Intro (00:11):
In this episode of Consider Before Consuming, we speak with Melinda Tankard Reist, author, speaker, and movement director of Collective Shout. With years of advocating for women and girls, Melinda has been dedicated to exposing the harms of porn culture and sexual exploitation. In this episode, Melinda shares [00:00:30] alarming findings from her latest report on sexual harassment in schools, the role of pornography and shaping toxic behaviors and the growing crisis of digital exploitation. With that, let’s jump into the conversation. We hope you enjoy this episode of Consider Before Consuming.

Fight The New Drug (00:51):
Melinda, thank you so much for joining me on Consider Before Consuming today. Can you start by introducing yourself and telling our listeners a little bit about who you are and [00:01:00] what Collective Shout does?

Melinda (01:02):
Sure, Natale. Well, thanks so much for giving me another opportunity to be on your show. So I’m Melinda Tankard Reist. I’m an author, speaker, writer, media commentator, and advocate for women and girls. I am also the movement director for Collective Shout for a World Free of Sex Exploitation. We founded the movement 15 years ago to fight objectification of women’s, sexualization [00:01:30] of girls, the pornography porn culture, trafficking, and make the connections between all of those things and violence against women. We’re primarily an activist movement. We run campaigns in Australia and globally. There’s only five of us. We’re a pretty small team, but we punch above our weight and we also engage in politics, lobbying, advocacy, as well as the grassroots [00:02:00] campaigning. And we have thousands of supporters in Australia and internationally and very valued global partners as well, like yourselves.

Fight The New Drug (02:07):
Thank you so much, and you have been an amazing example of what a small few people truly can do to cause a ripple effect of positive change. So we’re so grateful for your work in this space and really excited to get to speak with you today. You do have such a unique perspective on these topics we’re going to talk about because of a report we’ll talk about specifically that you’ve done and published recently [00:02:30] that has some really interesting finding regarding sexual harassment in schools and also just you’ve worked so closely with youth and young women and young men, and I think you can really speak to this from what you’ve heard from them in a way that a lot of other people don’t really have the same experiences in this space. So I first want to ask you, how did you become interested in researching and speaking about the objectification of women in harms of pornography?

Melinda (02:57):
Well, I’ve been an activist women for a very [00:03:00] long time, since my teens actually, and I worked on a magazine, it was a bit of a satirical magazine called Faking It, the Female Image in Young Women’s Magazines. It was published back in 2007, and then I decided to write a book on the sexualization of girls called Getting Real Challenging the Sexualization of Girls. I’m a journalist by background and I’ve always felt led, compelled [00:03:30] to write on issues that I felt didn’t get enough attention and needed attention. And so I wrote Getting Real Challenging the Sexualization of Girls and brought together the global evidence at the time and had contributors from experts in the field. And that book really took off and led to me speaking almost full time on the subject. And I could see how when you sexualize girls, it leads to [00:04:00] harms against them, mental health issues, developmental issues, emotional problems, also self-harm, eating disorders, poor academic performance.

(04:14):
And it seemed to me that the crisis we were seeing in girls’ wellbeing and mental and emotional health was significantly driven by the toxic messages from culture about how a girl should look and [00:04:30] act and be how girls were being groomed by a pornified landscape to think they needed to look hot and sexy and put themselves on display and make themselves sexually attractive to the male gaze to adopt these pornified personas and personalities. And we’ve seen it take off since then with thousands of young women selling themselves on OnlyFans being pressured to send [00:05:00] nudes. And so they get this very limited and narrow idea about their value and worth that they have to and act and behave almost like a porn performer to be acceptable. So I wanted to challenge that with getting real challenging the sexualization of girls. And then as a result of that book, one of the contributors was a young woman who was struggling with body image issues and she recognized it was the culture that was making her hate herself.

(05:30):
[00:05:30] And she wrote to me when the book came out and said, your book is a collective shout against porn culture. And that phrase leapt up at me. And that’s really how collective shout, collective shout started. And I also have three daughters and a son. So I take these issues personally, yes, there’s the writing and the research and the campaigning, but when you have daughters especially, you see how toxic the culture is to them. And they were born to me, so they were hearing this message since they were conceived, but it was still hard. [00:06:00] It was still hard to protect them from these harmful messages. So sorry, that’s a really long answer.

Fight The New Drug (06:08):
Yeah, no, it’s great. And I think it sets us up for this conversation so well, because we really are going to address so many different facets of these issues and it’s because you’ve had so much experience looking at this through so many different lenses based on your research and experiences in your work, you just listed many things that you’ve [00:06:30] found are consequences of this culture, but what are some of the most alarming effects of pornography on young people’s perceptions and attitudes towards sex and relationships?

