Girls Gone "Wild". How It All Works.

Amanda at Pandagon has written about the Miss New Jersey "scandal." Poor Miss New Jersey. She was supposedly blackmailed about some racy pictures that were available on the Internet. Click on the Pandagon link to see what those pictures look like and read Amanda's take on the whole sordid saga.

Now, it could be that there are further pictures showing her eating barbequed Christian babies, who knows. But if these are the pictures that almost made her lose her tiara, well, the world has gone crazy.

Reading about this made me remember all those arguments about "Girls Gone Wild" and the new-fangled form of sexist exploitation which consists of appropriating women's photographs on the Internet and then playing various sexist games with them. Many participants in that debate argued that the pictures couldn't possibly hurt a woman's later career opportunities at all, even if some men rated it for fuckability without her permission, say.

This beauty pageant story makes me think that the pictures will hurt the women later on. The double-standard is well and thriving, it seems. Now, if you really want to have the top of your head blow off, contrast this policing of women's sexual lives with that Evolutionary Psychology argument that women are by nature coy and less interested in casual sex than men.