Lads Mags find women’s suffering entertaining
Posted by charliegrrl on June 15, 2007
Thinking about the rise in Grindhouse films, it’s clear that many men enjoy watching women suffer. Whether it is being humiliated, scared half to death, violated, cut up or tortured, there is a demand from men to watch women suffer.
Here are some examples from lads mags.
Bukkake is where a man wanks and then ejaculates sperm over a woman’s face, often in her eyes. This is popular in porn and normalised in lads mags. Imagine what a guy is thinking when he is looking down on a woman’s face, masturbating, and his climax, is to squirt sperm all over her face and in her eyes. He’s thinking you are a worthless, subservient piece of meat, I will humiliate you- you are a depository for my hate.
FHM highlighted a bukkake video in one of their newsletters and posted it on their website. This clip tells the short story of a guy who likes to bukkake on his girlfriend’s face, and how he brings all his friends over and they all bukkake on his girlfriend’s face too. She is drenched in sperm, she is abused and humiliated- this according to FHM is funny.
Warning, this film is disturbing so please don’t watch if you feel it may be too much for you. This film does not contain nudity, nor images of the actual act of bukkake.
Loaded have posted a game online for their readers to play, called Jack the Ripper. The aim of the ‘game’ is to kill the most women walking out at night, by stabbing them, to ‘rid the streets of their shame’.
ZOO have posted this film on their website, in their jokes section. This clip shows a prank played on a woman, who is so scared she ends up uncontrollably screaming and shaking. This is accompanied with men laughing in the background.
Far from being harmless mags that celebrate nice tits, lads mags here clearly show their contempt for women.
Thanks to Maddie and Rachel for sending me these
Blog of Feminist Activism 
Lucy said
That’s an absolute discrace. I’ve been telling people for ages that these magazines are utter abuse but they don’t listen. They should be banned. Female suffering is NOT ok and it is not something to be masturbating over. Men are sick.
fannyblood said
ooooh. oh. oh dear. x
fannyblood said
HOWEVER, NEW REPORT SAYS THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY ALLURING INDUSTRY FOR YOUNG GIRLS TO WORK IN. GO FOR IT, GIRLS! ACHIEVE YOUR DREAM OF APPEARING NAKED IN LADS MAGS. FUEL THE HATE.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1270628,00.html
Girls Want Jordan And Jodie Lifestyles
By By Sky News Reporter Emma Birchley Updated: 10:00, Friday June 15, 2007
A growing number of young women are pursuing careers as glamour models enticed by the lure of a celebrity lifestyle.
Jordan: An aspirational figure?Tabloid stars like Jordan and Jodie Marsh have achieved fame and fortune by flaunting their assets for the cameras.
Now agencies which hunt out new talent have said more girls than ever are approaching them looking for work.
Nina Barnes set up Genesis Models in Bury, near Manchester, two years ago.
“We started wondering if we would have enough people to apply for us. Now I get 10 applicants a day,” she said.
“You can’t be a glamour model until you’re 18 plus… but every week I get someone who’s 13 or 14 years of age.”
Kelly-Ann Wilson was one of a dozen women invited along to a test shoot at the agency.
“I want the fame. I want people to recognise me. I want to be a household name because I want to be successful in what I do,” she explained.
On her 18th birthday Kelly-Ann visited a plastic surgeon to discuss having implants. Soon after her breasts were boosted from a 34B to a 34DD.
Linda Owens, 20, is also considering going under the knife. She says she wants to look like a Barbie doll and would like implants like Jordan’s.
“I’d like to get to where Jordan is right now but I think every model in the world would probably say the same thing,” she said.
Kelly-Ann poses for the camerasBut it’s a trend that’s causing concern. Observer columnist Christina Odone described it as a sad indictment of society when women feel it’s more important to have a big bust than intelligence.
She said: “There is an attitude now that all I need to do is pose, strut my stuff, show off my breasts and my assets and I too can get into the tabloids, be a Page Three girl and walk on the red carpets of Hollywood.
“That is the ultimate goal, and it’s celebrity, it’s D-List celebrity. Surely there’s more to life than that.”
One survey recently revealed that that two-thirds of teenage girls would rather become a glamour model than a nurse, doctor or teacher.