Melinda (06:41):
To me, the most alarming aspects are in my view, from my experience engaging with thousands of young people every year. The most alarming fruits of this porn [00:07:00] experiment on our young people is seen in the rise of harmful sexual behaviors, the rise of sexual harassment, sexual assault, violence against women, boys demanding nudes from girls, boys sending dick pics to underage girls, boys threatening girls with rape if they don’t send nudes. The daily sexual aggression, sexual bullying, sexual intimidation of girls now [00:07:30] as young as primary school. So in Australia, I’m talking grades four, fives and six. So eight, nine, 10-year-old girls being subjected to these behaviors, the inability to have a respectful, caring relationship even to sustain a friendship. Girls are just seen as objects for male gratification and pleasure, and the boys’ thinking has been warped. What chance did they have [00:08:00] of forming healthy relationships when pornography is the largest department of education in the world?

(08:08):
And as a result of that, our schools have become sites of abuse. There is a reason for the rise in absenteeism and school refusal in girls. This is my theory, I can’t prove it. I don’t have precise data, but I’ve got a pretty good, pretty strong suspicion because girls say to me, I don’t feel safe at school. [00:08:30] I don’t want to come to school. I hate coming to school because this is how I’m treated. So the other most alarming, newer development is the rise of AI enabled tools to turn any girl into porn. So this is known as image-based abuse, digital sexual forgeries, digital fakes. We hear a lot about the word fake. We talk about digital [00:09:00] fakes, deep fakes. The tragedy is they’re not actually fake, right? They’re not really fake because the real face of a real girl is being scraped from social media, put through an app and turned into a pornographic image.

(09:16):
It’s happening to girls in this country. It’s happening to female teachers in this country. There are 127 undressing and notifying apps which will purify any woman or girl within seconds. [00:09:30] They’re advertised openly. They’re all over social media. Their sites get millions of views. This is a new form of tech enabled digital intimidation of every woman and every girl. Now we’re seeing not only are the images being scraped from social media profiles, they’re being taken from the official school photos and those school photos end of year photos are being used to generate porn images. Now, [00:10:00] one school I was in, the boys not only created the images of girls, they were selling them. So this has become like a little industry where boys have become self-appointed porn producers for them. Why wouldn’t you do that? Why wouldn’t you do that? Now we’re trying to get stronger laws against not only the distribution of those images, but the creation because the creation itself should [00:10:30] be an offense. So there’s some of the things that I’m observing as a result of this unprecedented experiment on the developing sexual templates of our children and every adult is complicit in allowing this to happen. Little kids seeing torture porn, rape porn, sadism, incest at the click of a button.

Fight The New Drug (10:51):
Yeah, I think you’ve made so many good points, especially when considering all of these new forms of technology fueled [00:11:00] sexual exploitation. We’re calling them deep fakes. We’re saying it’s ai, it’s not real, but the consequences are very real for women and girls. The fear that you mentioned, the intimidation is very real. The consequences of the actions of others who are exploiting these women and girls and creating a culture that’s unsafe for them where they’re saying they don’t want to go to school, those are very real things. So it is concerning and it is alarming. And also our young people are really kind of, we’re not preparing [00:11:30] them adequately to address these things as technology’s evolving so quickly. So of course you’re doing work that is working through that, as are we and so many others, but it really does take awareness among parents and so many others like our listeners, to be able to help shift some of this culture. I want to ask you about, I mean, you’ve spent so many years talking with youth. Do you have any personal accounts specifically that have really moved you or you found the most compelling that you’d [00:12:00] be able to share with us?

Melinda (12:01):
Look, I have so many. I have hundreds of them. It’s very deeply affecting and distressing when you talk to young girls who are so traumatized by what they have been subjected to. When you have young girls say, they call my mother a milf, and you probably don’t want me to say what that is out in full, they’re distressed that their mothers would be spoken of in those terms. [00:12:30] When you have young women of color saying that they are subjected every day to pornographic tropes based on their race, their ethnicity, when they are compared to porn performers of the same ethnicity or called the name of famous porn performers, for example. I won’t say who she is, but there’s a very well known Lebanese woman in pornography who Lebanese girls tell me they get called that name at school every day [00:13:00] Latino women subjected to tropes about their bodies, young black women saying that they get subjected to being called sexual slurs based on pornographic tropes about having a sexually voracious appetite.

(13:21):
It’s very upsetting to hear those stories. Girls threatened with rape more than once a day if they don’t comply to the demands of a boy. And we are [00:13:30] talking young boys that are doing this. Young boys 12-year-old coming up to girls and saying, I’m going to take you to my sex dungeon. I’m going to rape you. This is not innate to boys, right? This is learned socialized behavior. They weren’t born this way. So those stories are very distressing. There’s two very distressing, the most distressing stories I’ve ever heard last year, but they’re in the courts and I’m not allowed to talk about them otherwise I would, but I’m [00:14:00] not permitted to talk about them. But the worst cases that I’ve heard of behavior of school boys, criminal behavior, criminal behavior of school, boys. So we’ve groomed boys to be sociopaths basically. And this does not set us up well for civilization does it?

