Nightmare in girl world

“The women of Spinifex Press have also been so passionate about this book and about the injustice done to young women and little girls through the pornification of their expectations, imaginations and self- images” Melinda said.

“Despite the diversity of the writers, we all agreed that opposition to the hyper-sexualisation of girls deserved a strong and united front. The time was also well past that such a protest should be dismissed by calling it the cry of an outdated or marginalised prudish ‘moral minority’,” she added.

One of the most striking features of Getting Real is the balance it strikes between the confronting and grim evidence of the widespread cultural abuse of children and the biting humour and satire used by some of the writers. I put to Melinda that the work represented a new type of “protest wit” which was a method likely to take some off guard.

“Yes, some of the writing in this book is shocking. The “pornified messages” and accounts of pro-rape websites are disturbing and should be. Some of the material is only the rallying together of images depicted publicly on our billboards every day. We thought our audience deserved to hear the truth,” she said.

“I also admit it is the feisty humour that keeps this material from really messing with your head,” she laughed, adding “Judy Gale, for example is a professional comedian who has turned her skills to her amazingly effective activism. She exposes the display of illegal porn in places like milk-bars and service stations.

Her grass-roots, “act-locally” approach and her humour exposes the value system of pornography, confront the CEOs of multinational companies and gets results all at the same time”.

Tyranny of silence

The authors of Getting Real are not shy in naming some of the interests that have attempted to put down and shame the impact of the book’s “collective shout” on behalf of girls.

Melinda Tankard Reist is only too aware of the predictable indignation her work provokes among those she calls the “sexual assault libertarians”. She has made a professional specialty of busting the hegemony of silence which cripples discussion of important moral and social issues in modern liberal society.

Her two previous books on post-abortion harm and grief, Giving Sorrow Words (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2003) and Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (Spinifex, 2007) and many of her published opinion pieces are testimonies of this.

She notes, “In this book I mention and make fun of some of the anonymous and vindictively personal hate mail that I have received.

“Even more importantly, some of our authors make a full frontal critique of the notion of freedom adopted by these self-styled libertarians, who use the weapon of ‘freedom of speech’ to deny speech to everyone else.”

One of the most probing of these essays is by the Dr Abigail Bray, who analyses the apparent immunity with which the so called “arts” can perpetrate the pornification of girl children.