London protesters rally against Assange extradition

By Christen McCurdy


Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Hundreds of supporters of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange gathered in London's Parliament Square on Saturday to protest his potential extradition to the United States.

Those present at the rally included Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Assange, 48, who founded Wikileaks in 2006, has been charged with 18 criminal counts of conspiring to hack government computers and with violating an espionage law, all in connection with his work with the site.

In 2010 Wikileaks, along with The New York Times and The Guardian, published classified U.S. military documents and field reports from the Iraq and Afghanistan war, which supporters say shed light on previously undisclosed aspects of the wars, including civilian death counts.

Two years later Assange, who is originally from Australia, took refuge in Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was accused of sexual assault.

The Swedish government announced in November that it was discontinuing that investigation.

Assange was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in April and has been in prison since the United States requested extradition

Earlier this week 100 physicians signed an open letter saying Assange was suffering from "psychological torture and medical neglect" in prison.

RELATED More than 100 physicians warn Julian Assange could die in prison

His hearing at Woolwich Crown Court is expected to begin Monday.

The court cannot evaluate whether Assange is innocent of the charges themselves, but can decide whether they are politically motivated, as his attorneys are expected to argue.

"This is not about left or right, we can unite on this, it is a dark force against [those] who want justice, transparency and truth," Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor in chief of WikiLeaks, said at Saturday's protest.

Assange could face a 170-year prison sentence if extradited to the United States and convicted.

ARYAN NATIONALISM
Namaste Trump: The US President’s approval rating in India has risen three-fold since 2016
Those who associate with the BJP are more likely to see Trump positively, said a US think tank.

TRUMP HAS HINDU FARMERS SUPPORT

A farmer from Telangana offers prayers to a statue of US 

President Donald Trump. | Noah Seelam/AFP

Manavi Kapur, qz.com
US president Donald Trump arrives in India next week at a time when Indians’ opinion of him has never been better. While he feels he hasn’t been “treated very well by India,” up to 56% of Indians are confident about his foreign policy, a Pew Research Center survey shows. In 2016, this figure stood at only 16%.

The US think tank’s Global Attitudes Survey was conducted between June 24, 2016, and October 2, 2019, through face-to-face interactions with 2,476 people.

Source: Pew Research Center via Quartz

“Those who associate more with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party are more likely than supporters of the Indian National Congress opposition party to voice confidence in Trump,” the research said.

Those closer to the BJP are also more likely to offer an opinion, it said. This aligns with Trump’s recent statement that despite the trade deal issues and snubs over Kashmir, he still liked Modi “a lot.”
Trade on the table

There is much speculation whether India and the US will be able to ink a trade deal during Trump’s first-ever state visit to India on February 24-25. The two countries have had several rounds of retaliatory tariff hikes in the past year. Some 48% of Indians disapproved of the US tariffs against Indian products, the survey showed.

It also appears that they are happy to export goods, services, and even talent while viewing foreign investments itself with some suspicion. Though a large majority of Indians said foreign companies setting up factories in India was good, they disapproved of Indian firms being bought out. 

Source: Pew Research Center via Quartz
The China piece

The US-China trade standoff is also a potentially important piece of the Modi-Trump talks, especially since America looks to India “as a counterbalance to growing Chinese influence around the globe,” Pew wrote. And the US could well use this sentiment in India to its advantage. Over 60% of Indians said the country should pick the US over China for stronger economic ties.

The US influence on the Indian economy, as compared to China’s, was also seen more positively. 

 

Source: Pew Research Center via Quartz

This article first appeared on Quartz.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

STRUCK GOLD
Geological Survey of India denies reports about discovery of 3,000 tonne gold deposits in UP

The earlier claim had been made by Sonbhadra district mining officer KK Rai.

Representative photo. | Michael Dalder/Reuters

The Geological Survey of India on Saturday denied news reports that around 3,000 tonnes of gold deposits had been discovered in Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh. The earlier claim had been made by district mining officer KK Rai.

“Such data was not given by anybody from GSI,” Director General M Sridhar told PTI hours after Rai’s claim. “GSI has not estimated such kind of vast resource of gold deposits in Sonbhadra district.”

