How the new pornographers are exploiting young women, and why liberals should care.
By Garance Franke-Ruta
Tuesday May 15, 2007
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:
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.
--------
Comments
Garance, you’ve done an excellent job responding to your critics and bringing the focus back to the harms that Joe Francis inflicts on women. Men who claim that the consumption of pornography has no negative consequences do not want the effects of porn production scrutinized very closely, for obvious reasons. They are odious. No one who enjoys the suffering of other people is liberal, or even fully human.
— Ann Bartow - May 15, 08:56 PM - #Fantastic article. As a young woman the age that Francis’s business preys upon (and thrives upon preying on), I’m so glad that someone has so aptly—and courageously—taking on GGW and porn. Not only liberals—but feminists, too—need to recognize that there is nothing empowering inherent in the sexual exploitation of women and that it’s time to brainstorm solutions to stop this brash display of inequity.
— Liz Funk - May 16, 12:09 AM - #I think the examples you cite of Joe Francis’ methodology are heart-breaking. But I also think there’s a conflation of several issues, one is the problem of scum like Francis existence. The other is the public-private barrier evaporating which Francis is merely a witness to, not the cause of. The second has less to do with age of consent then the change that digital photography and ever-present phone camera have wrought. That to me is a societal change which will bring its own cultural adjustments. We are simply going to have to get used to the lack of “private” public space.
Yes, 20 years ago you could go to Mardi Gras, flash a crowd and go back to your hometown and never think about it again. That isn’t the case anymore and it not just because there are people like Francis out there. It’s a change that technology has wrought. I’m sure people have been taking analog pictures during Mardi Gras since the flashing began but there was never an easy way to distribute such pictures, so they remained locked in some perv’s private collection. Since photography went digital, and the internet provided an easy distribution method (both to others and the legitimate media) now everyone can see your semi-nude pictures of quasi-famous people (or the pictures of you trying to embarrass your ex-wife, ex-girlfriend or just the women you conned into flashing for you.) It doesn’t matter if you are 18, 20, or 35. The ever present camera and the internet means if you expose yourself there’s a chance its been recorded and sent to others.
We can change some laws regarding consent and the right to distribute (and I think perhaps we should tighten such laws), but we are never going to be able to self-correct them so that it will be like it used to be before digital cameras and the internet.
For that reason I think risqué pictures and even the occasional nude image will become less and less damaging in the future to one’s reputation. I’m waiting for the day that a woman runs for Senate or Governor and there’s a 30-year-old picture of her topless. Will that be an automatic deal-breaker? (ala The Contender) Probably the first time it will be.
But eventually I suspect the ever present camera will lessen society’s idea of what “proper” behavior will be.
— Rachel Larris - May 16, 12:50 PM - #Maybe we should mourn the loss of private-public spaces. The ability to be nude or risqué without the chance of lasting harm being done. But I’m not sure there is a way to make it possible to return to the “good old days.”
For the examples Garance cites regarding GGW, I still think changing the laws in gaining consent to distribute images is the best way to less the exploitive power of bottom-feeders like Francis. It’s a little like pay-day loans. Some are super-exploitive, preying on poor people and then charging outrageous fees so they can never pay the loans back. We can reform the pay-day loan industry so it is less shark-like, but ultimately we don’t stop people from taking out pay-day loans altogether, whether it’s a bad idea or not.
Issues of individual liberty are not “libertarian” issues. They are American issues, at the core of what our country stands for.
If your issue is consent under the influence, then make it illegal to gain someone’s consent to the production of pornography under the influence of alcohol.
Reducing individual freedom is not the answer – to the extent that’s acceptable, it is acceptable only in the most extreme of cases.
This is not an extreme case.
— Joe - May 17, 05:54 PM - #I have no folley with your content, only with your journalistic ability. I could have written this piece in 2 hours, after filing through some online court cases, and pulling some quotes from other sources. Try writing something original and unique about the subject, and give a name and a face to these “liberals.” Faceless subjects are boring, as are pulled quotes and internet research.
— Marcus Burroughs - May 18, 02:42 PM - #i really appreciated Rachel’s comments about images and the meaning the convey. Because we have been dealing with the issue of the image for so long, and now that technology is increasing accessibility to the image, a topless woman doesn’t mean the same thing it once did.
— Meghan - May 18, 04:52 PM - #i’m not trying to say that the image of the topless woman is no longer hurtful, just that it doesn’t kill her reputation the same way it would have before the porta-pack was invented.
For me, this post was about 2 things consent and spectatorship. trying to make this issue a public vs private thing is useless. privacy is pretty much another social construct to help us feel better about how we perform in specific contexts.
Garance, i don’t think you should be questioning whether or not women (or anyone for that matter) have the right to their own image. I mean, clearly no one does. how an image is used, thought about, and experienced is dependent on who looks at it in a specific place and time. even when we pose and intend for our image to convey certain meanings we can’t ever control how it is gazed. (didn’t our 2nd wave femme fantastic Valie Export already school us on this?)
I think we, the ladies that is, should be asking why does the repetition of our image change how “safe” we are? i think this answer could spark a more productive discussion about the image of women in media production.
