All Your Breasts Are Belong to Us (Unless We Tell You Otherwise)
Kerry Howley | May 7, 2007, 11:08am
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, the very sharp Garance Franke-Ruta suggests we rewrite First Amendment jurisprudence to keep 20-year-old breasts off the Internet:
Joe Francis is a cultural pollutant. But as he contemplates life in prison, the rest of us ought to contemplate what he has wrought -- or what kind of society we have allowed him to create on our watch…
consider how much has changed in recent years. Once upon a time, a picture was just a picture…Just as Google transforms us all into archivists of previously fleeting moments, so too does the new digital recording technology give youthful acts a permanent life. In the case of Mr. Francis and his empire of imitators -- not to mention angry ex-boyfriends with digital flash cards and a long memory -- it can transform the playful exhibitionism of young women into scarlet letters that follow them around for life.
Is there anything to be done? Curtailing the demand side of such a "market" is difficult, requiring moralistic sermons and abridgements of speech. But the supply side is more vulnerable to change. It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21--"consent," in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.
Franke-Ruta is right! We don't want "playful exhibitionism" to morph into future-killing "scarlet letters." So let's channel a little Nathaniel Hawthorne circa 1850: Woman engages in sexual act, is shunned by society, dies alone. In Franke-Ruta's moral universe, the ideal response to this situation is: Prevent the sexual act, or at least prevent anyone from knowing what transpired. The problem isn't norms that sentence a sexual woman to societal exile; it's the ease with which naïve, silly adult women find themselves showing some nip.
It'd have been nice for Hester Prynne if norms had evolved to tolerate, rather than stigmatize, the sexuality of women. We're obviously headed that way. In an important sense, the reputational cost of stripping down on camera has never been lower. (Thanks, Paris!) By the time the current crop of flash-ready 18-year-olds graduate college, the cost will be lower still.
To retard this (ultimately beneficial) evolution, you've got to perpetuate the idea that the display of adult mammaries is an earth-shattering, life-altering, and above all shameful event. One way to do that is to jack up the age of consent and the cost of participation, turning adult women into victims and amateur filmmakers into sex criminals. I see how that's an ideal outcome for Rick Santorum-ites, the Independent Women's Forum, and Concerned Women for America; young women in general, not so much.
Morat20 | May 7, 2007, 3:57pm | #
Hmm. My thoughts:
The real issue here isn't naked 18 year old chicks, or 18 year old chicks having sex (at least not to me, and I suspect not to the original writer of the article).
It's the "drunken" bit. Now, as I understand it -- drunk people, of any age, are generally not considered entirely capable of consent. Sex is a bit of a grey area, insofar as sometimes it's just drunken sex and sometimes it's drunken rape and thus highly situational, but contract law is a bit more black and white.
I'm pretty sure you cannot, while incapcitated by alcohol, enter into a legally binding contract. Since each and every "Girl Gone Wild" has had to sign a release and consent form, the questions are thus: "Was she drunk or sober when she signed the release? Was she drunk or sober when they filmed it? Did they get the release before or after the filming?".
I see it like this:
1) Sober signing of release, drinking, filming of drunk flashing/antics/sex = Legally Okay.
2) Drunk signing of release, filming of drunk flashing/antics/sex = Not Legal.
3) Filming of drunk OR sober antics/sex/flashing, drinking, then drunken signing of release == Not Legal.
Rather than mucking around with the pornographic age of consent, if one actually wanted to address the problem you'd be better off doing things like "Following the GGW crew around with a videocamera, filming them getting drunken consents, then offering the girls free legal aide to sue the shit out of GGW".
If you wanted to approach it from a legal perspective (actually passing laws -- we'll ignore whether it's a good law to pass), a much more targeted and workable approach would be to require consent forms a day prior to filming or a day after, or require breathalizer tests and notarized results on the consent form, that sort of thing.
The problem isn't the boobs, the flashing, or the drunken sex so much as it is the legal and ethical issues surrounding the use if the resulting images. If those images were obtained through an invalid contract (because the signer was, for instance, wasted off of his or her ass and thus unable to legally sign a contract)....that's the actual problem.
Drunk and doing stupid things? Always going to happen. Drunk flashing? Always going to happen. Drunk sex? Really always going to happen. People catching it on videotape or film? Always going to happen, and more and more likely every day with cameras everywhere.
Having those images of you sold for profit without a valid consent form? Now there's an actual problem that's worth talking about.
