#179 “He Chose Porn Over Me” with author Melinda Tankard Reist

#179

Raquel Rosario Sanchez from FiLiA in conversation with Melinda Tankard Reist

Author of: He Chose Porn Over Me.

Raquel: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the FiLiA podcast. My name is Raquel Rosario Sanchez, and I'm the spokeswoman for FiLiA. Today we are delighted to speak with Melinda Tankard Reist who is the author of He Chose Porn Over Me: Women Harmed By Men Who Use Porn. Melinda is an author, speaker, media commentator, blogger and advocate for young people.

She's best known for her works addressing sexualisation, objectification, the harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and violence against women. She has also been very involved in Collective Shout for a world free from sexual exploitation.

 Melinda, how are you?

Melinda: I'm very well, Raquel. Thank you so much for your interest in the book and for having me on your podcast.

Raquel: So Melinda, let's talk about your book. Now this book is a collection of essays written by 25 women who share their stories of being involved in relationships with men who had a very toxic and harmful relationship with pornography. You are write in the book that the collection came together very quickly.

You write: ‘At the end of another COVID 19 ravished year, I posted on social media about a 21-year-old woman who had called off her wedding the same week that she learned that her fiancé was ‘addicted to porn’.’ And then you write: ‘My social media in-boxes filled with stories from women who wished that they had done the same. I followed up with a few posts, quoting some of these women, which led to a cascade of even more traumatised women coming forward to say ‘This is me. This is my story too’.’

 So tell us about the moment that you decided this needs to be out in the world, in the form of a book. People need to know about the harm that is being done to women when men develop this toxic fascination with pornography.

Melinda: Well, I'm a journalist by background Raquel and I've spent many years documenting the lived experiences of women and I've always believed that women’s experiences, women's personal narratives are critically important to understanding harms done to them, especially by the sex industry through porn. And I felt these stories deserve to be told.

I'd written previous books called getting real challenging the sexualisation of girls and big porn exposing the harms of the global porn industry and prostitution narratives, stories of survival in the sex trade and what this book does I suppose is put human experience to the forefront.

What is the lived experience of women at the hands of porn consuming men? And I just felt there's a book here. We don't really hear these stories. We don't hear the personal stories and I put it to my publisher Spinifex Press, and they said, yes, straight away. We really only had the conversation in February. And then by July here we are with a book. So it happened very quickly.

The stories were so profound, so compelling, so moving, I just compiled them really and wrote an introduction at the start. And we added a resource section at the end. The power of the stories, the rawness of the stories, telling the personal devastation, brokenness, abandonment, emotional turmoil and trauma is laid bare. And it really strips away the dominant narrative about porn, not only being harmless, but being a benefit to relationships and society, it rips that PR spin to shreds in this book. 

Raquel: Could you tell our audience in a summary, what were the women saying to you about their experiences with these men? What did you call it?

Melinda: Porn sick, porn consuming, habitual porn consuming, engulfed in porn, dominated by porn, their whole lives revolving around porn. So the 25 women in the book were collateral damage in their partners insatiable greed for porn. They tell stories of the crushing of intimacy, the loss of respect and connection. The women felt inadequate, devalued. They felt they couldn't compete with what the men were seeing and consuming in pornography. They felt never good enough. They described how porn took over their union, their families, their homes, the women felt rejected. They felt scarred. They described being used like a blow up doll.

They described an erosion of their boundaries, their overblown sense of entitlement from the men. Expectations that they would provide sex on demand, porn sex. That they would participate in sex acts they found degrading and demeaning. They described having to replicate the performance of women in the porn industry with their partners, expecting a porn star experience and some describe extreme acts of violence.

Choking, strangulation, suffocation, two women described being forced to have sex after the birth of children and the damage done to them as a result when they were still healing. Many of these women were subjected to sexual terrorism in their own homes.

And the book aims to situate porn on the continuum of domestic violence. There's a global discussion now about the epidemic of domestic violence of male violence against women. But it's time to situate porn as an element in that perpetration of domestic violence. And the men in the book carried out physical, mental, financial, verbal, emotional and spiritual violence against these women. 

Raquel: This is different from what we hear from the culture when it comes to porn. There's a big critique of when a couple encounters say some sexual issues, the recommendation from sex therapist tends to be, to advise women that well, you know, you should just like learn what he said that he likes and try to be more flexible, try to adjust yourself to him, to his demands, based on whatever porn he's consuming and the woman is made to feel inadequate as if there's something in her life that she's not doing correctly because she cannot compete with this version of sexuality that men are internalising because of porn.

 The 25 women in the book argue that actually that is extremely harmful because it further disassociates women from their own bodies, from their sexuality and their intimacy.