(14:19):
They won’t be able to sustain long-term intimate partnerships, let alone marriage, let alone family life. I feel in my worst days that we’ve [00:14:30] doomed an entire generation because this is what we’ve allowed them to be exposed to deforming their attitudes from the earliest of ages. So I’m having more disclosures than ever from girls and multiple disclosures from traumatized girls, one after another, after another. Sometimes I’m the first person they’ve ever told that they feel safe to tell. And this can include being raped, being drugged, [00:15:00] made, drunk, filmed. The filming is a big one. The film being shared, uploaded, ending up on a porn site. One young woman I spoke to actually just this week, her images ended up on an international site that had country based sites as well. It was eventually shut down. The Aussie site was called Aussie Aussie Sluts, but it was part of an international platform [00:15:30] where men and boys would send in images, non-consensual taken images and shared. And when you meet girls, this has happened to, it really does make it personal. You see the toll it’s taken, and they know they’ll probably never get those images back. Some were taken by a complete surprise. They had no idea this image had been shared until someone contacts them and says, I found you on this site and the trauma of that.

Fight The New Drug (16:00):
[00:16:00] Yeah. What are the ages of, just for context for our listeners, the women and girls and men and boys that you’re speaking to about and hearing these stories?

Melinda (16:08):
10-year-old, 11, 12, I’ve been in primary schools where girls are on suicide watch because of the level of sexual bullying from the boys. So we’re talking really young, and that’s definitely the shift over the last three or four years is that I’m being asked to do much younger grades now than before. I was having a conversation [00:16:30] with a therapist at a very well-known organization here called Bravehearts, and she was telling me, so they deal with children who are engaging in harmful problem sexual behaviors. She said five years ago they were dealing with kids who were sending dick pics to girls, right? She said, now they’re dealing with boys who have threatened to rape girls who have made obscuring videos of girls [00:17:00] who are consuming porn habitually, extremely violent porn, who have tried to rape their little sisters, even like baby sisters. And that’s the big shift that they’ve seen.

(17:17):
And again, much of this is contributed to by porn. Pornography is now acknowledged as a driver of attitudes which fuel violence against women. It’s acknowledged in our national plan of action [00:17:30] to address violence against women and children. That’s our federal government document. At least it’s being acknowledged like some of us were a bit lonely a decade ago and made fun of and derided and told we were creating a moral panic. And my response at the time was, if only there was one. But tragically, everything we said would happen has come true. And that’s been borne out in our shot report, our sexual Harassment of teachers report, which has found [00:18:00] diabolical findings in that report about the level of sexual harassment of female teachers and female students as well.

Fight The New Drug (18:10):
Yeah. Actually, can we talk a little bit about that report? Will you tell our listeners just generally the premise of the report, what you initially thought would happen, and then kind of what you found once you started to put this out there?

Melinda (18:24):
Well, I’d been sharing with a very well-known Australian author and parenting [00:18:30] expert by the name of Maggie Dent. I’d been sharing with her stories like I’ve shared with you today in the schools, and she said to us at Collective Shout, why don’t we run a survey and get an idea of the prevalence of this problem? So we devised a survey and distributed through our personal networks. Look, it didn’t get a lot of publicity. We just did it very quickly. It wasn’t like a highly [00:19:00] academically worded, it was some basic questions to get a handle on the nature of the problem, the extent, depth of the problem. And we were overwhelmed. We had a thousand responses from teachers, and these responses show that schools had become sites of abuse. That peer to peer sexual harassment has increased and peer to teacher sexual [00:19:30] harassment. We found that there was widespread, entrenched and normalized harmful sexual behaviors in Australian schools teaches teachers almost all female reported being subjected to routine sexual harassment by male students.

(19:46):
They were propositioned threatened with rape subjected to sexual slurs and the mimicking of sex acts seen in pornography. Most common was the phenomenon of sexual groaning, grunting, [00:20:00] moaning noises where boys are simulating having sex and they were subjected to these behaviors. They were asked for nudes, they’re intimidated, and they reported some of the harmful sexual behaviors were exhibited by children from as young as kindergarten to year three. So they’re the youngest children in education. Many said they didn’t feel safe at work. They were dealing with multiple disclosures [00:20:30] from adolescent victims. They were seeing more victims of image-based sexual abuse. They reported instances of children as young as year two, accessing and sharing pornographic content through personal devices or social media. They reported girls in years five and six, coerced into sending sexual images. These teachers, many of them were leaving teaching. They were suffering anxiety, [00:21:00] depression.