But according to critics, it’s hardly surprising when “lad mags” and reality TV shows continue to make stars of the scantily clad and the surgically enhanced.
charliegrrl said
You can’t be a glamour model until you’re 18 plus… but every week I get someone who’s 13 or 14 years of age
This quote is particularly worrying.
I should have also added, that every day for about two months I’ve had about 8 hits from my blog from people (men) googling ‘dead women’. Hmmmmmm any coincidence with the emergence of torture porn films..?
sparklematrix said
Fucking speechless. The fact is – every one of those dick heads who set this up would have been shitting themselves in the same situation.
rgm81 said
And you didn’t even mention Hostel II, the movie for which the entire marketing campaign revolves around young women getting sadistically tortured.
charliegrrl said
I’m doing a blog post of Hostel II, it’s worth doing one on its own
Richie said
Have you seen the first Hostel? Because that managed to be misogynist even though it was about men being tortured, which is quite an achievement. I’ve no idea what’s going on with Tarantino presenting this stuff; I know he gets a kick out of old exploitation movies, but Eli Roth’s stuff is, to be frank, incompetent. It’s not well made and the gore itself is pretty tame, so I don’t see why he gets special attention.
sparklematrix said
Ack! Now I’ve just looked at the bukkak video. Yeah, hilarious having women used as toilets demonstrating that ‘humour’ such as this is not only lavatorial little boy comedy but also complete loathing of females. Problem is – these troubled males seem to make a life long career in finding ways of feeding the misogyny.
Of course while they are abusing and demonising ‘others’ they have no need to examine themselves.
Merdeen said
urrrgh. Thats just wrong. What Sparkle says too.
I read an interview (this months Esquire, don’t ask)from Christina Ricci [Rae in the film] about Black Snake Moan. Sorry for long post, I hope it’s ok to quote from mags? If it’s not just remove my comment, but I thought this was interesting:
“Rae, Ricci insists, is a composite of people she has known in her life, real-life case studies, and true crime dramas, and she is at her most passionate when articulating why she wanted to play her. “She was very representative of women who are sexually abused, never got treatment, and then are wildly promiscuous. We dismiss them as sluts and wonder, ‘Why is that girl acting like that?’ Well, it’s probably something that was done to her when she was five. I felt like there needed to be an honest, realistic, if-this-offends-you-too-bad-because-it’s-real repretensation of that.
“It’s funny. People read this script and said to me, ‘This is male fantasy. Don’t you get it?’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s not. That’s not what it is about.’ ”
Those who have seen the poster art but have yet to see the film could be forgiven for begging to differ. A pastiche of old exploitation movie artwork, it features an illustration of a wanton Ricci chained and on the floor, next to the tagline: “Everything is hotter down south.”
“I do have complicated feelings about the marketing,” Ricci admits. The one thing that made it OK for me, when I rationalised it for myself, was that the movie is in some ways about exploitation, so for the campaign to be exploitive….maybe in some way that follows?” It’s a nice try, almost plausible, but Ricci is too intelligent to really believe it. Of course, this sort of contradiction is inherent in Hollywood, but Ricci doesn’t take the film’s subject matter lightly. She tells me that in a few weeks time she will be testifying before the US Congress on behalf of the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network.
I have a hard time trying to suss Ricci out. I mean the film is called BLACK SNAKE MOAN for crying out loud, if that’s not appealing to the male fantasy than god knows. I really don’t get it. How are the people that are going to see through the male fantasy part of the film and look for the real meaning [if there truly is one, that is]?
Then in the same mag, there’s an interview from Tarantino saying how his films [Death Proof/Planet Terror] “empower women”
Esquire: Both these films really appeal to men, but it’s the women in the movies that are truly empowered…
QT: “We definately wanted to empower women, because that’s not foreign to the genres we’re doing, and that’s a real thrust in Death Proof. These types of B-Movies and the Hong Kong and Japanese movies from the Seventies have a strong tradition of the female avenger. Those were the movies that allowed women to do that, not the Hollywood movies. So, in my film, we use the slasher format in the final act, where you would have the surviving girl vanquishing the bogeyman as she’s the one with teh mortal fortitude to see this thing out”
Meh. If only women didn’t *have to* ‘avenge’ in real life.
