Recently, I came across a campaign called We Can’t Consent to This, which purports to be ‘a response to the increasing use of “rough sex” defences to the killing or violent injury of women and girls’. But when I browsed the campaign’s site, it seemed somewhat familiar, and I started to suspect that the campaign was not what it claimed to be. British radical feminist campaigns tend to fit a particular pattern – a pattern with which I became familiar when I observed it over a number of years for my book Porn Panic!
For several years, a small, active (and
hateful) radical feminist group called Object was a key driving force behind claims that pornography was harmful, and made repeated calls for porn to be censored. Additionally, Object was behind a number of other pop-up anti-sex campaigns. These included
Stripping the Illusion (a campaign to get strip club licenses revoked by councils),
Lose the Lads Mags (which attempted to stop supermarkets selling magazines such as
Zoo and
Nuts), and
Rewind and Reframe, which called for the censorship of “sexist” music videos. Object may also have been influential in the
No More Page 3 (NMP3) campaign, which called for the Sun newspaper to end its iconic daily topless model on page 3. The same groups of people are also behind anti-sex work campaigns such as
Nordic Model Now. At times it seems there are more radfem campaigns than there are activists.
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