Email Submitted to Metro Newspaper on 27 things that men do that women hate

May 8, 2014, James Beaton, Media Complaints,

Email submitted to Metro on article "27 things that men do that women hate"

Good Afternoon

I am contacting you to complain about this article which appeared on your website on May 3rd. Firstly, it's my view that articles of this nature should not be appearing in a daily newspaper.

Secondly many of the "things" show violence being perpetrated against women, in terms of non-consensual activity. My view is that it is unacceptable for a media outlet such as yourselves to implicitly endorse violence of this nature in your publication. Furthermore, the light hearted tone of the introduction to the article jars considerably with the nature of some of the acts described, and as such this adds to the implicit endorsement of the acceptability of non consensual acts.

Violence against women, perpetrated by men is a daily occurrence, not only in this country, but world wide, and by publishing an article, describing for example, non consensual insertion of objects into a woman, as part of an article about things that men do that women "hate" is to trivialise what is a very serious issue. The suggestion that a woman might like to leave this "lying about where your boyfriend might see it", is also to suggest that women do not have the right to be heard assertively on such violence. Also, this "suggestion", fails to engage with how men might address their own violence against women and take responsibility for themselves in terms of being the prime causative element of this, and how they might work to end this.

All in all, to me, it is unacceptable that a mainstream media outlet sees it as being appropriate to publish an article such as this, and to compound this by failing to recognise that some of the content is a statement of male violence. The lighthearted tone of the article's introduction adds to a sense of "boys will be boys" which does not recognise the seriousness of the problem.

Yours sincerely

James Beaton

Consent, erasure of women, male violence, Media, Metro, Rape, rape culture, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, sexual violence, violence against women and girls

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