Porn Again

How the new pornographers are exploiting young women, and why liberals should care.

By Garance Franke-Ruta

If I had intentionally set out to write an article intended to provoke a backlash that made liberals look like a bunch of leering louts eager to ogle 18-year-old girls and transform society into a deregulated libertarian paradise where low-income women are routinely exploited, I think I could scarcely have come up with a better approach than the Wall Street Journal piece I published on May 4 arguing for raising the age of consent for appearing in pornography to 21. Such a backlash was, perhaps, entirely fitting, given that the topic was a soft-core porn company that has cut deals with major Democratic Party donors and preys mainly on young women in red states But it was also disappointing in the extreme.

Critics of my article have raised some good points, but by and large the responses were disturbingly marked by a far greater concern for access to pornographic depictions of teenagers than for the exploitation of young women. “I Want My Barely Legal Porn!” Matthew Yglesias trumpeted at his eponymous blog, boasting his argument “befits a man whose blog was once featured in Playboy‘s ‘Girls of the Pac Ten’ issue (really!).” Not to be outdone in proving his appreciation for young women’s forms, blogger Lance Mannion prefaced his defense of current law with this panting anecdote:

I have begun to worry about myself. I had been a long time praiser of older women, proud of the fact that on the beach I could look past the 17 and 18 year olds in bikinis to ogle their mothers…. Lately, though——well, lately, not so much. There’s a college town near here that because it’s where our drug store, video store, church, and barber are, I visit a lot. It’s spring, the weather has been beautiful, and that means the lawns around town are dotted with blankets on which lie somehow already magically tanned college women in mostly nothing more than their glistening skin, and on my last trip up there I almost drove off the road, twice.

Others liberals, finding the present raunch culture wanting, posited a need for an even more sex-saturated media environment. “If the brain-damaged idea of sex as explotation [sic] is the problem, I say let us militate against that idea,” wrote thespian Roy Edroso at Alicublog. “Let us have wide and unapologetic dissemination of sexual imagery.” And yet others called for a loosening of existing laws intended to prevent the exploitation of the young. Avedon Carol, a UK-based founder of Feminists Against Censorship, argues that existing child porn laws go more than far enough. “As if being treated ‘like a child’ when you are a child – and therefore not recognized as owning your own sexuality – were not bad enough, Garance wants to treat us as children when we are well past childhood,” she objected. My colleague Ezra Klein took a different tack and argued that not only should the minimum-porn age not be raised, but the drinking age should be lowered. “If you’re an adult at 18-years-old, you should be able to have a beer,” and also able to be sexually commodified, he wrote, before conceding, “I certainly hope my little sister isn’t going to be flashing anyone.”

Like Klein, Yglesias was only too eager to defend the rights of unrelated low-income 18 year-olds with limited job opportunities to join the porn industry, where, presumably, they will all be treated better than the Wal-Mart stock clerks about whose working conditions today’s progressive college students care so much. “One might hope that in a more just society with broader educational and economic options fewer people would earn their keep this way,” Yglesias wrote on Campus Progress, “but at the end of the day, making it illegal for these women to be in porn will reduce, rather than expand, their opportunities.”

Sadly, in the rush to defend raunch culture, neither Yglesias nor the other critics closely examined the record of “opportunities” provided by Joe Francis’ firm (or others in its genre), the cases against them, and the long history of failed legal attempts to prosecute firms like his for abusive treatment of 16-21 year olds under existing laws. Nor did they look at the major Democratic donors who have helped Francis expand his reach and normalize his approach of creating “gratuitous nudity, end to end,” even though such efforts have helped fuel the backlash against “Hollywood liberals” that has been so successfully used against would-be Democratic office-holders.

Let’s look at what Francis and his company have been charged with over the years, and how slowly the wheels of justice have turned against them. Among other things Francis has been:

• Sued for damages by the parents of seven girls from Florida and Alabama who were 16 and 17 in 2003 when Francis’ firm allegedly – among other charges — picked two of them up on the street, brought them to a hotel room, induced them to perform sex acts with each other, and filmed them. The case was filed in 2003 and was only settled this April, after Francis was jailed on contempt of court charges after becoming abusive to the women during settlement talks.

• Charged with misdemeanor sexual battery against an 18-year-old in Los Angeles based on events that took place in January 2007.

• Fined $2.1 million in 2006 after pleading guilty to federal charges that he failed to document the ages of women he filmed, charges first filed in 2003.

• Indicted by Florida prosecutors for feloniously using minor girls in sexual films.

• Alleged, in a Los Angeles Times profile, to have had sex with a drunken 18-year-old virgin in the back of a Girls Gone Wild bus outside of Chicago despite her repeatedly telling him no and that he was hurting her.

Yglesias is right that these are not Ivy League students, but young women from less prestigious schools still have ambitions and lives that can be wrecked, and even nightclub dancers with B-averages from public high schools in red states have an interest in not being abused or manipulated. Consider the case of Southwest Texas University student Amber Kulhanek, who had drinks poured down her throat by bartenders after being seated in a barbershop chair during a wet-T shirt contest in Mexico. She wound up with her nude image plastered all over an American cable television station and on the Wild Party Girls Internet site maintained by GGW imitator the Arco Media Group Inc. She was drunk and never even signed a consent form. And yet she was forced to sue in order to get her image removed from television and the internet. Friends and family saw the ad, according to an Austin-American Statesman report, and strangers began asking her to take shirt off for them. She was so traumatized by the experience she withdrew from school, according to her lawyer, who ultimately won a $5 million judgment for her after Arco failed to contest the case. “We’re hoping this sends a message to these pariahs that they can’t booze (the women) up…so they really can’t give consent,” her lawyer told reporters. “It’s really like rape.”