Sridhar said the organisation shares its findings about any resources with state units after conducting its surveys. The northern wing of the GSI had carried out the work in the region between 1998 and 2000 and had shared its report with the local authorities for further action, he said. In that report, the GSI estimated around 160 kg of gold in the district, he said.

If the gold deposits were around 3,000 tonnes indeed, they would be almost five times India’s current reserve and the country would end up having the highest gold reserve after the United States. Rai had claimed that the deposits, worth Rs 12 lakh crore, were found in the district’s Son Pahadi and Hardi areas.

UP: 3,000-tonne gold deposits found in Sonbhadra – almost five times India’s current reserve

The deposits, worth Rs 12 lakh crore, were unearthed by the Geological Survey of India in the district’s Son Pahadi and Hardi areas.

Representative image. | Joel Saget/AFP

The Geological Survey of India has discovered gold deposits of around 3,000 tonnes in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonbhadra district – almost five times India’s current reserve, PTI reported on Friday. The deposits – worth Rs 12 lakh crore – were found in the district’s Son Pahadi and Hardi areas, said district Mining Officer KK Rai.

The work on finding gold in Sonbhadra started in 1992-’93, Rai said. The deposits in Son Pahadi is estimated to be around 2,943.26 tonnes, while the one at Hardi is around 646.16 kg. If these estimates turn out to be true, India will have the highest gold reserve after the United States. According to the World Gold Council, the US has 8,133.5 tonnes of gold, followed by Germany with 3,366 tonnes, and the International Monetary Fund with 2,814 tonnes.

The geology and mining department of the state government has sent a team to the district to map and geo-tag the area. The exercise is expected to be completed by Saturday, The Times of India reported. “After the completion of mapping, we will submit the report to the directorate for further action, like auctioning of gold blocks for mining,” Rai told the newspaper.

District Magistrate S Rajalingam said the geological survey and the directorate of geology and mining had sought permission to survey the area. “The team will submit the report to the directorate for further action,” he added.

IN THE DARK: LEADER MOVIE REVIEWS
‘What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael’ profiles the critic who changed cinema
The woman who redefined the review gets the last word here

Film critic Pauline Kael, seen here holding forth in a discussion

 with actor Tony Randall, did not suffer the old boys’ network lightly.
COURTESY PHOTO

Posted Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Kirk Boxleitner kboxleitner@ptleader.com

There’s really no way for any modern movie reviewer to write a review of the documentary “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael” without seeming at least slightly self-serving, because without Pauline Kael, something like 90% of modern movie reviewers simply would not be able to exist, and that includes your friendly neighborhood film reviewer here at The Leader.

Kael’s life and opinions were marked by ironic contradictions, with her legacy being a prime example, because much like Bruce Lee, who exhorted aspiring martial artists to eschew any one discipline in favor of “The Way of No Way,” what made Kael stand out most as a movie reviewer, which was her unique authorial voice, has also been imitated by endless successors, including those who disagreed vehemently with her opinions.

Kael eagerly embraced the new and avant-garde, even as so much of her own persona was modeled after the sharp-tongued proto-feminist women who featured so strongly in the cinema of the 1930s. Likewise, Kael explicitly championed the value of what she herself branded as “trash” movies, and yet she ruthlessly excoriated horror films as a class, most notably 1973’s “The Exorcist,” and was so backhanded in her few compliments toward 1977’s “Star Wars” that George Lucas named the villainous General Kael after her in his 1988 fantasy film “Willow.”

A rambunctious West Coast gal who always chafed at what she saw as the overly academic and austere East Coast style of movie reviewing, Kael nonetheless found her longest and most fruitful home in the offices of The New Yorker, the virtual definition of effete dilettante metropolitan magazines, where she frequently crossed swords with editor William Shawn over the conversational voice (and occasionally longshoreman vocabulary) she introduced to the field of reviewing as a whole.