It does surprise me that one can give consent while intoxicated. It would be a good start to make it legally impossible to give consent while under the influence of alcohol.
Raising the age of consent, however, probably will not happen due to the economic pressure of the hugely successful pornography industry.
Personally, I believe our society would be better served by a less prudish attitude towards nudity and sex. Far better than changing the age of consent would be a law prohibiting discrimination based upon one’s sexual history or images taken. Of course, the religious right would hate that, they love to look down their noses at people who have sex outside of marriage and enjoy it.
— Grant - May 18, 05:48 PM - #I’m recalling those fellows in Borat who are forever publicly branded as racist, because they got drunk and signed consent forms, then talked kaka. The laws against drunken consent would have to apply to them, yes? They lost their court case, though one did lose his job… Is this about capacity for consent, or about sexual imagery of women?
— bouyant - May 18, 06:29 PM - #I already have a huge problem with the fact that the law finds 18-year-olds too immature to handle choices about drinking alcohol, but have no problem with letting them commit themselves to military service. It simply makes no sense. The consequences of military service can be death or mutilation—much worse than embarrassment or job loss or not getting into the college of one’s choice. Why allow 18-year-olds to join the Army while preventing them from participating in pornography?
— cowalker - May 19, 11:00 PM - #“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.”
Thanks. With an opening like that, I don’t have to read any further.
— Mithras - May 20, 11:06 AM - #Yes, they were all rushing to the defense of raunch culture. And I oppose the War on Drugs because I just loves me some heroin.
I applaud the new tack you’re taking. Why try to honestly convince your audience when you can simply mischaracterize those who disagree? Oh, and that damning paraphrase you attribute to Ezra, the one about sexual commodification—way to sneak words into his mouth. Without the bookending quotes, people might assume he didn’t say what he didn’t say!
I realize what you’ve done here is nowhere near as earth-shatteringly scandalous as taking your shirt off, but maybe you should be ashamed of yourself regardless.
— solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short - May 20, 04:18 PM - #If your proposal makes sense, my proposal makes more sense:
— Jon Swift - May 20, 06:36 PM - #http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/05/raising-minimum-age-for-porn.html
“ ... 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.”
How, exactly, does existing copyright law fail to address the issue of “involuntary distribution and publication of private images”? What changes to existing copyright law are you proposing?
— hello - May 21, 02:31 PM - #As I point out on my blog, your statement about college majors is ridiculous. You may not lose a job based on ithat choice, but you’ll certainly fail to receive a job based on it. I don’t see how the harm is different.
Here’s a different argument: firing people for appearing nude in a video or photograph violated Title VII under a disparate impact, non-business-necessity model, because women are so much more significantly likely to be disqualified. I’m amazed at the amount of time you’ve devoted to this without faulting employers who would unfairly take someone’s livelihood away based on an irrelevant personal decision.
Finally, characterizing this as coming down to pro- and anti-Joe Francis is dishonest on its face. No one has advocated amending the existing legal regimes he’s violated, and no one has argued that he’s performing a public service.
— aeroman - May 21, 02:59 PM - #Garance — we nee dmore social freedoms, not less. You’re being a prude.
— Mike M. - May 21, 03:18 PM - #We need more naked people!
Big ones!
Small ones!
Green ones!
Brown ones!
What evil are you trying to expose here exactly, and why are you beating up on liberals with penisis that show no shame in enjoying the human form. Sure exploitation is bad, lets get mad at that. Does being male and enjoying the view of college aged women sunning themselves make me somehow unable to fight exploitation? So go ahead and play the neanderthal card on me and men like me. I am still gonna love honor and maybe even occasionally lust after the fine female form in all of its numerous permutations!
— John - May 21, 04:16 PM - #Down with prudes!
— Mike M. - May 21, 05:07 PM - #She was 19 when they were taken, grown in form, but clearly not yet a mature individual.
Thanks Daddy, but that seems incredibly presumptuous of you.
Do you pander, condescend, and patronize like this ALL of the time?
— anon - May 21, 05:11 PM - #Garance, when all is said and done, the fact remains that what you’re really advocating is a paternalistic policy of limiting the rights of young adult women in the interest of “protecting” them.
If your real concern is the exploitation of women, I suggest you direct your fire at the exploiters rather than at the women you claim to be so concerned about.
I would also suggest that you cease attempting to equate your critics with pornographers and exploiters. While you may, mount a theoretical construct to support this, it’s really nothing more than the old assertion that those who dissent are “objectively” the enemy.
— W.B. Reeves - May 21, 05:31 PM - #“...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… It’s a fine idea as far as it goes” I agree. This is a sensitive decision to say the least for a young person to make, with the possible repercussions far-reaching enough to warrant special delays built into the contract. I can see how this would help those under the influence from making a “decision” they would have never made sober, but what about those who simply have no viable alternative? Those who are too poor to adequately protect themselves from sexual exploitation, or from signing an exploitative loan, perhaps. I think these are the people you are concerned most about, and those who need the most help. I don’t think inferring that some male pundits appear to be “leering louts” helps your article’s thesis at all – although it is exciting to read you lambasting them. They had no real place mentioning their own legitimate lusts in their defense of the 18-year-old age of consent for pornography. I think this reflects a touch of defensiveness on the part of these males who see their own sexuality threatened in the (worthy) condemnation of a medium aimed largely at men’s sexuality.
