People Take Action: What You Can Do People Take Action: What You Can Do "It is in all these ways that each of us, informed by our heads and hearts, can use our voices as primary instruments and can become the agents for transforming our culture by creating images that foster hope for ourselves and our future. Each of these activities has the potential to be significant in and of itself; when combined, they will enable us to realize what may seem at this time almost unimaginable, a new lexicon of imagery that will lead the way to transforming our rape culture and healing centuries of violence." --Campbell, in Transforming A Rape Culture, 151.
 1. Learn
more so that you know the difference between what IS
educational and liberating and what is dehumanizing and
exploitive. Don't accept ALL sexual expression as
educational or liberating. Some is. Porn isn't. Like
Playboy and similar publications. |
 5. Help raise public
awareness by suggesting and supporting school, civic
group and church programs and workshops on dehumanizing
and degrading sexually explicit media. |
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 2. Talk
with your friends and colleagues. Encourage others to
identify, analyze, and resist false and desensitizing
images and the underlying messages in pornography and
porn-influenced material. |
6. Support media activist groups who promote more
balanced, realistic, and diverse portrayals of girls and
boys and men and women, in media. Media Action
Alliance Media
Watch |
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7. Encourage your professional association and local
child advocacy organizations to develop position
statements on the commodifying of subordinating sex and
the inappropriate sexualization of children. Linnea Smith's article on Sexual Exploitation of Chidren in Advertising The American Medical Association, The American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, UNICEF SITES |
11. Ask leaders at your neighborhood schools if they have a sexual harassment policy, if they have a program on media literacy, if they discuss pornography in sex education classes. If not, volunteer to serve on a committee to develop needed programs. |
| 3. Teach your children to respect children of the opposite gender. Talk to them about sexuality. Give them the information they need to make smart, caring, responsible decisions. |  8. Take seriously and
use responsibly your power as a consumer. Don't help
finance the widespread sex mis-education represented in
so-called "men's" magazines. Cancel your
subscriptions, choose other gifts for the men in your
life. And above all else, don't consider it a young boy's
rite of passage to learn from these magazines that sex is
all about degrading women and children. |
 12. Be techno-savvy. Technology
expands the challenge. Be aware of the Playboy Channel
and similar television programs. |
 4. Express
your concern to your local radio and TV stations about
programs that legitimize and glamorize girls and young
women as centerfolds, strippers, bunnies, pets, and
playmates. And glorifies boys as Don Juans, predators,
sexual gladiators, and users. |
9. Write
the advertisers of men's magazines. Make a difference by giving them important feedback on the material (and messages) their advertising dollars finance. |
13. Pornography is pandered on the Internet...and NOT just to adult consumers. Establish clear online guidelines for your children. Larry's World: Children's Safety on the Internet Parental Control of the Internet
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10.
Contact your elected officials and ask about legal
strategies for counteracting the harm of pornography.
Things like: raising the age of models to 21 for
porn-posing, affixing warning labels on men's magazines,
and earmarking porn product tax dollars for treatment
programs for sex offenders and porn addicts. 
Snowflakes are one of nature's most
fragile things, but just look what they can do when they
stick together." -Verna M. Kelly
Even the most hard-nosed physicists
admit that the flap of a butterfly's wing here can change
the weather hundreds of miles away." -Gloria
Steinem"
"Hope is like the sun, which as
we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden
behind us." -S. Smiles