So tell us a little bit about how the culture has sanitised pornography versus what the women reveal was the actual reality of it in their lives. 

Melinda: You put that very well. The culture sanitising porn. The porn culture grooming women to expect to be treated this way. Grooming men to treat women this way and the complicity of so-called sex therapists.  

Story after story tells of women going to get help and finding that the sex therapist, so-called counsellors, so-called psychologists side with the male, telling her you are just hung up. You are just a prude. You need to loosen up. You need to get drunk and get that monkey off your back that tells you, you don't like porn. This is just what men do. And you need to serve that. You need to enable that and not make him feel bad. You need to give him more sex. You need to pander to his needs. 

The book really is a damning indictment of the so-called sex therapy industry. Based on the stories in this book, I would say run a mile from any sex therapist, unless they have a porn critical framework and understand the toll, the devastation, the trauma done to women, then don't go anywhere near them.

The so-called sex therapy industry is cited with the porn user and with the sex industry in further victimising and shaming women. So be very, very careful who you go to see for help. 

Raquel: When did that happen? Was it a shift driven by consumerism? Was it a deliberate shift in which women were going to couples therapies, saying we are having this issue in our relationship. We want some help. And instead of it being like a regular couple therapy appointment, what the women were getting was ‘well, actually, maybe you need to just watch the porn with him and try to recreate whatever it is that he's getting off to.

When did that shift happen in sex therapy? 

Melinda: It's hard to say exactly when. I would suspect it started to happen with the sexual revolution, so called, in which porn was extolled as empowering and liberating and freeing women from the shackles and it’s all a lie.

It's not empowering. It really serves the patriarchy. It serves men and the therapeutic industries, so called, have enabled and facilitated this idea. And when you mentioned couple’s therapy, the women in the book really only got help when they got their own private, separate counselling from victim informed, trauma informed therapists who saw them on their own because the men didn't want to go to counsellors who might challenge them.

So often you'll see in the stories, the man complains, he protests, demands to see someone else. If he's even called out at all, until he finds someone who aligns with him, certainly in the book, the women didn't benefit from couple’s therapy mostly because the man was further enabled in his behaviours.

Raquel: Let’s talk about some of what you actually found in the stories of the women, which is an increase in sexual violence, in sex, in part, because of the prevalence of violence in pornography itself, and you are right. The frontline worker, Di Macleod, the director of the Gold Coast Centre Against Sexual Violence told you in the past few years, we have seen a huge increase of intimate partner rape of women from the ages of 14 to 80. Plus the biggest common denominator is the consumption of porn by the offender. They were believing that women were ‘up for it,’ 24/7 ascribing to the myth that no means yes. And yes means anal oblivious to the injuries caused and never, ever considering consent. She said, we are seeing a huge increase in the deprivation of liberty, physical injuries, pressure, drugging, filming and even sharing footage without consent. 

I thought that was really striking when reading the stories of the women that they would be describing, essentially the development of their relationship, how things started, how is it that they fell in love with this man? They got into this relationship with this man. And then some paragraphs down the line. You read that this man has been trying to penetrate them in their sleep or was already doing it. or he was just demanding sex, essentially coercing women into sex. 

Let's talk about this increase in sexual violence because of the violence in pornography.

Melinda: Yes. The quote of Di Macleod. When she first wrote to me and said that what they were seeing, the porn inspired injuries in young women, 14 years old through to elderly women in their eighties. I can't give a better example of how porn normalises and eroticises violence against women than what Di Macleod told me.

This is really all the evidence we need of how porn embeds sexual violence into domestic relationships. And we're seeing this playing out now in younger people. For example, I have an increasing number of young women say to me, he went for my throat without even asking. Young boys asking, do I need to strangle her when I have sex? They think strangulation, causing pain, choking, gagging, ejaculation on the face is a normal sexual experience. 

One of the most disturbing stories I heard was recent and you know, I think I've heard everything and then I hear something else. A teacher told me that she overheard two 12-year-old boys discussing sex. Now one 12-year-old boy said to the second, 12-year-old boy, how do you know when you are actually having sex? And the second boy said, when she starts to cry, now, this is what we have taught young people. We are seeing more adolescent boys turning up in sexual assault statistics on a global scale at a level never seen before.

And this is how they have been groomed now. They don't know what a healthy intimate relationships look like, they expect that women will want to be violated, abused, degraded, dehumanised, depersonalised, that they desire pain and suffering. What does this say about the future of civilisation? If this is what boys are learning from age nine or 10, how will they treat women? How could they possibly sustain healthy, long term intimate relationships? It's a disaster. And this book demonstrates that. 

Raquel: What is behind the shift in pornography towards more violence against women, more explicit, sexualised violence against women?