(21:01):
They couldn’t sleep anymore. They didn’t want to go to school. Teachers that I met last year, I met three young teachers first year out in teaching and they said, it’s too hard. They’re leaving. And they’d only just started out. Some of them had been in six months or less, and they said, we didn’t go into teaching to be sexually harassed every day by boys to be groaned at moaned, at threatened, having boys trying to film us up our skirts, down our blouses, making pornographic [00:21:30] comments to us. One teacher said, a boy said to her that she had a mouth that belonged on PornHub. Why would you want to go to school and have to hear that? I had a teacher tell me she overheard two 12-year-old boys talking about sex. One boy asked the other boy, how do you know when you’re having sex? And the second boy said, when she starts to cry, this is what they think sex is. And they’re then carrying out sexual intimidation, sexual aggression [00:22:00] on their peers and on female teachers. And they have no hesitation to do that. That’s what porn has done. It is bred disrespect into them. So they think that’s how you treat women porn combined with toxic influences from the manosphere like Andrew Tate and his copycats, who many boys look to. They see him as a role model. The fact is the boys are learning these toxic behaviors and then they’re enacting them on [00:22:30] their peers and on their female teachers.

Fight The New Drug (22:34):
And if there’s this much entitlement as well among these boys in schools to act out against their teachers in these ways, and young girls are seeing this knowing, well, if it’s happening to my teachers, I mean, it’s just normalizing a culture where they think they have to accept it as well. Right. There’s no sense of this being something they can get out of.

Melinda (22:53):
Exactly. And girls have said that. They’ve said, well, I’ve seen how my teacher is powerless to stop this, so [00:23:00] how can I expect it to be addressed? And if they don’t see the school respond as well, if there aren’t consequences, for example, girls say to me, they get severe penalties for having an extra piercing having their uniform too short. There are serious consequences for vaping now in Australian schools, and they’ll see consequences on for those behaviors. But they’ll say to me, they’ll say to me, but the same day I got six rape [00:23:30] threats from that boy over there the same day, that boy over there offered me a hundred dollars to make a porn film for him and his friends, and there was an afterschool suspension. So they don’t see justice being done, and they don’t see equality equity in the types of consequences. So there’ll be more of a penalty because their hair wasn’t pulled back properly.

(23:54):
There was a uniform violation, a nose piercing. But then meanwhile, [00:24:00] the boys are walking around entitled, making sexist comments, sending girls live masturbation videos. That’s a thing as well in young girls 12, 13 telling me that. Yeah, so there needs to be a whole of community approach. There’s some gaps that we’ve noticed in doing this research and in my own engagements in schools. And that is that there are no sexual harassment policies that apply peer to peer or [00:24:30] peer to teacher. They apply teacher to teacher, and that’s it. And even if there is a sexual harassment policy, it’s buried in a bullying policy. It’s sort of buried there in some tiny little subsection. So there hasn’t been enough done to address this rise of peer on peer sexual harassment, sexual intimidation, sexual bullying behavior. And I’m working with an expert, Maha Mellum, who’s a child safeguarding specialist. [00:25:00] She worked on our royal Commission into institutional responses to child abuse, and she and I combined to try to help schools to develop a framework for addressing these behaviors. Schools are already overwhelmed. They have so much to deal with. We have a crisis in education here with a record number of teachers leaving the profession. There’s so many demands on schools, and so this has kind of slipped through the cracks, and we’re trying to help address that.

Fight The New Drug (25:30):
[00:25:30] I want to ask for anyone who’s listening and maybe curious, did this report ever show that female students were sexually harassing male teachers or that male students were sexually harassing male teachers?

Melinda (25:42):
Not really. There was a tiny percentage on that, and it was more relating to harassing, maybe harassing teachers of particular sexualities or that kind of thing. But look, it barely showed up.

Fight The New Drug (26:00):
[00:26:00] We hear all the time also how overwhelmed schools are with so many issues. But I think a lot of people don’t realize how much pornography is kind of a root cause and fueling so many of the issues that schools experience. I mean, everything in your report points to this. And are there any…

Melinda (26:17):
Here’s what’s interesting, Natale. We didn’t even ask a specific question about pornography. The teachers volunteered. We didn’t even specifically word or try to lead them in that direction. [00:26:30] There was no leading question at all about pornography. They self-identified porn as a driver. And social media, they said social media, the is the quote, social media is our number one behavioral issue at year seven. So social media porn and the Andrew Tates of the world were identified, but social media and porn were considered the biggest drivers for these [00:27:00] behaviors.