As the documentary itself notes, while Kael clashed with fellow film reviewer Andrew Sarris over his 1962 essay promoting the “auteur theory” of cinema, which roughly posits that directors should be credited as the “authors” of their films — seriously, there’s an entire academic discipline devoted to this, so trust me when I say I’m way oversimplifying it — Kael herself inadvertently bolstered the notion of the film auteur by elevating the roles of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and yes, even Brian De Palma in her reviews.

Perhaps the best compliment I can pay to either Kael or this documentary is that, whenever Sarah Jessica Parker reads excerpts from Kael’s reviews in the documentary, or it tantalizes us with accompanying short-cut clips of even more films than I could keep track of in a single sitting, it reminded me so much of why I love movies in the first place, which is yet another irony, given how Kael ultimately retired, barely a year before her death from Parkinson’s disease, because she finally grew too disenchanted with the quality of cinema to continue.

Whether you agreed with her or not — to my mind, she totally missed the boat on “Blade Runner,” and her plaudits for “Last Tango in Paris” were mind-bogglingly misplaced — Pauline Kael did as much as any actor, director or producer to advance the cause of cinema. She recognized the innovations of the French New Wave, and through her critical recommendations, made possible the emergence of the American New Wave, whose influence is still felt in our theaters to this day.

And contrary to the hurt feelings of my fellow Orson Welles fan, Peter Bogdanovich, Kael elevated both Welles and his “Citizen Kane” screenwriter, Herman J. Mankiewicz, to their proper places of import in the public consciousness, through her 1971 book-length essay, “Raising Kane.”

A final irony in her legacy is how Kael’s crusade against ivory-tower elites in the field of reviewing arguably rendered her redundant, with her New Yorker colleague Renata Adler turning Kael’s rebellious acerbicism against her in a cutting 1980 essay, and the documentary illustrating how the internet has splintered any hope for a central voice for reviewing (watch for blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em pop-up appearances by YouTube’s Doug Walker, a.k.a. “That Guy with the Glasses,” and Danika Lee Massey, a.k.a. “Comic Book Girl 19”).

And yet, because of the gal who learned her snappy patter from hard-boiled dames in 1930s screwball comedies, I’d argue that anyone who enjoys film is better off … including this one kid from Washington, who learned all his best lines from smart-alecks in 1980s slob comedies, and who’s now lucky enough to Ferris Bueller his film opinions onto newspaper pages every week.

Thanks, Pauline.

P.S. As much fun as it is to see film directors like Quentin Tarantino geek out over Kael, and David Lean grouse about her, stick around for the closing credits, which feature some audio quotes that give the woman herself the literal “last word” on her life story.

‘Varda by Agnes’ allows pioneering film director to speak for herself

The artist captures a glimpse of herself in ‘Varda by Agnes,’ now playing at the Rose Theatre.
COURTESY PHOTO
Posted Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Kirk Boxleitner kboxleitner@ptleader.com

I last sampled Belgian-born French New Wave film director Agnes Varda’s work in my Dec. 6, 2017, review of the Academy Award-nominated “Faces Places” for The Leader, so it feels bittersweet to finally have the opportunity to do so again with “Varda by Agnes,” her final film, since she died last year at the age of 90.

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of a film career that spanned no fewer than six decades, and saw her shaping the development of the profoundly influential New Wave movement in film, is that Varda never stopped working, right up to the last, and even more, her most recent years were arguably among her most avant-garde, as she sought to redefine the entire nature of what a “film” could be.

This film basically consists of Varda regaling an audience of raptly attentive film aficionados with a series of endlessly fascinating anecdotes about her career, delivered with a dry and self-deprecating wit, and accompanied by corresponding clips, that I could have watched go on forever, even as they made my inner film reviewer cringe, because there’s no way I’ll be able to even briefly summarize those stories without feeling like I’ve left out something essential.

Varda started out as a still photographer of dramatic artists and theatrical types, including her future peers in filmmaking, and the dichotomy in her perspective was evident early on, because even as she admitted an affinity for staged shots, she also made it her mission to capture people on camera in their most unrehearsed moments.

