Melinda Tankard Reist - Rejecting Sexploitation

Melinda Tankard Reist founded Collective Shout ten years ago, a grassroots campaigns movement for a world free of sexploitation in all its forms. She's an author, speaker, media commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls. She's best known for her work addressing sexualization, objectification, harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and violence against women.

Melinda Tankard Reist Website: https://melindatankardreist.com/

Collective Shout Website: https://www.collectiveshout.org/

Collective Shout Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/collectiveshout

Collective Shout Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collective.shout/

(Transcript is a guide only and may not be 100% correct.)

Emily Olsen

Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen.

Rodney Olsen

I need to warn you that today’s episode of Bleeding Daylight may be confronting at times, but it focusses on issues that affect us all. They’re also issues that give each one of us opportunity to shine light into some very dark places and to make our world more compassionate with greater respect and equality for all.

My guest founded Collective Shout ten years ago, a grassroots campaigns movement for a world free of sexploitation in all its forms. This is an episode that should be heard by many, especially parents. I encourage you to share it widely so that we can all take action to draw closer to the kind of world we long to see.

Constant abuse and even death threats have become common occurrences for Melinda Tankard Reist. Those reactions only serve to highlight the seriousness of the topics that she raises in our society. She's an author, speaker, media commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls. She's best known for her work addressing sexualization, objectification, harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and violence against women. I'm so pleased to have her joining me on bleeding daylight. Melinda, thank you so much for your time.

Melinda Tankard Reist

Thanks for having me. Thanks for your interest.

Rodney Olsen

I'm interested in knowing where your passion for standing against this kind of exploitation actually began.

Melinda Tankard Reist

Look, it probably began in my hometown growing up in a country town in Victoria and I started to see the mistreatment of women in my community. I became a journalist from the age of 16 and began to document some of that mistreatment. One of the first pieces I ever wrote was about the opening of a women's refuge in my town for victims of violence. I also noticed that mistreatment of Indigenous women and migrant women. I was then awarded a scholarship to study journalism in the US and that I ended up traveling globally and witnessed for myself the second class status of women around the world, returned to Australia and continue to document issues affecting women and girls, that I wrote my book Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls, and that's really where this work took off. And I was asked look where's the grassroots movement against everything you've described, and that's how Collective Shout came about 10 years ago.

Rodney Olsen

It's interesting that there are a number of issues that you're looking at there, that are just obvious that these are harming but I think a lot of what you call to the surface are those things that just go past us without us recognising what's going on. What are some of the themes that you think that most people don't understand are harmful to women?

Melinda Tankard Reist

I'm really glad you've asked me this, Rodney, because I've always believed that I was meant to document issues that were going under the radar. I've written six books now. And I felt led I suppose to expose things that were harmful in the hope that we might wake up and do something about those things. So the epidemic of violence against women globally, if you look at female genital mutilation, bride burning, dowry deaths, if you look at trafficking in the bodies of women and girls into the global sex industry, if you will. With the fact that girls globally are more often denied education and and kept in a very controlled and submissive environment, the way that pornography is shaping and molding attitudes and behaviors, that teaches boys that they have a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and girls and teaches girls that they exist primarily for male sexual gratification and pleasure. And that's my main focus at present is exposing how we are warping the sexuality of an entire generation, how we are contributing to violence and brutality and sexual cruelty,. callousness, in what we are presenting as normal sex, and this is stuff starting earlier and earlier. So yeah, I've just felt that I'...