Pornographers could argue that 30 years ago, pornography used to be less explicitly violent, but now there's this overt desire to broadcast pain and the abuse of women. What do you think, based on your research and your work on this topic, is behind it?

Melinda: Well, the fact is the most violent genres of pornography are the most popular. When the war in Ukraine broke out, the most popular search term on porn hub was for Ukrainian girl. Also, at that time, there were sub threads where men were asking for rape footage from Ukraine. This tells us a lot.

And the reason that this has happened, a significant reason is that men have become, immune to, for want of a better word, I need a better word, but sort of standard pornography and they need something more extreme to get off on, to masturbate to because what they used to get off on doesn't do it for them anymore.

And the porn industry knows that, which is why they have to serve up more explicit, more extreme, more graphic forms of pornography, which show women being tortured because the men just stopped responding, so needed something stronger. And this is why we've seen this growth of the most violent genres, misogynistic, and often racist as well.

That's what they've had to do. That's how they have to build their business model is to keep providing more extreme content to keep men consuming it and making money. 

Raquel: Yes. I want to ask you in a second about the effect that this actually has on men's sexual lives.

But first I just wanted to touch on the fact that as you mentioned, you know, strangulation is now a regular staple in pornography, but as we know, from our work on ending violence against male violence against women, strangulation is a red flag for potential homicide. So it's almost as if we're witnessing a very explicit eroticisation of what we know to be violence against women and how it permeates in culture. Because then you have young women who are groomed into thinking by social media, by popular culture magazines that they read with articles about how to enjoy choking, how do you do it ‘safely’ the promotion of BDSM as it was a regular practice.

They are groomed into believing that this practices that we know to be red flags and violence against women, that this is not only how they should explore their own sexuality, but what they should expect from a sexual partner as well. And this is affecting women younger and younger. 

Melinda: Yes. It certainly is. We know it's happening to women younger and younger because we're seeing it on TikTok which has a genre called ‘kink talk’ in which underage girls are presented as covered in bruises as fantasising about wanting to be strangled, wanting to be choked. They call it breath play.

There's advice for girls on how to do breath play, well advice for young people, how to do breath play ‘without leaving a corpse’ they're told when to stop, when to look for warning signs, like bloodshot eyes, a change in skin colour. As if this is just a, a normal behaviour and not a red flag for homicide.

Here in Australia, in the state of Queensland, a designated domestic violence service opened just to deal with the victims, the survivors of choking, just dealing with choking, nothing else. How many of these are we going to see are needed around the world? 

And, you know, you asked about the effects on the boys, on the men. Well, they're being taught rape myths. They're being taught no means yes; they're being taught women want to be forced. Forced and violated is just another porn genre. They expect to treat women badly. 

Raquel: You work with young people as well in schools, right? So do they object to becoming involved in these dynamics? 

Melinda: Well, you know, I'm speaking more to young people, particularly young women about coercive control, about violence, about sexual harassment. These girls are being sexually harassed at school every day, and don't actually recognise it because they think it's so normal.

It's become so much a part of their life. Not until hearing me speak, do they say, oh, I didn't realise that that was against the law. I didn't realise I shouldn't have to put up with that. The girls are telling us, without exception in every school we go into, my colleague and I, Daniel, we have been fully booked now until the end of November and every school we go into girls say to us that they are sexually harassed. They're groped, they're touched, they're rubbed up against in the corridors. They tell us about boys trying to take pictures up their school uniforms, demanding nudes, sending girls dick pics, and the big one that we've written about recently, you can find this article on my website and Collective Shout’s website is on the rise of sexual moaning.

So boys making sexual moaning noises to girls, to female teachers, boys as young as 10 or 11 making these noises and playing those noises from porn sites through their devices, through their laptops, even in the classroom, on the school bus, masturbating to girls on the school bus, the sporting event showing porn, making these noises, the weekend party, the line-up at McDonald's anywhere that girls are, they hear these moaning noises.

 The girls all put their hands up when I asked how many of you have heard this noise? So they're enduring sexual harassment and criminal behaviour, even at school. And I'm been interviewing teachers, female teachers who are telling me they are going to leave teaching because they're sick of enduring sexual harassment when they turn up for school every day.

So not only have schools failed to create a safe educational environment for students. They've also failed to create a safe workplace for female teachers. So these are the stories I'm hearing all the time. 

Stories are getting worse. Even in the last year, stories are getting worse and something has to change for the sake of women and girls, but also boys, if they're not called out on this behaviour, how are they going to function? How are they going to be decent contributing members of society? We're just churning out these porn warped, porn deformed boys, and then letting them loose on the world.