In addition, I felt uncomfortable at Amanda Marcotte’s use of the word, “dick”. “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.”
While this may be true – the men shoving cameras at these girls may indeed be dicks – I don’t believe that sexually charged word belongs in this article. I acknowledge that power dynamics are not in favor of women, and that sexism requires power, but the bias the word shows does not engender positive discussion. In addition, the videos are not punitive in nature, but in effect.
Joe Francis does indefensible harm to women and men. Ann Bartow is right to say that you bring focus back to that central point in your article. No one can soundly deny that the production methods of pornography quite frequently have negative consequences, as you say. But to say that those who enjoy the suffering of others are not liberal, or not fully human! First, a political affiliation or belief such as liberalism is such a wide term that it can only be self-applied, and I don’t think anyone can truly deny another person the right to call themselves what ever they wish. Second, Ann is implying that those who enjoy the suffering – those who consume pornography which has been produced by way of suffering – are not fully human. I strongly object to this, based mostly on the grounds that it is not right to deny the humanity of just about anyone. What about those consumers of pornographic content who are not aware of the sordid aspects of the industry? They are a little like a circus audience watching a dancing clown with a broken foot. A bizarre analogy, but the point is the audience doesn’t always spot the pain behind the scenes. I deplore calling that audience “not fully human”, even as I understand that these people are the chief enablers of this majorly deplorable industry.
“...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”
— Josh - May 21, 10:24 PM - #You’re correct in this, and it’s something that our courts have not dealt with, as far as I know. What’s needed is more bargaining power given to those posing for the pictures. If the pornographers were forced to sign a contract stating that the pictures will be used in this certain way and in this certain context only, it would be harder for them to misuse those materials. The problem is, many of the young women are doing this for the first time, and probably would not be in a position to, say, join a union to gain bargaining power. I don’t have a solution for that one.
There is something truly amazing about the fact that you continue to flog this unbelievably crappy argument. Honestly, this went way past pathetic some time ago, but somehow you keep managing to sink lower. Now, in this fourth or fifth iteration of your argument that 19 year old women need to be treated like infants, you are depending upon a quite deliberate mischaracterization of the arguments against you.
— brent - May 22, 03:39 AM - #I like the fact that Campus Progress has an ad featuring Jay Z on the same page as this post. As he says in 99 Problems:
<blockquote>Now once upon a time not too long ago
A nigga like myself had to strong arm a hoe
This is not a hoe in the sense of havin a pussy
But a pussy havin no God Damn sense, try and push me</blockquote>
Mmmm, delicious irony.
— Mithras - May 22, 02:41 PM - #It’s also pretty ironic that Campus Progress—a website dedicated to giving college students and young people a greater voice in national conversations, and in that sense, an organization that wants to empower young people—would publish a nonsensical argument that young women are, in effect, too dumb and immature to make decisions.
— brad - May 23, 03:05 PM - #This is the culture that liberals have rubbed in our faces for the last 30 years. look at how movies and TV have changed. This is what you wanted. How exactally do all these strong empowered intelligent women get in this situation.
— g.h. - Jun 2, 06:39 PM - #Ms. Franke-Ruta:
— d.h. - Jun 3, 10:08 PM - #Here’s an idea. How about not doing dumbass things on spring. Things like, oh I don’t know, sitting in a chair while bartenders pour drinks down your throat.
I’ll go out on a limb and assume you weren’t that kind of undergrad. Good for you.
You can’t protect everyone, no matter how hard you try.
The temporarily ruined lives of young women who acted stupidly and took some clothes off in front of a camera will serve as warnings to other young people.
(Rape, coercion, and the like are another matter and should be prosecuted zealously and punished severely.)
But a little embarrassing nakedness, I think, is a good way to teach a lesson.
What better way is there to show why drinking too much can be dangerous than to have examples of women whose lives are disrupted by this?
There may be a few big bugs in Garance’s proposal – but there does seem to be something different about a mistake anyone could make – and which would remain largely private – and one that would become a powerful image in the public domain
— LR - Jun 16, 08:16 PM - #...that would repeatedly humiliate. GFR’s argument was not clearly thought out (she said so herself) but there’s something there not lacking in merit.
Mike M.,
The only prudes are those that unleash shrieks of moral hysteria against women (and girls) w/ such slurs as “‘ho” and “slut.” Yet, I doubt you condemn those bigots/prudes.
Since heterosexuality is natural, then why are women singled out for ridicule and contempt, to the point where even rape victims are blamed for “provoking” an attack? The moral outrage leveled at allegedly “promiscuous” women, thus, can only be valid if it’s assumed that to be female is to be inherently “immoral.” That level of moral extremism is so utterly irrational it amounts to sheer madness. And yet it’s widely accepted.
— Davidson - Jun 21, 09:04 PM - #i like sexy end girl 18 ages
— Gentrit - Oct 4, 11:25 AM - #