While I've been out... a lot of new noise is going on about the same old thing: dealing with the treatment of women in porn. Looking again at Joe Francis, Garance Franke-Ruta comes up with a solution that strikes me as a brilliant way for making things worse - let's raise the age of consent for porn to 21 from 18.
One of the few regulations that pornographers follow with strict compliance is certifying that the performers in a 
porn shoot are over 18. This even happens internationally, because distributors in the US are subject to fines and imprisonment for even distributing material with underage minors from overseas. As you might guess, when you make 18 the line in these sorts of things, you get a lot of... people between the ages of 18 and 21 making porn.
When I say "brilliant," I mean that genuinely - it's amazing that none of the older women prudes on the right didn't get here first. As J says, they've moved the age of childhood up progressively (raising the drinking age, etc), so this would hardly be out of line. When I first saw the article, I thought, "well this one will be laughed out of town quickly" but not so, as the circle of lefty bloggers moved to contemplate the logic of one of their own.
But the idea is crazy, and it's dangerous - America's problems with sexuality and fetishizing youth cannot be solved in one fell swoop.
In the yin and yang of arguments over porn, both ends are problematic - the sex prudery of conservatives that tries to ban porn and the overly naive "sex positive, anything goes" approach of liberals. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for freedom and people doing what feels right. But I also know it's just not that simple.
There's a charming naivete, almost, to the way some folks - especially straight, liberal men - view porn. There's a lot of trying to separate out the "good" porn from the "bad" porn (usually that which involves fetishes, and obvious awful things like violence, severely underage kids, etc), and saying that once these distinctions are in place one can be dealt with, without affecting the other. And along the same lines, recent feminism has younger women trying to separate the "stigma" of porn from the healthy expression of their sexuality one obvious example being, naturally, Amanda Marcotte.
The problem is that these distinctions are, in the larger sense, hogwash. The notion that women who are
sexual amount to "dirty girls" didn't start and doesn't end with porn. Take that out - and gay male porn is the obvious example here - you've still got a stigma attached to sex work. And you've still got dirty girls.
The argument against Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild, ultimately, has everything to do with America's notions about class. Young, college age women have been doing porn forever; but they weren't, usually, the ones literally in college. Francis - a definite low-life - has exploited a group of women where participation in porn is unexpected... fine, upstanding girls in college, for God's sake, who should be doing better with their lives than... well, than what? The answer, which no one really likes, is that they should be better than the usual class of women who wind up in porn.
Liberals shouldn't romanticize pornography - it's a harsh, unpleasant business that attracts a lot of the worst elements and thrives, in no small degree, on exploiting the frailties of others (including its customers). That doesn't mean all porn is rape, or all pornstars are terrible people who should suffer social isolation for being in it. But it does mean that when you look under the rock, you may not like all of what you see. It's not pretty.
And none of this is solved by raising the age of consent. Indeed acres of mischief would be introduced, as presumably a slew of porn made with 18-21 year olds (the teen girl and gay twink market) would have to be pulled off shelves. What of the vast circle of teens with webcams and MySpace pages and a taste for adventure? Technology has once again leapt past our boundaries, and once again, our first reaction is regulate. But that's probably not the solution here, when self-regulation figures so heavily into these choices.
Amanda Marcotte's point about a zone for youthful experimentation is valid and speaks to the larger issues around drinking age and driving ages and the like, where teens have been progressively regulated out of their rights since, well, I was about 18. At what point will we stop trying to extend childhood? At what point will we face the facts that kids need to grow up, be in the world, and do messy things like drink, drive, and have sex? And that at some point, they will have to make mistakes, and learn from them?
But even more troubling, when will we start to unpack the baggage that really drives this discussion - our uptight notions about sex and sexuality and our fascination with youth, to say nothing of our approach to gender and power? There's just no way to avoid Garance's implications that college age women need protection from themselves, and that the state needs to force them into it. If you think that will stop Joe Francis from wandering the beaches of Cancun, picking off the weak ones in the herd, you're kidding yourself. The way to stop him is to let the laws we already have, and our common decency, win out. Because when it comes to acting out, he's got what the beaches want. At some point, that 19 year old needs to figure out for herself that the way to not wind up drunk and topless starts with her.
Comments