What does it mean for example if a boy was never called out for this behaviour at school and he ends up in the police force or if he ends up as a judge on a bench and he is ruling in a rape trial, a sexual harassment trial, and he's been consuming rape porn since he was a young boy? I really do think this is a kind of civilisation that we are creating. Is this the kind of civilisation that we really want? 

Raquel: And we know that there's a connection between intimate partner sexual violence and pornography, but yet when you speak about this question, feminists are oftentimes accused of moralising or being a prude. 

You're writing the book that in Australia, forcing a partner to view porn against their will, is now considered included in the definition of domestic violence. There was a significant report released in 2011, Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety (NRO) examined violence against women during the COVID pandemic. And then the researchers found that one in three respondents who experienced sexual violence said that their partner had forced them or tried to make them watch porn when they did not want to.

Pornography is presented as if it was a question of liberty, a very libertarian sort of idea of let people do whatever they want to do. But what we're witnessing when it comes to violence against women, is that oftentimes it is women who are being forced or coerced into watching porn if they want to remain in a relationship that's for example, something that many of the 25 women featured in your book would say over and over, oh, I wanted to save the relationship. I wanted to keep him, I didn't want to lose the relationship. Therefore, I thought that I would have to perform or watch this porn with him. 

So let's talk about the coercion of men forcing and coercing their partners to watch porn, to groom them into sex acts. 

Melinda: Yes. Well, I was very pleased and encouraged that the NRO’s report that you cited, included being forced to watch porn against your will as an act of domestic violence.

And this needs to be widely known because I don't believe that it is seen that way, but it should be seen that way. Exposing someone to porn against their will is an act of violence and many women that I speak to say this, that the men try to coerce them to watch porn, degrading de personalised porn. Often the men couldn't actually have sex without having porn playing in the background. I even speak to teenage girls who tell me their boyfriends actually cannot get an erection and cannot ejaculate without having porn playing in the background, because this is how they've been conditioned to get off. And they want their female partners to be part of that. I mean, really they're just using the woman as a living sex doll or a, a masturbatory aid. 

This is not making love. This is not an intimate, special connection between the, the two of them. He is really using the porn to enhance his experience of masturbating to his partner. None of the women found pleasure in this. They did it against their will to try to ‘save the relationship’ or keep him happy or they expected that was their role to do what he wanted. 

Raquel: Let's talk about the sexual dysfunction that porn is producing in men.

Something that I found really interesting reading the book is that men developed these very toxic dependencies on porn and they, they would increase it and for some men their lives were taken over by wanting to consume more and more and more pornography. And they would, for example, neglect their jobs, obviously neglect their families, their relationships. They had this toxic dependency on porn and it would take over their lives. 

And then you would think that there was a payoff that they were getting from it. But it turns out that the men, for example, when they were actually having sex, not watching people have sex on screen, but when they were actually engaged with sex, they couldn't ejaculate or they had sexual dysfunction. They couldn't get an erection. Their bodies were becoming desensitised itself, which is a real paradox because you would think that the whole point of consuming porn is so that they could be able to enjoy when they're actually having sex. And then you read all of these stories about, well, actually these men weren't able to orgasm at all.

So it was not like they were getting something positive at the end, on the contrary, it was harming something that was so precious to them, which was their sexuality. 

Melinda: Yes. I wish more men would realise this. We're seeing teenage boys now with premature ejaculation and dysfunctional sexualities that have never before seen where even teenage boys fail to be aroused by ‘normal women’ because they've used so much porn that they need more extreme genres to try and get erections, but often they can't actually relate sexually to ‘real women’ they've developed this toxic dependency.

 The men in this book barely had other lives. Like it was all around porn, even while they were looking after a baby, even when they were on a trip with their partners to some tourism destination, they'd have to drop into the toilets and masturbate in the toilets while they were at work, they were consuming porn. These were all kinds of men in all kinds of different professions. 

And I want to quote Dr Caroline Norma, who co-ed Prostitution Narratives with me. And she emailed me an observation after reading an early draft of the book. And she says it is actually quite an extraordinary contemporary phenomenon that men are so loyal to porn that they're prepared to have women leave them. That real women and children, households, future plans, et cetera, are nothing in the face of men's porn usage. They just end up meaning nothing because men actively and willingly choose porn. Regardless.

 Now, these men, if they ended up with sexual dysfunction, often the woman got the blame for not providing a porn star experience, for not being sexy enough for not stimulating him enough. So it doesn't matter what she does. She ends up with the blame. 

The men lose their empathy. They lose their humanity. They experience an erosion of empathy. And she's just collateral damage and often the children as well, because he stops caring for them, his gratification triumphs empathy every time.

But then he often ends up with sexual dysfunction and we need more men to know that this is what they are risking. I mean, we'd like them to care from an ethical point of view, from an empathetic point of view. But sometimes the only thing that they understand is your penis might break, it might stop working.