Fight The New Drug (27:01):
For anyone who’s listening who maybe isn’t on social media or parents who have kids on social media, can you speak a little bit about to why social media is such a problem with sexual harassment in schools?

Melinda (27:14):
Well, again, it normalizes it. A lot of people don’t understand. We’ve just had a huge debate on this in Australia actually, because Australia is the first country in the world, and we were part of this campaign to decide to raise age of access to social media. It’s been a massive issue. [00:27:30] What a lot of people don’t understand is that social media is often the gateway to porn. Most children see porn first through social media. It’s not well understood. In fact, Twitter is the most common place for boys to go to access porn because there’s no limits on it. And they can get uncensored content there of their favorite porn performer and feel like they’ve had some kind of connection with her. So [00:28:00] social media introduces porn to children.

(28:04):
It contributes to body image issues in girls normalizes, often eating disorders, the whole fitspo inspo fads that we’ve seen in the past and really sets children up for failure. It introduces them to extreme violence, things they should never have to see, which harms them. We know that. We know that children are more [00:28:30] anxious than ever before. This has been documented by the likes of Andrew Height, and sorry, this has been documented by Jonathan Height in his book, the Anxious Generation and people like Jean Twenge. And we saw what happened with the Facebook whistleblower. Francis Hagen said that they knew meta knew the harm they were causing to girls, especially on Instagram, and kept it hidden, kept it secret because [00:29:00] they need the clicks. The algorithms work to introduce children to the most harmful sexual violent content. And that, again, is playing out in schools across the country, and I would suggest in schools across the world.

(29:19):
So that’s why we were part of that campaign. We also helped to drive the campaign on age verification protections for children. And that trial has literally just started. Our [00:29:30] federal government had refused to run a trial. It had even refused to take the advice of its own eSafety commissioner, but we forced the government to change its mind. We spearheaded an open letter at Collective Shout, an open letter of leading women’s safety and child protection experts in this country, the biggest names in this country, urging the government to reverse its decision, pointing to the links between porn and violence against women and the [00:30:00] rise in harmful sexual behaviors. And the government. We have a crisis violence against women crisis in this country, and the government did change its mind at an emergency cabinet meeting. And so that trial has just started now. So if we get the results, and I’m sure we will, to lead to a proper age verification implementation of a system here in Australia, combined with [00:30:30] now increasing the age of access, I don’t want to give the impression that that will fix the problem.

(30:34):
It will not make the platform safe. It will just delay the age at which the harm starts to happen. So I want to make that clear. We don’t see this as some kind of magic bullet. The platforms are still unsafe places for children, and we still call out big tech to show some corporate social responsibility here and not be allowed to operate like the Wild West and do whatever they want for profits, but at [00:31:00] least we can allow some more cognitive development in kids before they get access and have all this harmful content streamed into their brains.

Fight The New Drug (31:10):
And I know you just said it delays exposure, right? We know it’s not if it’s when kids are going to see porn, but I want to talk a little bit about, this has come up several times in this conversation how this isn’t just something that’s affecting young people when they’re young [00:31:30] and in schools, and then they get out of school and then this goes away. This is something that is affecting sexual templates that’s leading to you. As you mentioned earlier, you think we’re setting up a generation of boys for failure who won’t be able to sustain intimate relationships. And can you just talk about some of the effects you have a violence against women crisis in your country, as do we in many other areas of the world, and how is pornography affecting that [00:32:00] when so many people see this as just an innocent thing that is normal for young boys to do and then we can just grow out of it? What are your thoughts on that?

Melinda (32:10):
Well, it’s well documented now. So it’s not even just my opinion. It’s being documented that exposing boys to pawn contributes to the acceptance of rape myths. For example, the idea that no really means yes. And we’re seeing this in a rise of strangulation, choking, and strangulation [00:32:30] in girls. I have young women say to me, he went for my throat without even asking. This is a genre of porn that is hugely popular in Australia. We have a designated domestic violence center set up in Queensland just to deal with the victims of choking because there were too many of them. And the existing services couldn’t cope with that. This is a red flag for homicide, but it’s been normalized in porn. It leads to more sexual assault. It leads [00:33:00] to the idea that it’s okay to hold a girl down and force her to have sex. It results in a six boys being six times more likely to be sexually violent. And we know that the most popular genres of porn are the most violent. We know that 88% of porn content contains violence against women in which women are depicted as enjoying the violence.

