BECKY Watts has been described as a sweet, caring and feisty young woman.

You can’t escape the press surrounding the story; she was murdered and dismembered by her stepbrother.

Much of the focus has been on his obsession with pornography, which he admitted to viewing almost daily.

It focused on teenage girls and his collection included a real rape of a girl in her own house.

Violent attitudes towards women are prolific in pornography and in the last decade have become more extreme.

Women are reduced to the sum of their body parts; just a piece of flesh that (some) men feel entitled to use and abuse as they please.

Many like to view these incidents as isolated, yet if you look at the bigger picture of our increasingly pornified culture (whether that be five-year-olds toting playboy bunny pencil cases or adult women having labiaplasty), it doesn’t take a genius to seefigure out that it is all connected.

The constant objectification and limited representation of women in the media serves the idea that women are sex objects.

This erodes women’s confidence and leaves them vulnerable to coercion and control because all women are supposed to be sexy for men.

After petitions were raised against Ann Summers UK for their recent window displays, their response was that being sexy is empowering to women (especially if you’ve got a whip in hand).

Becky Watts is a victim of a sexist culture. How many more women have to die before we wake up to the dangers of the pornification of the main stream?

  • Carmel Offord started the Cut It Out campaigns against media sexism with Jessica Woodfall.