Raquel: The term you use in the book is ‘porn induced, erectile dysfunction’. Is this something that is considered separate from just regular erectile dysfunction? 

Melinda: Sort of, it's more specific to porn related, porn induced, because of the glutting on pornography, this is contributing because he needs that extreme content to get aroused and ends up in places he didn't even think he would end up.

 We're seeing this, for example, with child sexual exploitation material. You know, we used to call these men paedophiles and we just say that they had a predisposition to abusing children but we've actually created that disposition because we have eroticised children. We have provided a paedophilic aesthetic in mainstream popular culture, which creates these desires in men. And this is part of what the porn industry has done, porn culture more broadly.

Raquel: It’s such an interesting paradox because if you told these men, you know, the 25 partners of the women featured in the book, that your addiction, your toxic dependency on pornography is going to not only take over your entire life to the point that men are going to the bathrooms at work, using their cell phones to masturbate to, but also is going to generate a sexual dysfunction, in the sense that your penis is going to stop working properly. You're not going to be able to enjoy even having sex with a human partner, that's not what the porn industry tells them. The porn industry sells them the illusion that being engaged with it is somehow a healthy manifestation of male sexuality.

Melinda: Yeah, the global multi-billion-dollar predatory porn industry isn't known for telling anyone the truth. So, they wouldn't care. And then the pharmaceutical industry can step in and sell men Viagra to get their penises working again. So, follow the money trail here.

Raquel: You object to the term ‘sex addiction’ Can you explain to us why you reject this term? 

Melinda: Yeah. So this is a fascinating conversation. The reason that we object to it is because there are too many men who use it as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for their choices. We believe that even if you have a compulsive behaviour, a habitual behaviour, you still have moral agency unless you're a child.

We make exceptions for children who don't have the cognitive development to make choices. In the book, we put the case that we've got to be careful about using the terminology around addiction. And some of the women themselves said that their partners were quite happy to use the terminology around addiction, because then it took away any responsibility for his abuse of his partner. It became something that was beyond his control. And so that's why we prefer to use the term ‘habitual porn use’ or ‘compulsive porn use’ or ‘problematic sexual behaviour’ We prefer that terminology. 

Raquel: Something that I really found striking in the book is that it really humanises the women sharing their stories, you know? I'm going to read a little bit from the book in a second, but it always ended with women talking a little bit about themselves, for example, you read about how the relationship began and how the women fell in love with this man. And then you read about how things deteriorated and became harmful and on occasion, extremely violent for women, but it always ends up. For example, with women thinking they’re boring. She lives in Newcastle. She enjoys riding bikes with her kids, playing board games, laughing with friends, writing, watching her garden grow and cooking, which is a very beautiful and touching way to end each one of these sections because the whole point of their experience, that the experience that they described with this men, it was about dehumanising them.

It was about like making them into these sort of objects to project, I don't even want to call it sexual fantasies because now we know that there's this dysfunction behind it, but they became dehumanised. And I really like that in putting together their stories. You found a way to humanise them so that the reader ends up seeing them as whole human beings, not just as this horrible experience that happened to them with these men. 

Melinda: I really like that observation that you've made there Raquel because I've come to know some of these women and we've actually become friends and they are fully human women and their humanity was denied them. So yes, we do want to bring their humanity back. And the women have said that they feel heard, they feel validated.

Even on the launch, we had a global online launch today, our 13 contributors attended and four spoke and in the comment section, quite a number of women said, you know, I feel heard, I feel validated. I feel less lonely now. I can see myself in these other stories. And so we have these sort of academic debates about porn.

This brings it back to the individuals that are harmed, the women and the children who are harmed. And yes, we wanted to give them the chance to say what else they enjoy in life, hobbies and interests and life giving activities. 

Even though these stories are devastating and sad and raw and confronting, really this is actually a hopeful book. That might sound hard to believe, but you know, you've read it because the women are rebuilding their lives, they're reclaiming their lives. They're in the process of leaving porn sick men, they're carving out a new life for themselves. They're discovering a new life is possible and that's a hopeful thing. 

Also in the generosity of them telling their stories, they are going to help so many other women. They also contributed to the resources. So I only included resources that women themselves said had helped them. So that's a positive message.

There were two main aim to this book. The first was as a warning to younger women. Don't date men who use porn, heed the warning, heed the advice. Notice the red flags. Here's what to look for. You know, your life will not flourish and go well if you stay in a relationship with men hooked up to pornographies misogyny, drip system, this is not going to lead to happiness and flourishing in your best life.