We see this in 1967’s “Uncle Yanco,” a spur-of-the-moment short film that came about when Varda discovered a relative she didn’t even know she had in San Francisco, when we see her film multiple takes of her “first” meeting with her uncle Yanco Varda.

One of Varda’s early cinematographers recalls how the director sought to sneak in footage of village bakers and other ordinary people into her films, without making them aware they were on camera, and Sandrine Bonnaire, the lead actress of Varda’s 1985 “Vagabond,” recalls how she had to learn how to live as a nomadic backpacker for her role, at one point incurring blisters from repairing her own well-worn hiking shoes by hand.

Although Varda has directed celebrity actors such as Catherine Deneuve and Robert De Niro, her empathy for the dispossessed remains a constant throughout her films and later multimedia art exhibits, whether by highlighting feminist issues and shooting a documentary about the Black Panthers during the 1960s and ‘70s, or by giving voice to the homeless and the hungry in the 21st Century.

Varda’s 2000 documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” not only took advantage of more discreetly compact filmmaking technology to film urban and rural gleaners, without making them feel like they were under a spotlight, but it was also a forerunner of Varda’s multiscreen exhibits, such as rooms in which she combined her video with still photographs and even tangible examples of what she was shooting, whether it was a floor full of gleaners’ potatoes, or a coating of sand to simulate the beach whose waves could be seen washing ashore on the screens.

With Varda’s 2004 “The Widows of Noirmoutier,” she strove to ensure every viewer would have an entirely unique experience, by allowing a set number of seats in the screening rooms, and having each widow speak on a separate screen — each screen with its own set of headphones — so that no two viewers heard the same widow share her recollections.

With this background, it’s little surprise that Varda’s experimentalism led her to collaborate with the pseudonymously named photographer “JR” on 2017’s “Faces Places,” which not only made the inhabitants of country towns and industrial workplaces into the subjects of the duo’s literally larger-than-life work, but also turned those people’s hometowns and workplaces into the canvases for that same oversized artwork.

In spite of the failing eyesight that afflicted her in her final years, Varda never turned a blind eye to the injustices of the world, but she retained her humanistic belief in people, and she stubbornly held onto her optimism for a better world to the point that, when she wanted to bask in the beach settings she so enjoyed, she had the beach brought to her, by flooding city streets with sand as part of one of her art exhibits, as seen in 2008’s “The Beaches of Agnes.”

IN THE DARK: LEADER MOVIE REVIEWS
‘Parasite’ shows how class struggle makes all sides inhumane
Dark comedy decries capitalism, spares sympathy for no one

The destitute Kim family scrambles to make ends meet in 

Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite.”
COURTESY PHOTO

Posted Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Kirk Boxleitner kboxleitner@ptleader.com

When “Parasite” was initially released, it was one of a number of new releases at that time, and as time went on, as much praise as it garnered, I figured it wasn’t fresh enough to warrant a review.

Fortunately for me, “Parasite” won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, which has given it a new lease on life in theaters, so now, all I have to do is avoid saying anything that every other critic has already pointed out about this film.

For starters, while every other critic has correctly pointed out how profoundly class-conscious writer-director Bong Joon-ho is, it’s worth noting how adept he is at code-switching between what American and non-American audiences expect from their explicitly “class-conscious” films.

In 2013, Bong’s “Snowpiercer” posited a post-apocalyptic future in which the only survivors of humanity were all passengers on the same globe-spanning super-train, with the wealthy few living luxuriously near the front of the train, while the huddled masses of the hungry were packed tightly into the cars at the back of the train.

Even when American audiences are willing to acknowledge the yawning chasm that separates the haves from the have-nots, they still crave a Horatio Alger narrative of a lone hard-luck hero, pulling himself up by his bootstraps to ascend to the ranks of the more fortunate, and “Snowpiercer” cast no less than Captain America himself, Chris Evans, as the square-jawed underdog who finally makes it to the front of the train.

By contrast, “Parasite” shows the mostly unemployed but tirelessly laboring Kim family, searching for an escape from their squalid poverty by employing their ingenuity to ingratiate themselves with the affluent and indolent Park family, and yet, while Bong clearly decries the gulf between rich and poor, at no point does he encourage us to feel any empathy for the desperate, aspiring Kims, who are too devious and grasping to engender our sympathies.