(33:29):
What a [00:33:30] lie. This is propaganda. It’s an indoctrination of an entire generation, and we’re seeing it in our violence results, our statistics on violence against women globally. But we’re also seeing it in the breakdown of relationships. Now, that’s the book I mentioned earlier, getting Real. And then this one is, he chose Porn over Me, women harmed by Men who use Porn. And this book is a collection of personal accounts of women who were in relationships with habitual porn using [00:34:00] men. And one of them is called He Tried to Kill Me. It documents the violence that men expected to enact on their partners, even where they hadn’t been previously violent. They start consuming porn and they want to enact the signature acts of pornography on their partner. And then they’re surprised. She doesn’t actually want that. She doesn’t like that, but they thought that she actually would, that she might secretly want to [00:34:30] be raped because women secretly want to be raped and have rape fantasies in pornography.

(34:40):
So it sets them up for failure in relationships. It leads to women really being collateral damage in their partner’s greed for porn. This book tells of the crushing of intimacy, respect, connection, love in relationships, men consuming porn in the family home, kids [00:35:00] seeing it on dad’s computer, dad’s device. So the kids being harmed as well. And this is why I say that porn is a breach of the social contract, the social compact, and we need to hold this industry to account. And that’s why we also support what Lila Michelate has done with bring down porn hub. We need to bring it down. PornHub infested [00:35:30] with rape videos, non-consensual images, child rape trafficking, women being drugged and raped and filmed.

(35:43):
Again, this is another driver of what happened to Gisèle Pelicot, all these men lining up to violate that woman. Again, this is a whole porn genre, drugged and violated, drunk and [00:36:00] effed. This is all from porn, and many of those men were consuming that kind of pornography. And it’s also led to what we’re seeing tragically with women like Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this, but last week, Lily Phillips in the UK filmed herself out on the street with ejaculate, dripping off her face, and she’s smiling and filming herself. And [00:36:30] I’ve been reflecting on this very deeply. These women are also groomed by porn, groomed by pornography. Feel that that’s the only thing they have to offer, that maybe not good at other things. This is how they’ll make money and a small number do make money. Most don’t.

(36:46):
A small number do. And I was thinking about deface and dehumanization, depersonalization, deface, debasement to film yourself dripping in ejaculate to advertise [00:37:00] yourself as a receptacle, just a receptacle, like a dump Trump truck. There can be no pleasure in that. There’s no desire, there’s no pleasure. There’s no intimacy. The media reports slept with. There’s no sleeping with. There’s no sleeping going on when you’re seeing a hundred or a thousand men in one go or multiple at one time to get those numbers up. So look at what this has led to for women. [00:37:30] This is consuming my thoughts at the moment. I’m not sure if that’s showing or not, but I’m thinking about this a lot, about the women who really have internalized porn, internalized, misogynistic ideas about women, and then it’s wrapped up as empowerment and freedom and liberation. But I realized going around schools, girls know about bondage, kink, choking. You may not want to say this, but the come shot on the face, [00:38:00] they know about all of this. They dunno how to say no. I’ve young girls saying, how do I say no without hurting his feelings? We haven’t even started with the basics yet.

(38:10):
We haven’t even started with the basics. There was a book published here by some very well-known women who I don’t want to name, became an Amazon bestseller called Welcome to Consent, and it told eight, 9-year-old, 10 year olds how to sext safely, how to do hand jobs and explain to anal explains all his sex acts. It becomes an Amazon global bestseller. [00:38:30] These kids have never held hands, they’ve never had their first kiss.

(38:34):
And they’re being learned hardcore sex acts. They’re being taught hardcore sex acts and how to sex safely, which is impossible. It’s also illegal if you’re underage. Cutting the head off doesn’t make it safe. It still constitutes child sexual exploitation material in Australia if the child is underage and it’s still dehumanizing, boys just stick the face of another girl onto that body that’s happening, cutting and pasting a [00:39:00] girl’s face onto another girl’s body. So why would you encourage that? So anyway, yes. That’s why I’m writing that book to try to give girls some power to know they’re allowed to say no. Girls say after I speak, oh, we’ve learned. We’re allowed to say no, as if this is some kind of radical, crazy concept that they’d never thought of before. Sorry, I don’t even remember the original question, I’m sure.

Fight The New Drug (39:22):
No, it’s perfect. And it is so needed because my next question was going to be, do you think that girls and boys know [00:39:30] what’s happening to them? Do you think that girls are aware that they’re learning, that they have to submit to such a high level of violence? And really, I think you answered that, it’s that they don’t, you said girls are asking, how can I say no without hurting his feelings? They don’t even know that they can say no. Right? And that, yeah, that they should be worried about not having their feelings hurt by violence and abuse in a sexual setting. But so many women and girls, both and men and boys, I think [00:40:00] are so unaware of the indoctrination. Pornography is fueling, giving them into a world that women have to submit to a very high threshold of violence, especially sexually. As you mentioned, pornography shows women are enjoying this violence and girls think they’re supposed to be, even if they’re not.

