledging or used to form a lynch mob.

“…when women are equally represented in our parliaments, then will true change against the all consuming power of the depraved sex industry, in all its forms, come about in Australia .
Posted by diver dan, Tuesday, 18 March 2008 3:44:39 PM”

Oh yeah?

As I pointed out on another recent porn related thread research recently released by Murray Straus found a strong relationship between smacking children and sexual violence when children are adults. The likelyhood of sexual violence increases with the level of smacking.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080228220451.htm

R0bert

Whilst nominally rejecting non-consensual sex, the article is actually indicates the article is really anti-sex and specifically against pornography, not anti-choice. It also contains numerous errors of fact.

For starters, the act of bukkake does not involve "oral penetration". Whilst Caroline may find it, ahem, not to her taste, other women disagree. The founder of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown, strongly advised in favour of semen as a natural skin cream, for example.

The article claims that the pornography industry makes more money that the mainstream entertainment industry, without any evidence of such an outrageous claim.

If - and only if - the author is genuine in their concern of the representation of women in pornography, rather than being opposed to sensual expressions themselves, the answer - pardon the pun - is staring you in the face. Make better pornography.

In closing I will add my voice to those who have expressed surprise that a presumably intelligent forum such as Online Opinion has been overrun by epistemologically weak articles on this subject. It can hardly do the University of Melbourne or QUT any benefit to their already suffering reputation.

Yeah, another unforunatately facile article from Caroline Norma.

"The pornography industry makes more money than the mainstream entertainment industry, so we can assume it’s not a few men that are enjoying themselves with pictures of men spraying their ejaculate all over naked women."

How exactly does that follow? As far as I can tell, bukake is a particularly extreme and unappealing form of porn. How is it representative of pornography generally? Most people I know would be quite revolted by bukake, but are quite appreciative of more tasteful depictions of erotica, including pornography.

This is not shaping up to be an earth-shattering dissertation.

I don't think it's anything wrong with the UMelb or QUT in particular but more with gender studies courses generally. If you go to UMelb and get a PhD in an older, established discipline like languages, philosophy, history, politics etc, you are likely to get a good rigorous degree. But if you go and take one of the 'advocate' subjects like womens/gender studies or sociology (increasingly education and English too) then you're not likely to get much. It's evident from articles like this that gender studies just doesn't attract high quality candidates. It attracts candidates who already have a preconceived idea of the world and who want to reinforce their ideas through activist oriented 'research'.