After his multiple Oscar wins, Bong told interviewers that the seemingly absurd grotesqueries portrayed in “Parasite” are an inevitable consequence of capitalism, which makes the film’s worldview even more dire, because he’s essentially saying that capitalism turns us all into something less than fully human, whether it’s the oblivious yet nit-picky Parks, pampered to the point that their basic household skills have atrophied, or the remorselessly manipulative Kims, twisted into vulture-like scavengers by their cramped, unhygienic living conditions.

While there have been more adaptations of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” than I can list here, I submit that Bong is the only filmmaker to fully, successfully recreate the nightmarish scenario envisioned by Wells, of beautiful, mindless Eloi basking in the idyllic tranquility of their veritable Garden of Eden, while down below, the grubby, misshapen Morlocks toil out of sight, to make those creature comforts possible.

I’ve seen this film referred to as a fairy tale, but anyone who’s seen “Married … With Children” or “Seinfeld” should recognize it instead as a pitch-black sitcom, with the scheming, filthy Kims as the trashy Bundys and the father of the urbane Park family demonstrating many of Jerry Seinfeld’s finicky fixations, including an oft-repeated obsession with people who “cross the line” that actually could have been a sequence of dialogue in a “Seinfeld” episode.

Bong casts his good-luck charm, the craggy-faced Song Kang-ho — who appeared in Bong’s “Memories of Murder” in 2003, “The Host” in 2006 and “Snowpiercer” in 2013 — as the father of the Kim family, and as buffoonish as his behavior can be through much of the film, there is a tragic grace in the scene where he quietly concedes to his son the futility of making plans, whether for self-improvement or for a better future.

Indeed, it’s only because Bong keeps us a shuffle-step emotionally removed from the struggles of the Kims that we can appreciate the surreal, ghastly loveliness in some of the film’s most cringe-worthy scenes, from the devastation wrought by a deluge of rain on a working-class neighborhood, to a laugh-out-loud moment of a young woman savoring her hidden cigarettes, even as she sits on a toilet that belches out black sewage water.

An American treatment of this material would be more likely to come across as a didactic polemic, stridently advocating some solution or another, but for all the Horatio Alger-esque aspirations of the son of the Kim family, Bong appears to have arrived at the conclusion that the system is already irreparably broken, so the least we can do is appreciate the spectacle of the wreckage.

https://www.ptleader.com/stories/trump-other-pollutants-are-making-life-literally-difficult,2398

Auschwitz museum calls on Amazon to drop Nazi books

Among anti-Semitic books available on the site is one written by a Nazi convicted of crimes against humanity. The museum called it 'hateful, virulently anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda.'


The Auschwitz museum called on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to remove Nazi-era anti-Semitic children's books from the global online shopping platform.

"Hateful, virulently antisemitic Nazi propaganda is available for sale not only on @AmazonUK," the Auschwitz Memorial tweeted at the American e-commerce billionaire.


"Books by authors like Julius Streicher can be found also on @amazon & @AmazonDE. Such books should be removed immediately. | @JeffBezos @Amazon," it wrote in a Twitter post on Friday.

The Holocaust Education Trust (HET) also tweeted a statement calling on the Amazon founder to remove the books from the site. Among those on sale is an anti-Semitic children's book called "The Poisonous Mushroom" (Der Giftpilz), written by Nazi party member Julius Streicher and published in 1938.

Read more: Fresh Nazi songbook scandal hits Austrian far-right Freedom party

Streicher "was the founder of the virulently antisemitic Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer," read the statement issued by HET. "He was executed for Crimes Against Humanity ... The front cover alone draws on longstanding and offensive antisemitic tropes."

Read more: Why Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' is a political issue


'The Poisonous Mushroom' by Julius Streicher, the Nazi founder of the anti-Semitic newspaper 'Der Stürmer.' The Auschwitz Museum and Holocaust Educational Trust called on Amazon to remove the book from the website.

