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May 31, 2008
Virginia Haussegger says that just after giving a speech at a Sydney weekend conference titled ''Let's Talk About Sex'', run by the Australian Reproductive Health Alliance, in which she argued against the increasingly overt use of sexism in media advertising and popular culture, particularly music videos, an attractive 22-year-old woman stood up and said, ''Look, I just want to say I'm a slut, and I'm proud of it.''
 Haussegger says that what followed was a pretty fierce debate about the word ''slut'' and sexual power. She says that:
I was fascinated to learn that many of the young women viewed aggressive sexual behaviour as a form of ''female empowerment''. Unlike me, they didn't feel offended or degraded by the kind of soft-porn imagery in much of our daily media. Far from criticising it, they were more inclined to celebrate it. My arguments about the objectification of women, and disempowerment caused by the reduction of female sexuality to the sum of our body parts, just didn't wash with this hip, young crowd. I was effectively shouted down
The cover of the ANU Law Student Society's quarterly publication Peppercorn is another example of this divide. Sex is being used to sell the magazine.
Haussegger says that the fact that it's not the students but the lecturers who have been offended by the ''sexist'' cover speaks volumes about a very different generational response to what constitutes sexism.
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