Garance Franke-Ruta's article in the Wall Street Journal about Girls Gone Wild and similar recordings of young women doing sexual or pornographic things has provoked an interesting blog conversation. Garance recommends raising the minimum age at which one can engage in acts of pornography from eighteen to twenty-one. Her argument is this:
It is true that teenagers become legal adults at the age of 18, right around the time they graduate from high school. The age of consent to serve in the armed forces is also 18 (17 with parental consent), as is the minimum voting age since 1971, when an amendment to the Constitution lowered it from 21. But the federal government is already happy to bar legal adults from engaging in certain activities. Most notably, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 raised the drinking age to 21 (by threatening to withhold highway funds from states that did not go along). In practice, the age limit is flouted on college campuses and in private homes. But it has still had a positive effect, not least by driving down fatalities from drunk driving.
A new legal age for participating in the making of erotic imagery--that is, for participating in pornography--would most likely operate in the same way, sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world's next Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of "talent." And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself--long since routinized--but its "barely legal" category. "Girls Gone Wild"--like its counterparts on the Web--is treated as a kind of joke. It isn't. There ought to be a law.
Garance points out that youthful indiscretions of this kind can follow a woman for the rest of her life, now that the Internet provides a handy place for storing videos and pictures, and given the way the world views women who have bared themselves in public (or even in private), the consequences could be severe.
Avedon of Sideshow disagrees with Garance's proposal:
I was once setting up for an interview about porn with a few other women, including one who had been a Playboy centerfold. (And also with Alice Nutter, which was very cool.) The ex-Playmate had said something about how she wouldn't want her daughter to do it, and I asked her why. She said something about how she'd rather her daughter finished college and did all sorts of respectable things. "I never posed for Playboy," I said. "I have my degree. And you're the one who has a column in a daily newspaper, and I'm not." She allowed as how I might have had a point. Her posing for Playboy when she was young had gained her all sorts of entry into a better life that none of her working-class friends had managed, and neither, with all my middle-class advantages, had I. So maybe baring your knockers for the camera isn't necessarily the life-ruining event Garance thinks it is.
Being indentured for the rest of your life by student loans or foolish credit card decisions could just end up being a life-ruining thing, though. But we don't seem to get nearly as upset about that.
But I wish Garance would rethink her whole approach. The problem isn't that girls get drunk and flash for the camera. The problem is that we still raise kids to think there is something dirty about sex, and we never quite get over it.
And Amanda of Pandagon partly disagrees with both Garance and Avedon, though she agrees with Avedon on this:
I agree with her that even if Garance, like me, is mostly interested in giving young people the space to experiment sexually without a bunch of punitive cameras coming in to stubbornly insist that 18-year-old women's experimentation belongs to slut-bashing 40-year-old wankers, there's exactly no way that a law like the one Garance is proposing would be used in good faith. Instead, it would be used to slut-bash, just as "Girls Gone Wild" is about punishing young women for sexual experimentation. Our culture is so stuck on the idea that the people in the wrong are Girls Who Do It, not the guys who rape them, not the creepy old fucks who want to punish them by taking away their contraception and plastering their faces all over advertisements on cable TV so you know that they're subhuman sex toys who don't deserve respect—there's no way that such a law wouldn't just turn into more witch-burning of Girls Who Do It.
Where she agrees with Garance is this:
I do take some issue with Avedon bringing up a Playboy model she spoke with, who was far from being punished for posing naked. While it's true that some women do very well from youthful porn displays, Playboy modeling is often the exception that proves the rule. The wink-and-nod "girl next door" thing is similiar to the Jessica Simpson "I'm a sex object virgin" thing, where the price you pay to be a respectable sex object is a lot of kow-towing to the idea that those other sex objects, they're the horrible sluts. You know, those stupid bitches who shook their tits at a camera for a T-shirt, the ones who are asking for it.
(Cut-and-paste is an excellent way of writing a blog post. See how far down the page I am already, and I haven't said one single thing yet? If I didn't have a head cold I might go back and rewrite this all. But I have a head cold and the clips will stay.)
And what will I say on all this? I think it pays to step one step back and ask what it is exactly that is going on with the Girls Gone Wild videos and what it is that might make a woman who posed for Playboy do well in certain cases. The answer has very little to do with women's sexual needs and a lot to do with who has more money and power in the society.
The Girls Gone Wild videos exist not because young women are experimenting sexually (that can happen in bedrooms and cars all over the place) but because someone with a camera arranged the situation to happen. The setup is a commercial one and the audience for it does not consist of young women. If we regard this as sexual experimentation then it is a commercial sexual experimentation.
The ex-Playmate may be successful in her later career, true, but only if she picks that career very, very carefully. Being a bishop is out, so is being a politician or a teacher, and probably a lawyer. I'm not sure how many columnists one might have out of the Girls Gone Wild participants, but I doubt there would be enough good jobs for all of them. For most participants the participation will not be a thing to add to the old resume.
The reason for that is partly in Avedon's statement about sex being viewed as dirty, but perhaps even more in who it is that is assumed to have been dirtied by sex. It is still usually the woman whose reputation is smeared or whose "purity" is lost.
Would raising the minimum age of legal participation in erotic imagery be a good idea? I'm not sure. I have some problems with the fact that an eighteen-year old can go and fight in a war in Iraq, come home and then not get served a beer in an American bar. This seems illogical and patronizing. It seems that the age of maturity should be the same for all purposes.