Thread by @Calumets

So much of our culture is predatory. Boys & girls are bombarded daily by thousands of advertising images objectifying women's bodies on buses, bus stops, walls & newspapers. Online, porn depicts men (literally & routinely) foot pinning a woman's face, fetishising force & pain.

I teach at secondary school level & frequently overhear & deal with young boys (even the 'nice' ones) making rape jokes, disrespecting female peers, sexually pressurising & shaming their classmates. It's rife. It's also hardly surprising. They reflect cultural values around them.

Have a look at popular newspapers online editions today & you will see the way women are depicted smothering every page. Not just the images, look at the words...

Yesterday, I did just that with the UK's 2nd most popular newspaper, The Daily Mail (online edition).

Alongside the tragic story of Sarah Everard (which in this paper seemed weirdly devoid of sympathy or interest in the victim), were columns of lurid pictures (often telephoto lens long shots) coupled with misogynistic comments targeting male readers.

Without exception, these 'teasers' employed language designed to present women as sexually available & sexually provocative. Examples:
• Flashes her washboard abs
• Shows off her taut-abs
• Flaunts her pert posterior
• Flaunts her toned figure
• Flaunts bikini body

As well as the overtly depraved use of 'flashes' (think about it!), words like 'shows off' & 'flaunts' are designed specifically to give men tacit permission to sexually intrude because women are presented as inviting the attention. This was one day, one paper, dozens of examples

If we are serious as a society about tackling the toxic masculinity which can lead to events such as the tragic death of Sarah Everard, we need to tackle mass media. Men need to stop consuming this output. The simplest way to achieve that, would be to remove it from circulation.

Without the normalisation of these toxic attitudes towards women & sex flooding our cultural spaces, it might just be possible to re-educate males so that women can live safely & without fear & men can rediscover respect.