Grown up girls take responsibility

At the Drum on Monday February 28 there's another piece by Melinda Tankard Reist on the corrupting influences of pop music

This time it's a song by Brian McFadden written for fiancée songstress Delta Goodrem, titled Just The Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar).

One of the offending lines is:I like you just the way you are, drunk and dancing at the bar, I can't wait to take you home so I can do some damage

Not everybody's idea of a love song, but no doubt it has some personal triggers for the couple involved.

MTR and fellow campaigner, journalist Nina Funnell, take the opportunity to unleash a tirade against McFadden for encouraging a culture apparently known as "passed out p*ssies", in which a woman drunk beyond the capacity to consent isn't taken home in a cab, but instead taken to somebody's place and passed around for sex.

A vile practice, and abusing a comatose woman who can't give consent is sexual assault, no question.

But there is a difference between drunk, and passed out, and having sex when drunk isn't the same thing as raping an unconscious woman. I don't think McFadden is singing about the latter.

What is nowhere mentioned in the article is that women are responsible for their drinking behaviours, and a culture in which women believe that getting insensible on drink is a normal part of a good night out is also a vile one.

A woman has a responsibility to take care of herself. Nobody else can do that for her. It is a nasty world at times, particularly if you are of the drink and vomit, vomit and drink culture.

Years of feminist rage against men seems to have achieved very little, as MTR admits, at least in the world of pop culture inhabited by millions of young women. It might be time to consider turning our attention to educating those women instead of wasting our energies blaming men. This is much harder, of course, but it might have a more successful outcome.

The first thing we should be educating girls and young women about is taking responsibility for their own choices and decisions. If you're going to drink yourself senseless, bear in mind that you might get gang raped while you're unconscious.

We apparently can't stop some Neanderthals doing this, but maybe we can do our best to stop young women putting themselves into the situation in the first place. This will involve the whole village, of course, including the pubs and the parents, and not just some hapless male writer of horrible pop music.

No brains, only tits, bums and legs

On Tankard Reist's website there is also a post titled Surrounded by a culture in which girls are all body and only body.

Here MTR sets out her objections to Lea Michele, star of the US hit TV series Glee appearing on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine wearing a dress that reveals cleavage. Because Michele (in her mid twenties) plays a teenager in the show, the argument is that she has a responsibility to appear modestly dressed even when she's not in character, otherwise she's setting a bad example of "sexification" for the teenagers who watch the show.

A hark back to old Hollywood morality, when a racy private life could get a film star fired.

Cleavage shots and the like, the campaigners claim, teach girls that the only thing that matters is their appearance, and that looking sexy should be their primary goal. Who they are and what they do is subjugated to the cultural imperative to cultivate and flaunt their sexual power.

If this is the culture Reist and Funnell want to jam, then they're going to have to close down all media everywhere. Even that ad for shampoo where a young woman lets her dress slip off as she steps into a city fountain to wash her hair – there's a breast outlined and she's taking off her clothes in a very sexy manner – will have to go.

They aren't talking about raunch here, or soft porn, though even that is in the eye of the beholder. The dress is unremarkable for the times, the pose hardly offensive. She shows about as much breast as they did in Georgian times, when nipples were barely covered and swelling, uplifted cleavage was perfectly acceptable.

Just say No to Victoria's Secret

Then there's the campaign to stopUSunderwear manufacturer Victoria's Secret from operating in Australia. The garments they produce are "pornified" according to MTR, and "falsely empower women."

Women who model these garments, and women who buy them, are adult women responsible for the choices they make. But try that argument, and you'll be told that they don't know they're being exploited. In other words, as well as nurturing perverted ambitions to look like porn stars, apparently millions of ordinary women who buy from Victoria's Secret haven't got any brains either.

But don't worry! The covered crusaders are here to protect them from themselves and they will pull out all stops to prevent that naughty porny underwear from being sold in Australia!

The battle for control over the representation of female sexuality

The outrage against Victoria's Secret and the Lea Michele frock nonsense have taken their protests into a whole other area, and one that raises questions about Reist and Funnell's judgment.

In order to interpret the world as they apparently do, you have to start from the position that there is something fundamentally wrong with all public representation of female sexuality. Any expression and representation of female sexuality is dangerous for women one way or another, according to this perspective, and it has to be stopped.

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.

Public displays of female flesh lead inevitably to a culture of exploitation and rape, turning sane men mad, apparently. All those KanYe West and Brian McFadden lyrics churning round in their animal minds, causing them to lose what little sense of decency they might just have been born with, if they were lucky, and then, dammit, a woman in a thong hoves into view, and it's not on her foot, either.

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.

If I'm wrong, and they do think there's an acceptable way to publicly show off the female body, then it's time they told us what it is, because their unrelenting negativity, their lack of any positive options for women who want to enjoy and share their sexual beauty and power, is becoming very wearing.

There's nothing wrong with desire, and cleavage

Personally, I think the human body can be breathtaking, and I see no reason for it to be treated as something that must be hidden for fear of the desires it might arouse. There's nothing wrong with desire, either, it's one of the driving creative forces in the world. It should be aroused.

Calling for the end of the "sexification" of women is not much different to telling women we are responsible for men's bad behaviour because of the way we dress ourselves. If we want to "sexify" why shouldn't we? We are sexual beings, sex is a fabulous thing; some of us like looking sexy, and men have to deal with that. We aren't going round in potato sacks because they allegedly can't keep it in their pants.

The majority of men do deal with it, admire the sexuality, and behave. Some don't, and I'd venture to suggest that they wouldn't anyway. Rape is nothing new, it happened when we were covered from head to toe, and you don't have to be overtly sexy or dressed in revealing clothing to be raped, as we very well know. Rape frequently has little to do with sex, and lots to do with power.

Lacy panties and balconette bras might not be everybody's choice, but there's room for them in the world. There's nothing wrong with you, ladies, if you want to wear them and you feel good in them. Don't let anybody tell you there is. Go for it. Cleavage can be wondrous.

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.

It's insulting to tell a woman who chooses to earn her income from her body that she's being exploited and she doesn't know it. Women are sick of being told they don't know what they're doing with their own sexuality. It's patriarchal.

So until these two glass half empty gals can come up with a suggestion as to how they think female sexuality should be represented and expressed, outside of the marriage bed, and until they learn to stop insulting everybody's human intelligence, I for one have read enough rants about the evils of popular culture.

And let's seriously start teaching our girls about the perils of being passed out p*ssies. Let's teach them that women are responsible for the decisions and choices we make, and that's something to be proud of. Let's teach them that women are not doomed to be victims of men, or even victims of other women, and that wearing a thong doesn't make it so.

Let's focus on what women can do and be, rather than on what men shouldn't do and should be.

That's an empowering rave I'd read and share.