Protect the Girls who went wild? - Updated


Invoking the Nannystate for MORAL PURPOSES, again.
Garance Franke-Ruta is wrong here, several times. Emphasis added.

Good. Joe Francis is a cultural pollutant. But as he contemplates life in prison, the rest of us ought to contemplate what he has wrought--or what kind of society we have allowed him to create on our watch. "Girls Gone Wild" and its skin-flashing antics--spring break, beach parties, Mardi Gras--may seem relatively harmless artifacts of our look-at-me culture, especially when compared with the mechanical bedroom scenes and stagey embraces of hard-core pornography. But that is precisely why they matter more: Mr. Francis's cameras have constructed a huge business out of recording the semi-nudity of "girls" who are not in "the business" at all: naïve girls, canny girls, drunken girls, pretty girls and not-so-pretty girls--regular girls, if one may put it that way. Above all, young girls. Mr. Francis has made it socially acceptable for a freshman at, say, Ohio State--living in a dorm room in Columbus like thousands of freshmen before her--to participate in soft-core porn.

Okay, assuming for the moment that Joe Francis is the scum of the universe, this article deliberately overlooks the part that our normal culture had to play. Francis didn't create soft-core porn, he capitalized on it.

Understand, this isn't a defense of Joe Francis. I've never met the man, I've bought none of his tapes or DVDs, and I find his commercials and infomercials annoying. But I can't sanction clamping down on his "immoral" behavior when it is the law that has made his profits possible.

American society has some serious hangups when it comes to nudity and sex. Since most of the time Americans only see naked people or semi-naked people in the buildup to sex (or the promise of sex), we've been culturally conditioned to accept that Nudity Equals Sex.

Last time I checked, every human came into this world without clothing. Yes, sex got us there, but I'm here to tell you that NUDITY DOES NOT EQUAL SEX.

Looking at an bare leg or an exposed breast or even "the naughty bits" does not provoke violent sex. The only reason why Americans make the connection is because time and time again it's been drilled into us that the only time we're allowed to see other people naked is as a part of sex.

It's not the nudity that makes "Girls Gone Wild" amazingly profitable, it's the fact that laws in the USA make casual nudity forbidden.

It's the same thing that makes illegal drugs profitable. Not the drugs themselves or the users, but that society has attempted to "stamp out" drug availability.

I can guarantee that if exposed female breasts were common, there wouldn't be a market for the GGW tapes because there wouldn't be the connection between nudity and sex. Demand is made stronger because it's forbidden, not because of the nudity. How do I know this? Experience. I happen to be a naturist. Most clothing-optional places aren't rampant dens of sin and vice. Yes, there are those that are, but then so are most of the clubs in Los Angeles. And people wear clothes there.

But Ms. Franke-Ruta doesn't stop with defining the Problem. No, she has to propose a Solution.

It is true that teenagers become legal adults at the age of 18, right around the time they graduate from high school. The age of consent to serve in the armed forces is also 18 (17 with parental consent), as is the minimum voting age since 1971, when an amendment to the Constitution lowered it from 21. But the federal government is already happy to bar legal adults from engaging in certain activities. Most notably, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 raised the drinking age to 21 (by threatening to withhold highway funds from states that did not go along). In practice, the age limit is flouted on college campuses and in private homes. But it has still had a positive effect, not least by driving down fatalities from drunk driving.

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, sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world's next Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of "talent." And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself--long since routinized--but its "barely legal" category. "Girls Gone Wild"--like its counterparts on the Web--is treated as a kind of joke. It isn't. There ought to be a law.

Amazing! Invoke the All Powerful Nanny State to impose a One Size Fits None Answer sure to shatter more lives. All "for the children" of course. Or in this case, "for the girls."

Do you remember the grandmother arrested because she took pictures of her cute grandchildren playing in the bath? How about the pictures of a camping trip that turned into a family's personal hell?

I do remember these things, and many more besides.

Homework questions, and these are important.

In the case of a law "for their own good," is there ANY basis that does not rely on a religion's morality? I'd argue no, as would at least one major libertarian writer.

If a law is based on the morality of a given faith, is it moral to impose that law on those who have not chosen that religion?

Here's one courtesy of Wendy McElroy. If no coercion is involved and it's a woman's body and a woman's right to choose, doesn't the same principle that protects abortion also protect pornography? This cuts to the very heart of women's rights. Because if a woman has the right to choose, then she has the right to choose.

Finally, why is a young woman flashing her breasts or bottom an "indelible error?"

Before we invoke the Nannystate "for their own good," these questions should be answered.

Joe Francis made money because he capitalized on the forbidden. But it wasn't him that forbade it in the first place.

You could raise the "age of consent" to 75 and it wouldn't stop the "problem."

Let's face it, if you really wanted to stop the problem, you'd have to go after EVERY industry that used sex to sell it's products.

Is it moral for the state to allow young ladies to show skin?

That's an important question. I want to emphasize it.

Is it moral for the state to allow young ladies to show skin?

I say that it's the woman's choice and if it is done without coercion, then it is immoral for the state to interfere.

Just as it is immoral for the state to interfere in her choice of clothes. Or her choice of sexual partner. Or where she wants to live. Or what career she wants. Or which religion if any she chooses to practice.

States don't do moral choices very well.

I'll go one step further.

Any state that presupposes that it has the power to allow it's citizens anything is one that should be abolished.

A state has the obligation to protect it's citizens and their property, that's it. Leave the moral choices to the individuals.

If the state is allowed to make these young ladies choices "for their own good," it won't stop with concealing a little skin. It will go on to choose what they can see, what they can listen to, what they can read, and eventually what they can think.

Maybe even how they vote?

UPDATE - Jon Swift has his own take on the subject.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - May 4, 2007 at 05:44 AM  Tag


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