Women's Day: Quotes worth thinking about

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"For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman."

— Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women)


"Although the sexual sell, overt and subliminal, is at a fever pitch throughout all forms of the media, depictions of sex as an important and potentially profound human activity are notably absent. Couples in ads rarely look at each other. Men and women in music videos use each other. It is a cold and oddly passionless sex that surrounds us. A sense of joy is also absent; the people involved often look either hostile or bored. The real obscenity is the reduction of people to objects... Of course, all these sexual images aren't intended to sell our children or us on sex--they are intended to sell us on shopping. This is the intent of the marketers--but an unintended consequence is the effect these images have on real sexual desire and real lives. When sex is a commodity, there is always a better deal."

— Diane Levin & Jean Kilbourne




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