Caitlin Roper Profile picture
Feminist activist, author + Campaigns Manager at @CollectiveShout. Julie Bindel once told me I have gorgeous hair. Tweets my own.
Mar 2 17 tweets 5 min read
This is false. I’ve been researching sex dolls and child sex abuse dolls for years, and I’ve written a book on the topic. “Conclusive” evidence that child sex abuse dolls reduce or prevent sexual abuse does not exist. (And I reject that claim completely.) 🧵

vid - @way2muchJRMC I note that Senator Karen Berg who made these comments has since voted in favour of the bill to outlaw child sex abuse dolls, and don’t want to contribute to a pile on. But if you’re interested in what the research on child sex abuse dolls says, read on. Image
Jan 16 28 tweets 6 min read
"There's nothing feminist about telling people what they can and can't do with their bodies of their own free will.”

This is a terrible argument to apply to surrogacy – here’s why 🧵
abc.net.au/news/2024-01-1… First, let’s consider which women are “choosing” to rent out their wombs – surprise surprise, it is overwhelmingly poor women acting as surrogates for white, wealthy, western buyers
Aug 28, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Pornography could be creating sexual interest in children, according to experts.

“Clinical experience and now research evidence are accumulating to suggest that the Internet is not simply drawing attention to those with existing paedophilic interests, but is contributing to the crystallisation of those interests in people with no explicit prior sexual interest in children” (Wood, 2013).

In Internet Pornography and Paedophilia, Wood writes that there is growing evidence that the Internet and social media "act as a catalyst, facilitating an interest in sexual images of children.”

“From a clinical perspective, it has been evident for some time that there are people seeking psychotherapy who have been accessing child images, who appear to have no explicit or crystallised sexual interest in children, prior to access sexual materials online.” According to Gail Dines and Mandy Sanchez, porn that sexualises children grooms men to see children as “legitimate sexual targets”.

In their paper Hentai* and the Pornification of Childhood, they write, “Hentai not only frames youth and preadolescents as legitimate objects of adult sexual desire. It sets men on that very path.”

*Hentai a popular genre of animated porn that depicts childlike characters, often engaged in sexual violence
Aug 28, 2022 20 tweets 7 min read
*Content warning* What appeared to be a dead body washed up on a Thailand beach turned out to be a discarded, headless sex doll. This isn’t a one off - it happens regularly 🧵
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1… Discarded sex dolls are being mistaken for dead bodies, causing a growing issue for police. The number of reports of what were thought to be dead bodies has increased significantly over the last few years thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-do…
Jun 27, 2022 14 tweets 7 min read
*Content warning* Child sex abuse doll sellers are offering to customise replica girl sex dolls based on photos supplied by customers.

This means men can send in photos of *real children* and a doll complete with penetrable vagina, mouth & anus will be made in their likeness 🧵 In 2020, @ChildRescueCo shared the account of an American mother named Terri who discovered a child sex abuse doll sold on Amazon modelled on her 8-year-old daughter, a child model.

One image appeared to recreate a photo that had been shared to Facebook childrescuecoalition.org/educations/chi…
Feb 21, 2021 20 tweets 7 min read
THREAD: Listening to the women whose rape videos were hosted by #Pornhub giving testimony before Canadian Parliament is both devastating and enraging.

These women and girls have suffered immeasurably because some men like to jerk off to the rape & abuse of women. #Traffickinghub In 2018 Victoria Galy found numerous non-consensual pornographic videos of herself, made by her ex, on Pornhub. She was clearly drugged or intoxicated. #Traffickinghub
May 13, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read
Andrea Dworkin wrote about the "pornographic conception of female power", the notion that women are powerful because men sexually desire them (thread) "The central conceit of woman-hating sex, sex as conquest and possession, dominance and submission, is that the woman has real power: she is only the apparent victim; she is only seemingly powerless. Her power is in her capacity to provoke erection or lust."
Jul 10, 2019 5 tweets 1 min read
It’s 2019, and it is still accepted that men need access to an underclass of women to absorb their sexual aggression theguardian.com/australia-news… We’re talking about a serial sex offender, one who “remains a serious danger to the community”, and the ‘solution’ is to grant him sexual access to women deemed less worthy? Why should a rapist's sexual urges trump women's basic rights?