Barely Legal Porn
Why we shouldn’t infantilize 18-year-olds.
By Matthew Yglesias
Tuesday May 8, 2007
I’ll admit to being at least somewhat hesitant to write an article that could be construed as expressing a desire to preserve my access to barely-legal porn. That said, when I read a proposal in The Wall Street Journal to raise the age of consent for participating in the production of erotic material from 18 to 21, I was pretty disturbed. Ordinarily, one wouldn’t think it unusual to see a dumb proposal floated in the Journal‘s opinion pages, but the author in question was Garance Franke-Ruta, my former colleague at The American Prospect and one of the most insightful commentators on cultural issues in American politics.
Unfortunately, in this case her understandable sense that something’s awry in a world where a reprobate like Joe Francis can make tens of millions of dollars producing Girls Gone Wild videos has led her to embrace not only a terribly unsound policy, but an even worse underlying principle to justify it.
On policy grounds, simply put, implementing any such ban would be incredibly difficult. The 21-year-old drinking age is, famously, not the most rigorously enforced law on the books. The fact that establishments wishing to sell beer, wine, or liquor generally require licenses to do so does, however, provide an avenue through which enforcement can be conducted. A comparable porn rule would be even worse. Franke-Ruta, somewhat curiously, actually concedes that her proposal is impractical, noting that “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 [as the drinking age limit], sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance.” Nevertheless, she thinks, “a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error.”
And, indeed, it certainly would prevent – “save” seems like a loaded term – some young women from doing something they might come to regret later in a world where, as Franke-Ruta notes, “digital recording technology give[s] youthful acts a permanent life.” On the other hand, criminalizing participation in such activity would dramatically raise the stakes involved from mild embarrassment to actual legal penalties.
More distressing in many ways than the practical issues, however, is the underlying principle. Franke-Ruta wants to prevent 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds from agreeing to participate in pornography on the grounds that a woman of that age is not ready to make a decision “that she will live with . . . for the rest of her life.” But, of course, older teens make decisions they will live with for the rest of their lives all the time. Many are full-time members of the work force. Many are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, undertaking the risk of sustaining life-altering injury or death. Many are married or have children. The last point seems particularly relevant. Are we going to favor mandatory abortions for teen mothers? Or should young women not be permitted to have sex until they’re 21? If so, then we might as well prevent older teens from buying lottery tickets or getting tattoos (a life-changing decision), either. Maybe college students shouldn’t be trusted to pick their own major either.
The fact of the matter is that older teens are adults and that the essence of adulthood is being put in a position to make decisions – even bad decisions. To be in a position where one has to rely on advice from one’s friends and family rather than on coercion to avoid them.
Meanwhile, Franke-Ruta’s analysis is curiously class-bound, erecting a dichotomy between Scorpion Bowl-drinking 19-year-olds and chardonnay-sipping young professionals. One doubts, however, that drunk Ivy Leaguers are actually the main source of pornographic talent. Most 18- to 20-year-olds are in the workforce, and most women making porn are getting paid for their work. One might hope that in a more just society with broader educational and economic options fewer people would earn their keep in this way (or, more realistically, they might get paid more), but at the end of the day making it illegal for these women to be in porn will reduce, rather than expand, their opportunities. What’s more, it’s likely to push many people into underworld activity (or perhaps simply illegal misrepresentations of their age) and make their work more dangerous.
Franke-Ruta has pointed to a real problem, but her solution is worse than the cure and justified by a bad underlying principle. It would make much more sense, however, to focus more narrowly on the issue of people too drunk to make smart long-term decisions, rather than on their age. Something as simple as making the release form process a bit more cumbersome – perhaps requiring that the would-be pornographer obtain a second release a week after the first one (when spring break is over and the subject likely to be in a more sober and reflective mood) – might substantially curb abuses without eliminating money-making opportunities for people in need or reducing young adults to the legal status of children.
Matthew Yglesias is an Associate Editor at The Atlantic Monthly. You can read his blog here.
Clarification: Yglesias’s piece suggests that Franke-Ruta has proposed “criminalizing participation” in pornography by 18-20 year olds. Franke-Ruta, writing on May 4 on her blog (in an elaboration on her Wall Street Journal piece from the same day), wrote that she does not favor criminal penalties for 18-20 year olds who appear in pornography.
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““One might hope that in a more just society with broader educational and economic options fewer people would earn their keep in this way (or, more realistically, they might get paid more)”“
This is one argument I hear repeatedly with regard to porn, and it doesn’t hold up in reality. I agree with most of Matthew Yglesias’ article, but this point bears some exploration.
The wages for porn aren’t just high – they’re stratospheric. A young starlet with a strong work ethic can generally pull in enough to be paying her parent’s mortgage and then some – we’re talking wages well into the six figures for a steady work schedule.
Under virtually any arrangement for a “more just distribution of income” you can think of, porn will outperform (in the short term) as a career choice. And as anyone who knows someone in the industry, or knows someone who knows someone in the industry can tell you, the common thread among porn stars is not generally socioeconomic class – it’s their desire to make huge sums of money with relative ease.