The second aim was to help women see that they should not have to stay in a relationship with a man engulfed in pornography who loves his porn more than he loves you. And you know, this is a permission giving book. You can get out, you should be out, you should get out and reclaim your life.

So I think ultimately this is a hopeful book. 

Raquel: Yes it is. And you also gave the women, each woman, the opportunity to provide advice based on her experience. And so much of the advice that the women had for other women who were with men who have these dependencies on porn. So much of the advice was to follow your intuition.

For example, one of the women, Catherine, she writes: ‘My advice is follow your intuition. I wish I'd listened to my inner voice and trusted myself more. What has been playing out behind your back can be hard to unravel. It's tough to know how to feel and how to react’. 

So many of them said, I had a little voice in my head saying that I don't want to have to adjust myself to his demands, I don't want to sort of pretend that this is okay. 

Another woman said, ‘listen to that voice inside you telling you that something is wrong. Had I listened to that voice I would have dug deeper and be been less ashamed of asking him hard questions.’ You feel disconnected from your partner and he starts being apathetic about your relationship. It's a red flag that something isn't right because so many of these women were made to feel like they were crazy and they were not, they were dealing with some very harmful men. 

Melinda: I asked each woman to share her advice, because again, they've been failed by the so-called professionals, the so-called experts in the therapeutic realm, these women know what helped them the best. And we thought it would be a service to all women really to include this very personal advice from direct lived experience. Again, this was an act of generosity from all of the women to do that.

Raquel: Yes. And, for example, I'm going to quote a little bit from the book and I was very struck by how pornography generates a lot of self-doubt in women. Women feel inadequate, physically, sexually, emotionally like they cannot connect with their partners if they don't live up to these expectations. Then one of the women writes: ‘before meeting my new partner, I had assumed anal sex was something only homosexual men engaged in. My shock. My boyfriend told me that he wanted to have anal sex with me. He found anal sex, anal scenes in corn, especially arousing. I couldn't make sense of anything anymore. What was happening? All I knew was that I would never be able to endure anal sex, not even for him, but how was I to keep this man as my partner, if I didn't provide him with this specific act that he seemed to find the most arousing, what did I do?

I didn't have any friends back then. And I didn't dare to talk to anyone else about sex, let alone this terrifying and disgusting request. So I went online and tried to find resources that would assure me that what he wanted to do to me was unacceptable and maybe even dangerous. And guess what I found?  Tips on how to do anal sex for beginners. How to convince your girlfriend to do anal and countless voices saying it’s totally normal, it’s what a lot of men dream of and you will be his queen if you allow him to do it to you.’ 

That's what a lot of the women were finding when they sought help. Just a lot of gas lighting telling them why don't you want to please him in this anal sex? But it could be any sort of like sex act that the men wanted to replicate. 

As you mentioned, use them as sex blow up dolls. So they could just replicate what they were watching in porn. And the advice that they got was just, well, you need to adjust yourself to this. 

Melinda: That's right.  She's the one that always has to adjust herself in porn culture. She's the one that's expected to do degrading violating sex acts that she doesn't want or enjoy.

 Again, this is what pornography has conditioned men to want. And for women to expect to deliver. We're seeing here in Australia, more injuries as a result of anal sex, including in young women. And some doctors have reported that they're seeing younger women with injuries from anal sex, often group anal sex, where the young woman ends up with a colostomy bag. 

Now, who's warning women that this is how you might end up with anal tearing and colostomy bags, that's not empowering, is it?

But this is what women are expected to do. And I'm so glad women are exposing this in this book, the pressure to do these acts that hurt them. 

Raquel: Something that I found, a sentence that I read in the book that was very striking, is that you said somewhere: pornography tells men that they are normal and the women who object are not. 

It's all about telling the men that, of course, wanting to consume pornography for hours in a day, neglecting your work, neglecting your family, neglecting just your own health for the sake of this content that that is something that is normal. And when the woman says, I don't want to be a part of this, then she's the one who becomes the problem and the entire society, sort of geared towards feeding this delusion that the men who consume the porn are just normal men who are enjoying their liberty and the women are the nagging ones. 

Melinda: Exactly. Porn erases her human rights. She is expected to completely erase herself, sacrifice herself, her wants, her health, her wellbeing for his porn fuelled desires. And that's reinforced everywhere. I remember a magazine article a few years ago where they had a question and answer section and a woman didn't like oral sex and the advice was, well, think of how you could like it, if you feel grossed out about it, do it in the shower. There was no option for her not to do it, not to deliver what he wanted. It was really all about how she could make herself do it, even though she didn't want to. And this was in a mainstream magazine sold in the supermarket. 

And it's the same with anal, it's the same with choking, ejaculation on the face, the other signature sex act of the porn industry that she's expected to want and enjoy and deliver. And even if she doesn't enjoy, to provide it anyway.