(40:20):
So they pretend to be or they believe that’s their role in something. And so it really is so important to be addressing these things with younger and younger [00:40:30] children as they’re being exposed, younger and younger, so that they know that this is not the only option. I wanted to ask you a little bit about in your work, I guess for context, what gives you hope in your work? It would be difficult to continue down this path if things only seemed to be getting darker and darker? And have you seen shifts in men and boys who have learned what the harms of pornography are, what the harms of what they’re doing are, and what does that look like? [00:41:00] How does that happen? And for women and girls as well?

Melinda (41:04):
Yes, it’s such an important question, and we do have to find hope in this work because it would be very easy to lose it very easy. And there are some dark days, believe me, there are some very dark days where you think, is it too late? However, I hear from girls who say, your message changed my life. I’ve realized that I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve realized that I’m okay as I am, that I don’t have to act [00:41:30] like a porn star to be attractive. I don’t have to give boys what they want sexually if I don’t want that. I’ve realized I’m allowed to say no. I’m allowed to set boundaries. I don’t have to do what everyone else says I have to do. I don’t have to send that picture. So that’s very inspiring and encouraging for me. Just every time I speak, girl’s private message me and tell me things like this.

(41:59):
And if I’m having [00:42:00] a really low time, I go back and read it all. I go back and read. I keep it all in a file, and I remind myself, well, that girl was helped. That girl was helped. That girl was helped. Boys who recognize that porn has poisoned them, that it has severed them from their humanity. I have had boys say, after hearing my message, they realized that they had become a patron of the global sex industry before. They just thought, there’s no harm in looking. I’m just looking. These women seem to [00:42:30] be enjoying it. All my mates are doing it. And then the light goes on and they realize they’re complicit. They’re complicit in a global trade which exploits the bodies of women and girls for profit. You can’t tell the dolphin friendly version, you know what I mean? You dunno how that woman ended up there.

(42:49):
You dunno if she’s really enjoying it or not. And we know that most of them aren’t. We know they often have terrible backgrounds which have led to this point in life. So [00:43:00] I’ve got a letter from a young boy, Tom, who said, I realized that I was part of the problem that I was contributing to trafficking, and he still had a conscience and an ethical core, and he recognized he didn’t want to be part of that. So he quit straight away. Meeting men who quit is encouraging. They had to do very radical things to quit, like some smashed their phones, smashed their computers. They had to take radical action because they didn’t want to be controlled by [00:43:30] the scripts of the global porn industry. They wanted authentic relationships. The other thing that gives me encouragement is the global movement against porn. We are seeing a shift.

(43:40):
Porn is now recognized as harmful, as toxic. In a way it wasn’t 10 years ago. I love seeing more young people being part of this global movement to reject porn. We know it’s bad for us. We want something better for ourselves, for our relationships. The Action against PornHub, [00:44:00] which so many have been part of, led by Lila, we never expected to see that. I never expected to see that, to be honest. Such a powerful industry finally held to account at Collective Shout. We gave evidence that the Canadian parliaments before the Canadian Parliaments Ethics Committee on the issue, we also took part in a high level briefing of MasterCard and Visa executives about why they shouldn’t host the transactions and profit from [00:44:30] providing the financial transaction platforms for this sexual exploitative trade. So that gives me hope as well. Working with our global partners is encouraging. So yeah, I have to find hope in those places.

Fight The New Drug (44:51):
And this is such a significant issue that’s affecting so many people in so many different areas of our lives. And I think [00:45:00] it can be really intimidating sometimes for the average person to say, oh, well, I can’t do anything to address this. And what would you say to them, to someone who thinks that they as one person can’t affect positive change on these issues?

Melinda (45:13):
I’m so glad you asked me that because it’s the perfect segue to mention that last year at Collective Shouy, we had our record year victories, 34 victories against companies in Australia and internationally, including trillion dollar corporations. For example, [00:45:30] Alibaba, which was hosting child sex abuse dolls. We have got child sex abuse dolls and replica child body parts of five e-commerce platforms. We are tiny five women working part-time on these campaigns. And we have been able to harness the power of our supporter base in Australia and globally and force these companies to comply. Now, if you have [00:46:00] a look on our website, collectors shout.org, you can read all of those wins, 34 victories, age verification trial, social media, age of Access, increase sexualized clothing, withdrawn, the Sex Dos removed. We shut down three porn magazines in Australia, which had been in Australia for 80 years. We ran a six week campaign on Twitter.