Anyway, I can’t comment as I’ve not seen any of these films. But, then again, I don’t really want to either.
CrankyCrone said
Nothing was ‘funny’ in either of those clips, humour requires intelligence.
The Jack the Ripper game, very tasteful/responsible (not) for a LM to promote it only six months after five prostituted women were murdered in Ipswich. I did investigate the game, it is possible to kill of the men in it. The men fight back whereas the women do not. Totally sick and pointless.
The bukkake clip was poorly made, was pointless and very unfunny. Was it made for, and by, 12 year olds? The entire bukkake concept really shows male hatred for all females, whether it be as arousal or as ‘humour’, it is nothing but pure contempt.
As for the woman being ‘kidnapped’ in an elevator to a staged death scene, still not funny. Her comments at the end were the best part of that: “you stupid bastard”, “fuck you, you miserable bastard” and “it’s not funny you stupid asshole”. Other than that, pointless.
I can only conclude from the above roundup, that if men find the above funny, then it is men that are indeed pointless, and perhaps feminism shouldn’t waste time educating them, but instead start exterminating them en masse. We would have to take care to preserve the few decent ones, like Richie and his ilk. I don’t even want to share a planet with the rest of them.
glump said
It seems to me that any violent attack at another’s face has a certain meaning that attacks directed at the rest of the body don’t carry. Interpersonal communication issues from the mouth, expressions of the eyes and the general countenance. A person’s face is where their humanity is seen to reside. An attack at a face is an attack aimed at the dead center of a person’s being.
In this way, buk***** is indeed an act of supreme degradation.
Rachel H-G said
Bad-taste jokes and puerile songs about disgusting sexual practices (surely you’ve grown out of those by secondary school age?)are one thing, explicitly tying them in to humiliation and poor treatment of women is another. Both of these videos keep showing close-ups of women looking terrified, dejected, disappointed or disgusted, as if it’s funny. It isn’t. Why does ladsmag humour always have to be at the expense of somebody? Why can’t things just be funny?
unearthling said
Richie, I’ve seen the first Hostel – it traumatised me beyond words – I couldn’t sleep properly for literally months I was so disturbed. And one of the things I noticed was although yes it was men being tortured (mainly) they used the allure of beautiful “easy” women to get them to the Hostel – if I recall correctly the guy who convinced them to go there says something like all the men in this village are at war so these women will just “fuck you” cos they are desperate. And then when they get there the tactic is to use half naked women to convince the men how great it is there and of course they have sex with these women before they are taken off and tortured and killed. It makes out like women are good for one thing – to sexually entice men. I was never sure if they knew what was going on and just didn’t care (making out women to be heartless psychopathic whores) or if they were forced to do it so they didn’t face the same fate (thereby being controlled and forced into sex with newcomers by the sick men who are in charge)
It was without a doubt the sickest film I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across. I dread to think what Hostel 2 is like.
Something has to be done about the Jack the Ripper game – that’s thoroughly disgusting! As for the bukkake video it seems to be a common theme in porn – I’ve seen men stand on women’s faces, spit on them etc – the worst thing I’ve seen in terms of humiliation (I don’t know what the name of it is) is women covered from head to toe in human excrement.
The video “joke” is vile. Who finds this funny – she was terrified and its clear that its not the “prank” that people are finding funny – its the fact that she is so frightened.
ysbryd said
And dont forget another video ‘highlight’ FHM call ‘surprised stripper’, where a drunk man throws up on a lapdancer and the cheering crowd of men surrounding them zoom their cameras in on the vomit and laugh at her.
Amy said
Holy shit.
I actually almost cried, seeing one of my sisters in such torment.
Those fucking bastards. They make me sick.
And that music.
Fucking joke section?!
Anyone who finds this funny is sick, and if I were to meet ’em, I’d punch them right in the face. (Hey…I’m not a pacifist; I’m too temperamental.)
Amy said
I mean, Jesus Christ Superstar…
anyone seeing a dead body hanging would go into some form of shock, or something.
It’s not because women are “hysterical” or too “emotional”.
I reckon some/many men would have an equally vocal reaction.
