In the company of wolves

In continuation from the blog on blogging (!), and in an attempt to expand my own blog awareness, and consider the ways blogging might be utilised to combat violence against women with ICTs – at the very least every click to open a blog page is a click not being used to open a porn site – I did some searching and found a site which I have a feeling is already being used by a few of the bloggers Ka-BLOGging for takebackthetech: blogher.org is a free blog syndicate for women bloggers where you can pool your own blog in with thousands of other women’s blogs, organised into manageable categories, and accessible to a wide audience. I found blogs there by women who have been discussing the connections between ICTs and violence against women for years. Even if you don’t have a blog of your own, you can still browse the other blogs.

The way I see it, according to a number of statistical sources (I used internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html), with 72 million people visiting porn sites annually, and a quarter of all search engine requests being for pornographic material, and as 72% of all those visits to the 72 million porn sites and search engine requests are visits made by men, that’s an awfully large portion of internet time and space being dominated and shaped to suit less than 50% of the world’s population. Regardless of your standpoint on porn, that such a specific market suiting one particular portion of society, should have a monopoly on surfers’ clicking control, is a frustrating injustice and an unacceptable bias in one specific (and, some would argue, debatably dangerous) direction! But it also suggests that if more women were encouraged to use the internet – at least as many women as men – that statistic would decrease as women used their mice to locate their interests on search engines, and opened websites that suited them… like blogs! If, on the other hand, you do feel strongly about the potential for violence against women through the exploitation of porn, check out… www.porndestroyswomen.org - at least no-one can say they’re undecided…!

technorati tags: takebackthetech