The book is offered on Amazon in German, English, French and Spanish. Over the last year and a half, Amazon has pulled several books by far-right authors including David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, according to the New York Times.

Read more: Germany: AfD apologizes after outcry over 'racist' coloring book

Last month marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Operated by Nazi Germany from 1940 until 1945 in then-occupied Poland, Auschwitz was part of a brutal network of concentration camps across Europe set up to carry out Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of genocide against 10 million European Jews. More than 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz, and two-thirds of the entire Jewish population in Europe were killed by Nazis.

Read more:As Holocaust survivors grow older, activists keep their stories alive

lc/mm (AFP)

Ryanair boss accused of racism after saying 'terrorists are generally Muslims'

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary has been accused of racism and Islamophobia after saying he supports the profiling of "single Muslim males" at airports. He said he believes terrorists are "generally Muslims."








Budget airline Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary called for the profiling of "males of a Muslim persuasion" at airports to prevent terrorism, in an interview on Saturday with British newspaper The Times.

"That is where the threat is coming from," he said. His comments have led to accusations of Islamophobia and racism from British and German politicians.

O'Leary suggested that checks on families should be less stringent while Muslim men flying alone should be targeted by airport security.

"Who are the bombers? They are going to be single males traveling on their own," the Irishman said in Saturday's interview.

"If you are traveling with a family of kids, on you go; the chances you are going to blow them all up is zero," he added.

"You can't say stuff, because it's racism, but it will generally be males of a Muslim persuasion. Thirty years ago it was the Irish," O'Leary said.

Read more: Easyjet, Thomas Cook and Ryanair — Brexit's effect on tourism's big names


Ryanair is Europe's largest budget carrier with more than 2,400 daily flights

Accused of 'Islamophobia' and 'racism'

German Green party politician accused O'Leary of spreading Islamophobia with his words.

"Why can someone like O'Leary spread Islamophobia like this today? Because he thinks people don't care. It's time to boycott Ryanair. Also for many other reasons," he wrote on Twitter.

Many other commentators on social media have called for a Ryanair boycott in wake of the comments.

British writer and TV presenter Adil Ray wrote that "this is discrimination, pure and simple."


British politician Khalid Mahmood from the opposition Labour party also condemned O'Leary's words, saying he was "encouraging racism."

"In Germany this week a white person killed eight people. Should we profile white people to see if they're being fascists?" Mahmood told The Times.

The boss of Ryanair, an airline that operates mainly in Europe, has previously caused controversy by suggesting that passengers should have to pay to use the toilet on his flights and that he may charge a "fat tax" on obese people.

SCIENCE
Why do men send women 'dick pics' without consent?

Whether dating apps or texting, it's all too common for women to receive random, unsolicited sexual images from men. Scientifically, cyberflashing hasn't received much attention, but initial studies offer some answers.


WHY DO MEN GET NAKED IN PUBLIC 

DRUNK OR SOBER

EXHIBITIONISM

I GOT ME A WANG DANG DOODLE


A sex scandal is shaking up French politics these days. Parisian mayor candidate Benjamin Griveaux has abandoned his campaign after a video allegedly featuring him masturbating surfaced online.

Believed to have sent it to a love interest, Griveaux has not yet confirmed or denied if the video indeed features him. Although the clip was apparently sent in a consensual context, men's proclivity for sending random, unsolicited sexual images or videos to women, commonly known as "dick pics," is a familiar phenomenon in the digital age.

In 2017, 53% of 18 to 35-year-old women surveyed by British market research and data analytics firm YouGov said they had received unsolicited dick pics. For those between 35 and 54, it was 35%.

There's nothing inherently wrong about sharing sexual images or videos — for some, it's exciting and erotic. Snapchat's particularly useful in this regard — images only last a maximum of 10 seconds, after which they're deleted by the app (to what extent this is permanent is unclear, but that's another story).

But three in four women say they've been sent pictures of men's genitalia without their consent; in social media chats, for example, while online-dating, or even in public, through sharing functions like Apple's AirDrop.