(46:24):
That was enough. That was enough. They went under. We shamed the executives [00:46:30] of Bower Media Group on Twitter put their faces there, their names and images from the magazines, which were in the corner stores, milk Bars seven 11 beside the lollies next to the counter. So it really shows what is possible, and it is great to go out on a positive note. It shows what is possible for cultural transformation and social change. When individuals get together individually on their own, they might think It’s only me. Maybe I’m a bit prudish and hung up, [00:47:00] or maybe it’s just me that doesn’t like this. And then they realize actually there are thousands of people who feel the same way, who want to protect our children, want to make a better world, want to call out things that are wrong and bad, and that the power of that collective voice.

(47:17):
We have seen it at Collective Shout. We’re celebrating 15 years this year, hundreds and hundreds of victories as a result of people joining together, speaking out, taking up their rightful place in the square, [00:47:30] and calling on corporations, businesses, companies to act do better for all of us calling out big tech platforms, calling out the porn industry, the sex industry, because we all want a better society, a better civilization, a better place to raise our kids. That’s what it’s all about. So we’d love your listeners to join collective shout.org, and we’d love to connect with you and work together to change everything that needs changing.

Fight The New Drug (48:00):
[00:48:00] That’s so well put and so encouraging, I think to remind all of our listeners that really just coming together, recognizing we’re not alone in this, and being able to say, what can we do? There’s so much happening that it feels like we can’t do something about, but what can we do and where can we start? And it’s so encouraging to see all of the success that Collective Shout has had in the past year and over the past 15 years, I believe. Is that right?

Melinda (48:27):
That’s right, yes. 15 years this year.

Fight The New Drug (48:29):
And [00:48:30] we look forward to seeing all of the progress that you’re able to make as well moving forward. I did want to ask really quickly, if there are any women and girls who are experiencing sexual violence or sexual harassment in the ways that you addressed earlier, are there any specific resources you would like to share?

Melinda (48:48):
Well, they’re going to be different in every country. So I would say find out a local support group, a hotline, a sexual assault crisis line hotline, support service. [00:49:00] There’s different services in every country, so it is hard to advise. But I would say get help. Get help, get support. Find support groups if you are with a habitual porn consuming partner. Well, this book actually has a whole section of resources, support groups to help you, podcasts, phone lines, websites, [00:49:30] excellent groups that have been set up to help the victim, the survivor of the habitual porn consuming partner. So yeah, I can definitely recommend that the resource section in that book and realize you’re not alone. We care about you. We want you to get help. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not your fault. You didn’t invite it, you didn’t ask for it, you didn’t deserve it. So please find a support services in your area and get support.

Fight The New Drug (49:58):
Thank you. And we’ll be sure to link to some [00:50:00] as well in our show notes for any of our listeners as well as to many of the books that are mentioned in Collective Shots resources as well, if you would like to learn more. Melinda, is there anything we weren’t able to discuss yet today that you wanted to be sure to mention?

Melinda (50:15):
I think you pretty much think you’ve pretty much covered it, Natale.

Fight The New Drug (50:18):
Okay.

Melinda (50:18):
And they can get the Sexual Harassment of Teachers report on our website collectiveshout.org as well. You can download it from there and please share and distribute it. It’s really important data and research [00:50:30] that needs to be better known. You can find my books on my website, linda tankard reese.com. You can get them in the US and in Europe and the uk. And yeah, we’d love to just keep talking and keep the conversation going and support your work as well.

Fight The New Drug (50:47):
Yes, thank you so much. And I would encourage any of our listeners to please take a look at that report. The information is so compelling. It’s not terribly long. It’s easy to digest, but it is, I mean, it’s really [00:51:00] alarming to see it all kind of laid out. You shared a lot of the findings from it today, but it is so important to see that and do please share that. And if you are a teacher yourself or work in an educational space and you are seeing similar issues as well, please consider reaching out. Consider looking at ways that you can change this culture in your schools as well and help affect positive change there. I want to thank you again, Melinda, for joining us on the podcast today, and remind any of our listeners to please like and subscribe [00:51:30] if you would like more content like this. And again, check out the resources that are linked below to learn more about Collective shouts amazing work in this space.

Promotional (51:49):
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(53:07):
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Outro (53:55):
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Consider Before Consuming. Consider [00:54:00] Before Consuming is brought to you by Fight the New Drug. Fight The New Drug is a non-religious and non legislative organization that exists to provide individuals the opportunity to make an informed decision regarding pornography by raising awareness on its harmful effects, using only science, facts and personal accounts. Check out the episode notes for resources mentioned in this episode. If you find this podcast helpful, consider subscribing and leaving a review. Consider Before Consuming is made possible [00:54:30] by listeners like you. If you like to support consider Before Consuming, you can make a one-time or recurring donation of any amount at ftnd.org/support. That’s F-T-N-D.O-R-G/support. Thanks again for listening. We invite you to increase your self-awareness, look both ways, check your blind spots, and consider before consuming.