That's what porn has done. That's the world porn has given us that her rights are subsumed for his porn formed wants, and desires. And what we're trying to do is reclaim women's rights. One of the most common responses I get from girls after my talks in schools is I'm allowed to say no and not feel bad about it.

Now that's a great outcome, but what a tragedy that these girls didn't know that before, they say to us, we didn't think we could say no.  Really young girls asking, how do I say no without hurting his feelings? This is just what they expect to have to do. 

Raquel: Yes. And as you mentioned, this is a hopeful book because this is about women trying to support and help other women in similar situations.

So how do you see, I mean, aside from the possibility that all women collectively stop dating men and getting involved with men who have this toxic dependency to pornography, how do you see the way out for the whole society from this porn affected culture? 

Melinda: Yeah, that is such a pressing question.

Gosh, it has to happen on multiple levels. It has to happen personally and politically. So personally don't date men who use porn. Leave men who use porn, unless they're willing to do the work, to get the help, to reform, to change their lives in a demonstrable way. You know, you're not obliged to stay. We need more education in schools on the harms of porn, helping young people to see and recognise the harms and to resist the toxic messages from porn culture. We need a massive uprising and then we need action at the political level, which is probably the hardest of all because money buys power and the sex industry is very powerful. And of course, many political leaders are consuming porn themselves. So why would they want to change the laws? 

So one thing we're trying is to at least get proof of age protections, age verification system to put one obstacle in the way of children accessing rape porn, torture porn, incest, sadism porn, at least having one obstacle in the way where there has to be proof that they're over 18.

It's not everything it's not ideal, but maybe there's enough common ground to say let's at least protect children as a start. It needs a whole of the community approach if we are going to see anything happen.

Fortunately, we have seen at least Pornhub brought before the Canadian Parliament's Ethics Committee, as a result of a global campaign, that Collective Shout Has been part of with our global partners and Pornhub was exposed for trafficking videos for rape videos, for non-consensual image sharing, also known as image based abuse, videos of underage girls. And at last some accountability, some transparency where cause Pornhub is owned by Mind Geek, which is headquartered in Canada. That's why this was examined by the Canadian Parliament’s Ethics Committee. And now we've seen the resignation of a number of Mind Geek executives. We've also seen some of the credit card payment companies now refusing to facilitate transactions for Pornhub.

So, there could be a domino effect here where at last some of the human rights violations that this industry is responsible for being are being brought to light. We are also seeing a more porn, critical movement growing globally. We're seeing more young people rising up and joining movements against porn saying we don't want to live according to the scripts of pornography. We want something better for our lives. 

So I actually think the hope is in this next generation, because it's sort of my generation that's messed this all up but perhaps the next generation will demand something better for themselves that is separate to porn that's real and authentic and human, based on mutuality and empathy and compassion and a genuine connection. And that's the way that we can create stable, decent human communities and refuse to allow these essential qualities to be devoured by the global porn industry.  

Raquel: That's a very beautiful way of putting it Melinda, as you mentioned, you have edited some other books and written other books you edited co-edited Prostitution Narratives, stories of survival in the sex trade.

You co-edited Big Porn Inc: Exposing The Harms Of The Global Porn Industry and you wrote Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls, but you are also very involved and you've mentioned it before, Collective Shout and you are the co-founder and movement director of Collective Shout, which is a grassroots campaigning group in Australia.

Collective Shout, the tagline is ‘for a world free from sexual exploitation, exposing corporations, advertisers, and marketers who objectify women and sexualised girls to sell products and services.’

Can you tell us a little bit more about your work with Collective Shout? 

Melinda: Yes, absolutely. I would love to. So when my third book Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls came out. A number of people started to contact me and say, okay, we know what the research says. We know that sexualising young girls is contributing to body image issues, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, poor academic performance, but where is the movement against this? At the same time that people were contacting me, wanting to know what they could do at a grassroots level, one of the contributors to the book who was a young woman who wrote about her struggles with body image issues caused by mainstream popular culture, wrote to me when the book was published and said: your book is a collective shout against the pornification of culture - And I love that phrase. It just jumped up at me - collective shout. I thought I need an excuse just to use those words.

 So I contacted some women and I said, I'm thinking of starting this movement, what do you think? They said, yes, we'd love to be part of that. And they joined and we launched the movement 12 years ago and we have so many victories since then in Australia and internationally. in 2021 alone, we had 20 victories, seven of those were global, including against multibillion/ multi trillion dollar corporations.