The living wage, better public financing of college tuition, or whatever the progressive economic panacea of the moment happens to be — none of it will significantly change the economics of going into porn.
You don’t star in “Weapons of Ass Destruction” to pay the rent, you do it to buy Gucci and put rims on your Escalade.
— Joe - May 9, 12:02 AM - #Also, I’d hope every good progressive with a libertarian bone or two in their body (and that should be all good progressives) would recoil at the article by Garance that Matt is responding to.
— Joe - May 9, 01:17 AM - #“Franke-Ruta has pointed to a real problem”
Oy vey, no she hasn’t! That the very small % of women in soft porn may feel embarrassed some day?? That isn’t even close to a “real” problem. Certainly nothing that should involve criminalizing.
The related issue of people exposing their lives on the Internet as teens and beyond, affects a much larger fraction of the population, to a similar degree. Eventually this is a problem a significant fraction of people will have to deal with. It is a result of changing technology, and while the knee-jerk temptation is always to become more authoritarian (won’t someone think of the children!), I think we’ll find better ways to adjust.
Perhaps in a couple of decades an easily Googled ancient photo of you topless with a bottle of beer will be so laughably common that it won’t carry the same illogical employment and relationship risks it possibly does now.
Regardless these relatively shallow “risks” hardly warrant anything close to Franke-Ruta’s emergency police state measures.
— dgaicun - May 9, 05:03 AM - #Joe,
The six-figure porn income is the exception, not the rule (and hardly what I would call “stratospheric.”) The vast majority of actresses (and nearly all actors) earn far, far less than that, and given that the average length of time in the industry is less than three years, it’s won’t keep you in Gucci for very long.
— Steve - May 9, 07:16 AM - #Basically I agree with you and thought that the issue isn’t whether women will regret doing the flashing but the fact that consent is often obtained really shadily while the participants are drunk, which is often facilitated by the GGG’s producers.
link
— Rachel Joy Larris - May 9, 08:52 AM - #So GFR has gone all Victorian. What an idiot.
— expatjourno - May 9, 09:13 AM - #Porn is the one industry in America where female workers make significantly higher pay than male workers. Garance should be holding porn up as a shining beacon of the success of women in the workplace.
— cf - May 9, 02:13 PM - #Another way of looking at this issue is that, very broadly speaking, the work that women are doing is significantly less valued than the work than men do. Women are twice as likely as men to work at minimum wage in the U.S. I don’t think we really know if “most women making porn are getting paid for their work.” What we do know is that most women who ARE getting paid are not getting paid enough to make a real living. The little info we have about women in the porn industry shows that. My take on this is that there are tons of industries: construction trades, for example, that pay fantastically well compared to porn salaries, but well-trained, qualified women are still being actively pushed out of these fields. Why not concentrate on getting women into well-paying fields? There need to be more options for women to make a living besides porn.
— Beccah - May 9, 04:16 PM - #““Another way of looking at this issue is that, very broadly speaking, the work that women are doing is significantly less valued than the work than men do.”“
O RLY? That’s funny, I could have sworn it’s highly situational. For instance, in the financial sector, unmarried, no-kids women make 107% of what unmarried, no-kids men do. Comparing unmarried, no-kids men and unmarried, no-kids women, the women are something like 5-10 times more likely to make it to the executive level.
In other fields, too, if you compare like to like, the differences tend to even out.
““There need to be more options for women to make a living besides porn.”“
I’ll call this a “hyperbolic implication”. You’re implying from your statement that there currently aren’t more options for women to make a living besides porn, which is little more than gross hyperbole.
— Joe - May 9, 05:04 PM - #““The six-figure porn income is the exception, not the rule (and hardly what I would call “stratospheric.”) The vast majority of actresses (and nearly all actors) earn far, far less than that, and given that the average length of time in the industry is less than three years, it’s won’t keep you in Gucci for very long.”“
Steve, much of that is within the control of the women involved. (Shockingly, porn doesn’t always attract the world’s best decision-makers.)
Those who:
-Have a strong work ethic
-Work to make a career for themselves rather than just blowing their cash paycheck to paycheck
-Keep clear of drugs and similar missteps
-Take the opportunity to make connections and learn the business/production side of the industry
Tend to do rather well.
As with many forms of economic success, the issue holding people back tends to be not a lack of opportunities, but a lack of bourgeois habits.
— Joe - May 9, 05:10 PM - #The problem with her proposal is that it does not go far enough:
— Jon Swift - May 9, 08:35 PM - #http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/05/raising-minimum-age-for-porn.html
On second thought… Jon Swift sold me. He hit upon the key argument in his closing paragraphs, but there it was indeed.
If not for Porn, god knows what level I’d be in World of Warcraft right now.
And, as we all know, video games > women.
QED.