Richie said
Hostel is immensely hypocritical. It presents itself as the story of these two standard loudmouth American college dicks who get their comeuppance, and yet all the hate in the movie is directed at the Eastern Europeans, especially the sex workers. The two jerks are presented as the heroes who have to protect themselves from the evil poor dirty foreign-types and whores, rather than over-privileged assholes who are thoughtlessly exploiting poverty in order to get laid. Yeah, the movie pays lip service to the fact they’re doing the wrong thing, but they’re still the good guys in the end. Oh, and there’s one woman who isn’t evil, but she gets her eye burned out and then kills herself because she’s not pretty.
Hostel 2… I’m interested in seeing the difference between the way the torture scenes are shot. Because I’m willing to bet that we’re going to be empathising with the torturers a lot more than last time.
unearthling said
QT: “We definately wanted to empower women… So, in my film, we use the slasher format in the final act, where you would have the surviving girl vanquishing the bogeyman as she’s the one with teh mortal fortitude to see this thing out”
Yeah and next he will be telling us that Kill Bill wasn’t an excuse to dress women up and have them act out male fantasy. I notice “Bill” only picked “sexy” women to train as “warriors” – are we supposed to believe this crap coming from the man who sells dolls of himself entitled, “rapist number one”
charliegrrl said
The FHM video that Ysbryd is referring to is this
hairylesbian said
If I were to violently kill Mr Tarantino do you think I’d get away with it on the grounds it was ’empowering’?
CrankyCrone said
Grrrr, I followed that FHM link, also saw the stripper video (notice how the guy is paying more attention to the camera than her?) and also stumbled across a cartoon rabbit singing “everyone has had more sex than me” (endlessly; must be a loop?). Perhaps if menz get distracted about how much sex ‘they get/don’t get’ then perhaps wimmin can sneakily take over whilst they all worry about their penises?
Richie said
The “final girl” in slasher movies is a really complicated subject. It’s not about “empowering” women and has bugger all to do with moral fortitude, but it’s also not (as that Guardian article from a while back suggested) an attempt to avoid accusations of misogyny. To compress it down to something that won’t keep me here until the shops are shut, it’s to do with the audience being unwilling to see men in a victim role, so the final act, where the hero is at their most vulnerable and scared, ends up featuring a woman. However, the audience is also unwilling to see a woman in the hero role, so she becomes de-sexualised and acts “like a man” (if a woman in a slasher movie ever has sex or wears feminine clothing, she’s probably doomed). One of the reasons the Alien series stands out is that they don’t de-sexualise Ripley; there are constant themes of sex / death / motherhood throughout it.
jennifer drew said
Both clips and Jack the Ripper play station game have one thing in common – women are not human but rather they are playthings for men to sexually abuse and humiliate. Do not forget Nazis employed similar methods when seeking to dehumanise Jews, homosexuals and other marginalised groups judged to be not human. Treating women with the utmost contempt and hatred such as Zoo’s and FHM’s efforts makes male sexual violence against women acceptable and normal. Men ejaculating on a woman’s face is not sexual, rather it is men expressing their hatred and contempt for women. Only difference is they are expressing sexualised hatred and contempt. Images of men ejaculating and using their penises as weapons is not sexy – it just proves how frightened these men are of women that they need to sexually abuse and degrade women.
littoralmermaid said
A sliver of a silver lining wrt Hostel:
In the US it tanked.
“Box office for horror movies is weak, verging on horrible … Moviegoers put a nail in the coffin of a dying horror boom this weekend, as ”Hostel: Part II” opened to just $8.8 million in ticket sales, far behind the crime caper ”Ocean’s Thirteen” in a three-day period of relatively soft box office performance.”
I’d much rather see the “horror boom” smashed by anger at the misogyny and pornification of female suffering rather than capitalism and getting bored with “trends”, but I’m relieved at the thought that I might see less of this woman-hating garbage around.
Although there’s still that movie with Elisha Cuthbert and another one where Lindsay Lohan plays a stripper who gets her legs hacked off. I don’t understand what is wrong with people, that they can find torture for the sake of torture entertaining!
Dave said
I had no idea lads mags promoted extreme sex acts such as Bukkake to its young,primarily male readership.