We brought down three porn magazines in Australia. Two of those had been sold in Australia for 80 years. We got rid of them in seven weeks. We got rid of child sex abuse dolls being sold through the biggest online shopping platform. E-commerce platform, Alibaba. We exposed the realistic anatomically correct life like children, babies, and infants being sold by 23 Chinese factories on Alibaba.

And then we also had a big campaign to support the Norwegian beach handball which was fined for inappropriate clothing in the Euro 21 competition in Spain because they swapped a minuscule bikini bottoms for bike shorts to play in that competition. And they were fined for, no joke, inappropriate clothing, because they breached the rules of the international handball Federation by wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms, that couldn't be more than nine centimetres across the backside. We ran a global campaign through change.org and eventually the rules changed and the women were allowed to wear shorts. 

So we’re a real diverse range of campaigns and we love this work. We are hoping to expand globally. We've got interest in the UK. We've got interest in the US and Europe South America.

And we know how to campaign. We use social media to campaign mostly, and we train other people in how to do it. 

This is about working for cultural change, social transformation about what kind of society do we want to have. And we know that objectifying women and sexualising girls is harmful. The research is solid on this. The biggest meta-analysis in the world says that objectified portrayals of women leads the viewer to have a diminished view of women's competence, morality, and humanity. So the research is solid and that's why we engage in civil disobedience in exposing this and forcing corporations to act ethically. To act as responsible corporate citizens rather than profiting from sexual exploitation. 

Our argument is that why should corporates and big tech companies, why should the interest of the porn industry be put before the wellbeing of the community? So we're trying to put the wellbeing of the community front and centre and working for the change that we all want to see.

Raquel: That’s wonderful and thank you so much for that very inspirational summary of your work.

Melinda: It's a pleasure. I could talk about Collective Shout for days. So I really thank you for giving me that opportunity.  

Raquel: Just one final question. Your new book is called He Chose Porn over Me and we obviously know that this affects women from all ages and all backgrounds, but you are very concerned about the generation coming up of very young girls who are dealing with partners who have been groomed in this porn infused generation.

So what would you say to a young woman or even a teenage girl who could be listening to this podcast? And she's either being pressured already by boys in her school or at her university or she's starting into the dating scene, which we know is full of men who will expect her to conform to porn.

What would be your advice to those young women? 

Melinda: Don’t date men who use porn, you deserve better treatment. You don't have to put up with this behaviour. Much of the behaviour is illegal. The law is supposed to protect you, take action. We say to girls in schools, you actually have the right. If this doesn't get dealt with at school, you can call a police. This behaviour is illegal; it's criminal. Schools have become crime scenes, if they don't act on this. 

So I try to help young women recognise their rights that they are entitled to stand up for themselves to say no and to be protected from this kind of behaviour, they deserve better.

We have failed them if we don't provide them with better and get these behaviours called out and stopped. 

Why should female teachers have to be groaned at every day? Young girls been groaned at some girls tell me they've been sexually groaned at since they were in grade two. And they're now in year eight or nine, kindergarten level right through to middle to late secondary school. They've endured this for years, which is eroding their health and their wellbeing, their mental health, their emotional health, their physical health. 

So yeah, it's about empowerment. The true sense of the word, not the sex industry version, which panders to men, helping them to see what they deserve to value themselves, to act according to their boundaries and their values, what they want for themselves, which many of them haven't considered, they haven't been given the opportunity to consider that.

Actually, you counter it, you don't have to subsume your entire self for this other person who is not treating you well. I'm noticing more coercive control now in young girls dating relationships, I've had more 15 year olds recently say to me when seeking my advice and they say, you know, do you think this is a problem? He wants to control me. He controls what I eat. He makes me work out every day. He won't let me visit my friends. He tells me who I'm allowed to follow and who I can't follow online. He won't let me talk to other boys, even boys who I'd been friends with for years before he came along and he keeps telling me that once I turn 16, we're going to have sex all the time without even asking her if that's what she wants. 

And then when I encourage them to run and to get out as quickly as they can, because they have been groomed for abuse, they are shocked to hear that. They're shocked to hear that they are in danger and this is not going to go well for them.

Raquel: Melinda, thank you so much for speaking with us, author of: He Chose Porn Over Me, co-founder and director of Collective Shout: for a world freedom, sex exploitation, and also a senior lecturer at the Centre for Culture and Ethics at the Notre Dame University in Sydney.

Melinda, thank you so much for speaking with us and for spending some time with FiLiA and our FiLiA audience.

Melinda: Thank you for the opportunity and your really deep and thoughtful questions. And for giving me a whole hour often, I just get, you know, a couple of minutes and, um, Caitlin Roper and I are really looking forward to being with you at the FiLiA conference and meeting you all.

So thank you for the opportunity also for us to launch our books at your conference. We're looking forward to that as well so thank you and thank you to your listeners.