That same year Becky Lynn Gritzke, a Florida State University student, sued Francis for using her image without a release after footage of her baring her breasts at a Mardi Gras celebration wound up on a billboard in Italy advertising the company, as well on the company’s website. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum.

Both these suits were resolved in 2002, four years after the first Girls Gone Wild videos were released, launching the entire genre. Since then, Francis’ empire has only grown. All told, The Los Angeles Times reported in 2006, “more than a dozen women have sued him, alleging that his company used images of them exposing their bodies on ‘Girls Gone Wild’…without their permission.” But “only a few have convinced the courts that they were unwitting victims. For the most part, judge and juries have sided with Francis’ 1st Amendment argument that the plaintiff’s images were captured in public places and that the company was free to use them as it pleased.”

Indeed, Francis’ earliest videos used footage that was obtained, without accompanying waivers, from news station B-rolls of spring break flashers and personal camcorder tapes of bare-breasted women at Mardi Gras. Since those days, obtaining consent and documenting ages have become a fetishized part of the Girls Gone Wild act. Today, Francis’ company appears so eager to film the youngest women it can, it has given crew members $1,000 bonuses for discovering 17-year olds out at nightclubs for their birthdays who are willing to disrobe on film the minute they turn 18.

The lawsuits over consent, exposure, and kiddie porn have done little to dissuade some of the biggest names in liberal Hollywood from trying to get in on Francis’ highly lucrative business. In 2002, Rolling Stone reported that Francis signed a deal to expand the Girls Gone Wild concept with the Mandalay production company run by Peter Guber, a major donor to the DNC during the early 1990s who was also, according to a 1997 Washington Post story, an overnight guest at the Clinton White House. Guber gave the DNC $20,000 as recently as 2000, according to FEC reports.

Francis also signed a Girls Gone Wild feature film deal with MGM, Los Angeles Magazine reported in 2002, having attracted the attention of Chris McGurk, then the vice chairman and chief operating office of MGM. McGurk in 2004 gave $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and another $2,000 to John Kerry for President, Inc., FEC reports reveal.

Such connections, one group of progressive values activists explained to me in early 2006, mean that liberal Democrats are exceptionally loathe to go after pornographers – or even to try to put much distance between themselves and those who profit from the exploitation of barely legal girls. Francis donated the maximum of $2,000 to Kerry in March, 2004, as well. There is no FEC record of the money being returned.

Can the harms that attend our new raunch culture be resolved, as some suggest, by amending the consent waiver process? Or will it require something more?

The proposal — first suggested to me by Ann Bartow, author of the Feminist Law Professor blog and a professor at the University of South Carolina Law School — to build a waiting period into the consent to participate in pornography is an intriguing one, and would do much to mitigate the impact of alcohol on the burgeoning porn-star for a day phenomenon. Yglesias also suggests this, as a counter-offer to my proposal that the age of consent to participate in porn be raised to 21. It’s a fine idea as far as it goes.

Revising the consent process, unfortunately, does not get to the heart of the problem, which is about the right to privacy and the costs to young women of the cultural and technological changes of the past decade. Amanda Marcotte said it best:

I think raising the age of consent to be in commercial porn to 21 could have to potential to protect youthful sexual experimentation. At least in the case of “Girls Gone Wild”, the presence of Joe Francis and his cameras has turned things like Mardi Gras from occasions of joyous debauchery to mean, misogynist events that aren’t nearly as fun as they used to be. It’s a shame that there’s no space for kids to experiment with some public debauchery anymore without some dick shoving a camera at them in the process of making porn movies that are punitive in nature.

The issue is only partially about consent, or even impaired consent. The issue is also that over the past decade and a half there has been a massive decline in the space of life that is private in the sense of being undocumented for all posterity, even if publicly conducted — and that there has been a simultaneous increase in media outlets, distribution channels, and commercial interest in the “scandal” of young female nudity.

Yglesias pretends that a young woman’s “decision” to have nude pictures of herself floating about without her consent is no different than picking a college major or “getting tattoos.” But he’s wrong. People don’t lose their jobs – or become permanent public spectacles – over “buying lottery tickets” or choosing to major in chemistry rather than physics. The difference is that there is an active harm being done to young women when pornographers take control of their images, without their consent (but with the consent of the courts), and that what people are choosing to do when they pose for pictures and what ultimately becomes of the images they choose to be in are often very different things. Miss Nevada Katie Rees lost her crown after pictures of her, bare-chested and kissing other girls, surfaced on the internet. She was 19 when they were taken, grown in form, but clearly not yet a mature individual. Or look at the case of the friends of American Idol contestant Antonella Barba, 20. Semi-nude pictures of her surfaced soon after she joined the show, leading her to say, “The pictures that were released of me – the ones that are of me – they are very personal and that is not how I intended to portray myself nor do I intend to portray myself that way in the future.” And it wasn’t just pictures of her, either. There were plenty of shots that exposed her young friends, too — women who were not looking to become famous or trade on their figures, and whose momentary goofing around at a beach outing is now public for all posterity.

Should such women have the right to control their own images? And do young women have an interest in not being manipulated, whether through drink or through peer pressure, into situations where they sign away what rights they do have? Those are the real questions at stake. The laws, as they currently stand, err too greatly on the side of protecting pornographers’ rights to transform unwitting or intoxicated young women into sexual commodities, and favor men like Francis, who reportedly earns $29 million a year, over the impecunious 18-year-olds off whom they have become rich. Raising the age to consent to be in porn to 21 may seem like an overly broad solution; alternative proposals that would address the issue of involuntary distribution and publication of private images, in addition to the questions of drunken consent, may ultimately prove superior. So far, however, I haven’t heard them.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor at The American Prospect. You can read her blog here.

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