Read more: Scared of getting attached ⁠— Why we run away from relationships


Even in public places, men anonymously send obscene photos to women using sharing functions

What is "cyberflashing"?

Why are men compelled to send photos of their genitalia to complete strangers? A Canadian study from 2019 was one of the first to examine the motivations and expectations of the men sending these images, as well as their demographics.

It found that cyberflashers were most commonly motivated by a "transactional mindset." Most of the anonymous 1087 men who were surveyed as part of the study said they sent these pictures in the hope of receiving similar ones in return.

The second most common reason given by respondents was that they were searching for a partner.

Results also showed that men who admitted they had sent a picture without being asked showed a greater degree of narcissism and sexism. However, explicit misogyny could only be inferred from very few of the questionnaires. Researchers found this mindset in only 6% of respondents. They concluded the majority of senders could be described as "misguided" rather than "hateful."

But... why?

In early 2019, Moya Sarner made a similar observation for the Guardian UK when she decided to conduct research inside the epicenter of digital sexism: Reddit, one of the largest online forums. There, she asked men directly if and why they had ever sent a dick pic. The men were allowed to answer anonymously. The thread exploded.

Again, different motives were given. These ranged from a desire for validation and a confidence boost due to low self esteem, to the goal of arousal, to some kind of probability calculation. Theyhoped, at some point, a woman would engage with them, Sarner said.

In 2016, American clinical psychologist David Ley attempted to consider the phenomenon using a scientific lens. But as there weren't any empirical studies to draw on until after the publication of his essay, he had to limit himself to comparisons and speculation. As the Canadian study suggested, Ley concluded that this behavior is often based on men's misinterpretation of women's sexual interest.

Read more: Infidelity: A fling doesn't have to end everything


The unsolicited sending of pictures of one’s penis is a criminal offence

Inconclusive scientific evidence

According to Ley, in anonymous environments, men, in particular, tend to display more sexualized behavior. In addition, male mating strategies are historically characterized by a certain boldness and audacity, Ley says. From this perspective, negative attention is often better than none at all.

For some, the thought of sexual rejection is the main source of excitement, for others, it's exactly what they fear. Ley suggests men with a heightened fear of rejection use dick pics to gauge whether their naked bodies are considered attractive, figuring an online interaction might be less painful than in real life.

The Canadian study results show sending unsolicited sexual content is mainly a result of men's ignorance. Too often, men assume what they think is an appropriate message to send will also be received as such by the women they send them to.

The fact that this might not be the case might not be clear to all, especially "first-time offenders," Ley says. There exists a lack of necessary clarification, he adds, suggesting young adults be taught to speak openly about their feelings and preferences from an early stage.

What to do?

Often, women simply ignore these unwanted images in order to avoid giving the sender the attention they are asking for.

But there are other options the senders should be aware of. After all, sending unsolicited obscene pictures is not a trivial offense. Recipients can make them public or have them prosecuted. In Germany, sharing sexual content without consent is a crime, which comes under the unsolicited distribution of pornographic material. This is punishable by fines or imprisonment of up to one year.

As of February 2020, those affected can protect themselves from having to see such unwanted content while using Twitter. With the twitter extension safeDM, inappropriate pictures can be filtered out of personal messages using artificial intelligence.



WHY LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD IS CAUGHT BETWEEN INNOCENCE AND SEXUALITY
German Romanticism

The Brothers Grimm describe Little Red Riding Hood as a young girl, innocent and blond - but that wasn't always the case. The girl is much older in other versions of the tale, and there wasn't always a happy ending either. That was a German twist to the story. Little Red Riding Hood first started in France.

1/10

DW RECOMMENDS


Why Little Red Riding Hood is caught between innocence and sexuality

Is Little Red Riding Hood just a naive little girl? Only in the tale by the German Brothers Grimm. In older versions of the story, she flirts and the wolf seduces her. Here's a look at various Little Red Riding Hoods. (29.11.2016)

Date 21.02.2020
Author Sascha Schüler
Keywords cyberflashing, genitals, psychology, nude pictures, narcissism