Ladies, rejoice.
This week, we had a historic victory.
Playboy magazine has announced that next year it will stop printing pictures of nude women in its magazines.
This is a more than 60 year-old pornography empire, famous for printing nude pictures of busty blonde celebrities on its covers and in is centrefolds.
Sure, the men’s magazine will still post raunchy pics of women, but the removal of completely nude images from the magazine is a progressive step forward.
Or is it?
Sadly, Playboy’s editor has not had a moral epiphany about the sexualisation of women and exploitation of the female body.
This is a business decision designed to save the struggling magazine, which has seen its circulation plummet due to the rise of internet pornography.
Thanks to the World Wide Web, no one needs to buy porn mags anymore.
Images of naked women and videos of just about any sex act imaginable are now only a click away for anyone with an internet connection.
It has meant that Playboy’s circulation has dropped from about 5.6 million in 1975 to about 800,000 now.
That doesn’t mean demand for pornography has dropped, it just means those almost five million people are accessing their pornography in a faster, free and more convenient manner.
While the accessibility of porn online is clearly presenting challenges for the adult magazine industry, it also presents major concerns for us as a society.
In 2015, it is alarmingly easy for a 15 year old boy to be able to see highly sexualised images and graphic videos, often where women are treated as objects not people, and all to frequently the victim of aggression.
The sexualisation of women in advertising, as well as the negative portrayal of women in some video games, further adds to concern about negative community attitudes towards women.
Children’s values are shaped at very early ages and having young men watching porn and thinking they can and should have control and power over women, and that women are objects, is disturbing, as is the notion young women watching pornography believe such behaviour by men is normal and acceptable.
A 2013 VicHealth study found concerning evidence of embedded negative views towards women, with 19 per cent of respondents thinking men should be in control of relationships and the head of the household. A further 38 per cent of people surveyed believe that women who say they are raped led the man on but later regretted it.
The same study also found young people in particular had more violence-supportive attitudes.
The existence of easily accessible pornography to children will only reinforce these kinds of preventable negative attitudes that can lead to violence against women.
Teaching respectful relationships in schools, which the Victorian Government has committed to do from Prep to Year 10 next year, is part of the solution.
With pornography as accessible as it is, we need to make sure we give our children the tools they need to navigate this new frontier that simply didn’t exist when Playboy magazine came onto the scene in the 1950s.
This doesn’t mean teaching our children about pornography, it means educating them about what is healthy behaviour and what is not, so they can challenge violence against women or the objectification of women if they are exposed to images that are sadly being increasingly normalised across our communities.
We need an integrated, whole of community approach to ensure we are promoting healthy relationships and equity in our society if we are to reduce the rising number of women subjected to violence against them.