— Joe - May 10, 01:43 AM - #Joe, I’m pro-porn with the groaning hard drive to prove it, but you’re viewing the industry through rose-colored vaseline, m’man.
It’s a business that attracts damaged individuals and, far too often, leaves them shattered in its wake (the guys too). Nowhere near as bad as the stand-up comedy circuit, but still.
There are ways to support the good and starve the bad, but I’ll resist the urge to proselytize—every man must find his own route to sustainable wacking practices.
— solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short - May 10, 10:17 AM - #SPNBS (Can I just call you Hobbes?):
I don’t actually see that we’re in disagreement — I already noted that “porn doesn’t always attract the world’s best decision-makers.”
I’m interested in the industry’s potential for well-adjusted people rather than how it handles broken ones; Other professions, such as IBanking, are also magnets for broken people without getting this sort of attention.
I’m a fan of doing what we can to help broken people in general, rather than targeting the industries where broken people tend to end up working.
— Joe - May 10, 05:32 PM - #I have no problem with porn. I love porn. In fact i’m looking at it right now. But, the real problem with porn is not some “mild embarrassment “ it is the spread of disease. I don’t know how Matt and all of you others could look over this glaring issue. When girls decide to turn to a career in porn, especially the kind that makes the 6 figurs, the kind that requires the production of dozens of scenes/movies a year, girls are puting themselves at significant risk. Today’s porn consumer will not buy anything that includes the use of protection. Interviews with industry stars Belladonna and Sasha Grey have highlighted the high rate of chalmydia and recent outbreaks of HIV within the industry. These are the real risks young women are taking when they decide to become porn actresses.
I don’t believe that age restrictions are helpful. I agree with just about everything Matt wrote-18 yr olds are old enough to make adult decisions and the media/reformers need to stop assuming they aren’t. However there are many aspects of porn that Matt didn’t get into which are much more important in analyzing our culture than the age of the girls.
Porn today is getting more and more violent. Why do men get off watch women tortured, beat, double and triple pentetrated, urinated on etc…. Hardcore porn stars often leave movie sets bruised and extremely abused.
I know all this wasn’t in the scope of Matt’s article and I’m sure all of you have considered some of these problems. But I do think that disease should be the number one worry about sex workers in America. The embarrassment is hardly a reason to worry. It is the fact that some women contract deadly diseases and do in fact ruin their lives at a very young age.
— Daver - May 12, 09:13 AM - #I think that one of the most important issues has not been touched on here. This porn issue divides libertarians from the liberals. While raising the age would be a horrifying example of government over-reaching for libertarians, this is not necessarily the case for liberals. One of the worst consequences of women in porn is the objectification of women in society. It is not at all difficult to see that porn is part of the problem. There are numerous studies that demonstrate the affects of porn on men’s (and women’s) attitudes toward women.
So, while they might get well paid, and embarrassment is not a real issue, liberals might consider anything that dissuades women from hurting their gender as something worthy of consideration. After all, liberals, if they are true to their ideals, should seek both positive and negative freedom—not simply unfettered negative freedom.
Whether this new age limit should be implemented as social policy, warrants far more discussion.
— Michael Cesal - May 12, 02:15 PM - #Michael, you’re confusing the liberals with the left.
True liberals wouldn’t support the infantilization of adults.
True liberals also wouldn’t condescendingly try to tell women that they are first and foremost members of a group (“hurting their gender”) rather than individuals.
— Joe - May 12, 04:53 PM - #Joe, when I say liberal, I am not talking about the Americanized version of liberalism, I am talking about Lockean/Rawlsian liberalism that seeks both positive and negative freedoms.
Again, the focus on individual negative freedom is much closer to the American version (which is severely atomistic) rather than the Lockean/Rawlsian liberalism.
Still, I don’t necessarily disagree that an individual’s freedom is not more important in this instance than society’s interests in providing an egalitarian environment for all its citizens.
— Michael Cesal - May 12, 05:07 PM - #Porn is art. Do you know what art is? It is everything…
— tthouston - May 15, 06:50 PM - #Whats up
— jerome - May 28, 04:54 AM - #Okay, so after reading through all of this, I will proudly proclaim that I am a libertarian as well & liberal & I am beginning a (not say “career” in the adult film industry, but a side job) line of work in porn/nude modeling mostly to take care of my parents, who for all of my life have worked their hardest to see my sister & I succeed in life showing us that hard work does pay off, so we wouldn’t have to struggle like they did for us. I also intend to pay off a few bad debts & potentially pay for my higher education.
I am only 18, but I do understand what I am doing. After vigorous research, I have applied & been accepted to a production company that is legit & uses all of its power to make sure its actors/actresses are constantly being tested for venereal disease(min. once per month), while holding a high standing on not coercing its actors/actresses to do anything they would consider to be “uncomfortable”.
At this point, I am open to both positive & negative criticism, but I have already made up mind & this is something I am ready for & anxiously anticipate!
— Evee - Mar 25, 07:08 PM - #