Petra's Blog
A unique insight into the day-to-day life of Petra Joy as she chronicles the fun, frolics and frustrations of an independent female porn producer.
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This is a man’s world – even on international woman's day
Posted: 08 March 2009
It is the year 2009 and you would think we have come a long way towards equality of the sexes but the papers are full with reports of violence against women – it happens all the time on many different levels all around the world. Every time I hear or read about women being assaulted, violated, hurt – my heart sinks and I wish there was more that I could do rather than raising awareness and giving an annual donation to a local shelter for beaten women.
Not much has changed if on gossip websites people accuse Rihanna to have “provoked” her boyfriend to beat her face green and blue. When will people realise that nothing that any woman does will justify her being beaten up or raped or killed? When will the aggressors take responsibility?
But then again “rape” is not even considered a crime in some countries. In Haiti it was not a crime until 2005. It was a free for all (men) kind of society. As if women were just there for the picking whenever any guy feels like having violent sex or degrading another human being. As if women were just there to satisfy men - with no will or choice of their own. Where there is no punishment, there can’t be a crime. And if it is no crime to rape and violate a woman’s body and break her spirit, it degrades women to pieces of meat no better than cattle. Even though rape is now officially a crime in Haiti rapes still take place regularly on a huge scale: half of the women who live in the slums of Port-U-Prince have been raped by gangs of armed men. And the government does little to punish the offenders. One of the big problems is that the very men who should enforce the law and protect women from becoming victims are often the rapists: policemen.
Amnesty International has now launched an online petition to protest about the high incidence of rape in Haiti – please support their online petition. The more people are aware of this issue and voice their opinion, the better. We care, so let’s express our opinion – otherwise nothing will change: http://www.tinyurl.com/c5ohzm. Only 229 people have signed so far, so a few minutes of your time can make a real difference.
Unfortunately the porn industry is still guilty of churning out movies that degrade women and - it seems that a lot of men only feel good about themselves if they are portrayed as the superior sex, the one in control who put women (sluts) into their place (down). “Eat dirt bitch”. “She gets what she deserves”. Those are powerful messages that can reinforce how already-sexist men think about and possibly treat women.
I will never forget one of my first experiences with misogynist porn. Being a feminist in the eighties when the first PorNO campaign kicked off, I wanted to find out what porn was all about. I did not want to be just against porn because I was a feminist. I rented 70 porn films from a German video store and watched them all over one weekend. I was shocked to see that most films were more or less violent towards women in words or actions. I will never ever forget one film that I viewed. It was called “Bondage Classics” and featured grainy short films in which women were tortured. They were chased, tied up, beaten and one woman had her nipple and lips ripped by barb wire. This had nothing to do with consensual S/M play and pleasure through role-plays of submission and domination. This was glorified violence against women - designed to turn men on. Even though I tried my best, I never found out where this film came from – it looked like a genuine snuff movie showing masked and faceless men, torturing women who looked genuinely scared. You could see the women screaming but you could not hear them because there was a wall-to-wall horror soundtrack. This film left such a deep impression on me that it made me shoot my first ever documentary called “Smash the chains” which intercut the scenes of women being tortured with images of strong women, practising self defence. I chose James Browns music as a soundtrack for this film:
“This is a man’s world but it would be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl!”
I look forward to the day when international woman’s day will be a celebration of womanhood because we won’t need to fight violence against women any longer. The violence that still happens on so many levels every day.
One day it will happen.
I have a dream...