Am i right in assuming that a boy aged 8 could buy lads mags containing this sort of material,is there no restrictions what so ever?
As far as bukkake is concerned,this is just one of the many extreme sex acts pornographers are asking/coercing women in porn to do.
It has no other purpose than to degrade and dehumanise women.
Spitting and urinating in womens faces,is also becoming common,todays pornographers seem to have a ‘free rein’,and are getting away with producing this sort of material and worse!!
Rachel H-G said
I work in Marketing and unofficially, the ladsmag ad sales people say that their readership is boys from ten upwards.
You won’t see that written down anywhere though, they’ll swear blind they don’t advertise and appeal to under-sixteens.
Lina said
Mainstream men’s magazines publishing that….. fucking hell, that is bad… I read through FHM (this months) the other day, had something about dirty women being ok cos at least they’ve got such low self-esteem they’ll do anything.
This is something else…
Richie said
Something else about that Jack the Ripper game, which I noticed while I was writing about it: It was published in early January 2007, shortly after the Ipswich prostitute murders, which makes it likely that the game was programmed during them. That makes it even more disgusting.
charliegrrl said
Dave, yes young boys can and do buy these magazines. There is no legal age restriction, although some supermarkets impose an age limit. Also, the websites of these magazines aren’t filtered out via porn filters…so they can view them on home and school computers. Many young boys are ‘friends’ with the lads mags on their official myspaces. This makes me very worried about the attitudes boys are developing about girls and sex.
charliegrrl said
Yep Richie, the Loaded Jack the Ripper game was brought out just after the Ipswich murders…but do they care..? Nope, they think it’s a laugh.
MaryTracy9 said
That video is, indeed, sick and NOT funny. The hatred towards the woman is almost palpable. I can tell that it was made in a latinamerican country, where, unfortunately, sexism and misoginy are huge.
On the positive side, kudos for posting this things and speaking up. I’m glad I found this web site. I’ll put it in my favourites 😉
Patrick said
With reference to the Jack the Ripper game you mention, there is a game called Battle Raper that was released for PC in the Far East in which you were supposed to rape women in return for hentai porn. The victims were shown enjoying the experience. I heard of it when I ran a discussion on violence in videogames a few years ago. Just thought it might interest you.
charliegrrl said
Thanks for that Patrick. It’s hard to believe such a game can exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Raper
Andrew said
THis is absolutely outrageous and gut-wrenching. No one deserves this kind of treatment. Joke?
Thanks for posting, speaking out. You are not alone.
Yassmin said
I’m extremely shocked and distressed by this. I can’t believe that there is no law to protect the vulneruble. The attitude in society now days seems to be that as long as it’s in a magazine its ok. What exactly are we teaching our children?
Emmah said
“He’s thinking you are a worthless, subservient piece of meat, I will humiliate you- you are a depository for my hate.”
Can I just ask a bit of an unusual question, Charlie? How do you know that this is what men think when they do this? Have you ever asked any men what excitement they got out of it? Does this act necessarily symbolize hatred of women, especially when both the men and women involved in such a sexual act are both there out of choice? I find it hard to believe that in all instances these women are forced into it.
I cannot say I understand the whole enjoyment factor of bukkake myself, but is it really fair to assume that this is an act of hatred rather than just some kind of kink. By the way, I don’t think all men find bukkake appealing either.
As for the video, it is a lame joke, I couldn’t help but feel for the woman in the video. I didn’t find it funny, it would make no difference what gender the person in that woman’s situation would be, it still wouldn’t be funny. There are jokes that push the boundaries, and there are jokes that go too far beyond them to be remotely amusing. I didn’t feel insulted or appalled, just a bit bemused as to why anyone would find reducing a man or woman to a quivering wreck amusing. Then again, I have never been much of a fan of practical jokes, perhaps I just don’t get it? 🙂
emma said
Slightly going away from the conversation but in a relating context, most men will look at these derogetory magazines and not even realise just how much women are being exploited. i also believe those women who appear in lads mags or in these video are just as stupid for wanting and feeling they need to do that to be recognised they obviously lack something in their life, it is sad and frustrating for respectable intelligent women to see this as it demines the whole female race, no wonder there are so many perverts around.