Sex, lies and greetings cards
On the adult humour shelf, three paces from a basket of toy unicorns, a greetings card caught my eye. Birthday goals, it said at the top, with a bulleted check list below. Item number 1 was a nice quiet meal. Number 2, a party with the family. Next: stripper and after that: get wankered. It progressed, in time-honoured fashion, to shag and a kebab. This delightful litany of birthday must-dos concluded with a single word: anal.
Aside from being impressed at the level of forward planning, I found the message troubling. A card above read Happy Birthday you big c**t. But this wasn’t as problematic as the implication that every young straight man should have anal sex as the high point on his birthday bucket list. (I wasn’t wild about the idea of booking a stripper for straight after your family party. What if Gran’s still there when they arrive? Terribly awkward. But in any case, it was that four-letter finale — anal — that bothered me the most.)
As I led my young daughters away, I was reminded of a recent conversation with GP and writer Eliot North (@eliot_north). Eliot believes that young people’s perception of what is sexually ‘normal’ is being skewed from a young age by exposure to pornography on smart phones. Acts of sexual violence, humiliation and degradation are being normalised. ‘No-one appears to be talking about the impact that watching this kind of material has on young people,’ she says.
The anecdotal rise in young women presenting with anal injury after sex may well be linked to expectations cultivated through watching porn. And although anal sex may be a loving and satisfying part of many people’s experience, it’s unlikely that a teenage girl with a torn back passage has had a good time. ‘Anal penetration of any kind with anything is associated with great potential risk to health,’ said Eliot, ‘and especially when associated with no sense of care or love or lubrication.’
Consultant in sexual health, Dr Judy Berry, shared these concerns. ‘Anal sex near sexual debut for women is often indicative of a power imbalance and the wide availability of pornography is having all sorts of impacts on sexual health. We are starting to see a huge increase in these issues as the generation who’ve had smart phones since they were 10 years old are maturing.’
Given these concerns, it disturbed me that someone in a high street retailer’s head office had approved that birthday card, which reduces the female body to a series of holes to be penetrated. Surely, with the growing awareness of gender equality in society, it should be getting harder to encounter this kind of reductive and offensive language?
But prejudice doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground. This kind of inappropriate sexualisation occurs precisely because we are becoming more cautious. While we focus on improving the language of public discourse — politics and business and officialdom — we brush aside exchanges of light-hearted banter. And this is where it all goes wrong. Because some of the most pervasive forms of inequality are sustained not by overt action but by ‘harmless bits of fun’.
Where once it was easier to spot — the bottom-pinching and wolf-whistling of the recent past — it now has slipped into the realm of banter[1]. And through the slippery medium of humour we are exposed to language and images that tacitly reinforce sexual stereotypes and expectations. Just because something is offered as a joke or with a smile, it doesn’t mean it is harmless. And these insidious assertions are made more troubling because the people with the most power don’t usually reflect on their behaviour enough to be aware of the inequalities they’re sustaining. It’s how dominant roles of race, gender and sexuality end up being reinforced time and again.
So, what does tacit reinforcement look like?
It looks like a high street card shop that pedals anal sex as every birthday boy’s end goal.
(And when concerns are raised, they can be laughed off — it’s just a joke, lighten up.)
It looks like a music video with semi-naked women writhing around a fully clothed man.
(And when concerns are raised they can be dismissed. It’s a celebration of women’s bodies. It’s art.)
It looks like the murder of a young woman described as a sex game gone wrong.
There’s nothing funny or beautiful or playful about a world in which young people ingest brutal sexual images, and in which women’s early sexual experiences are at best an endurance and at worst full of pain and submission. The normalisation of sexual violence must be confronted, even at the risk of appearing oversensitive, angry or humourless. We need to stop presenting girls and women as consumables and men as consumers. Because when those little girls and boys look up from the toy unicorns in the card shop, or turn on the TV, or seek intimacy with another human being, they should not be faced with such skewed expectations. It isn’t funny or artistic or exciting. It’s the failure of one generation to protect the next.
[1] See this excellent article: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jun/30/the-age-of-banter
