Poor Joe Francis. Last week, the “Girls Gone Wild” founder was in US Bankruptcy Court settling with a woman whose breasts were filmed without her consent on one of his videos. She will get at least $100,000 and perhaps as much as $5.3 million more.
Maybe Francis was ahead of his time. If he’d waited a few years longer to start his video enterprise, he could’ve gotten top college freshmen to do a lot more than bare their breasts: A Duke University student using the pseudonym “Lauren” made news last week when it was learned she was participating in “rough-sex” porn to pay her $60,000 tuition, room and board.
Lauren makes the topless co-eds on the beaches of Cancun seem like something out of a Jane Austen novel. But she does much more than that. She offers intellectual cover for young women prostituting themselves.
It begins with an economic comparison between doing porn and working in a service job at the mall. As Lauren told the website Real Clear Education, “Any job I would’ve gotten as a minimum wage worker would’ve been exploitative, degrading to me, and not provided the money I needed to make, which was $4,000 a month. So why would I work 80 hours a week, struggle with school, barely get any sleep and be treated like a second-class citizen, when I can do porn for 14 hours a day, make thousands, set my own hours, and have a ton of fun doing it?”
Makes sense, right? Why sell hamburgers when you can just sell your body? What have women throughout history been thinking by trying to avoid prostitution? Clearly the notion that selling sex is something one does as a last resort was a ploy of the patriarchy to make sure that women’s sexuality was controlled by men (and that there were an adequate number of cashiers at McDonald’s).
This is where it’s so helpful to have Lauren guide us through the intellectual waters of modern feminism. In an essay for XOJane, the women’s studies major explains: “It terrifies us to even fathom that a woman could take ownership of her body. We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that’s exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society.”
Once again, feminism has found a way to call the degradation of women empowering. In fact, it is anything but. Chris Hedges, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, wrote about the porn industry in his book, “Empire of Illusion.” One former actress he interviewed started making films because the money seemed good. She contracted a number of STDs. Over time, he writes, “The demands on her began to escalate. She was filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became ‘extremely rough. They would pull my hair, slap me around like a rag doll.’ ”
At one point during the interview, Hedges writes, “her breathing becomes more rapid. She slips into a flat, numbing monotone. The symptoms are ones I know well from interviewing victims of atrocities in war who battle post-traumatic stress disorder.”
There is no way to know the details of Lauren’s background, but there is reason to think that her parents, despite her statements to the contrary, know exactly what she has been up to. She has been viewing porn since the age of 11, she says. She suddenly had an extra $4,000 a month to contribute to the tuition bill. She turned down a full scholarship to Vanderbilt in order to attend a school she couldn’t afford without letting men abuse her on camera. (She says she found Duke more “spiritual.”)
So where are the grown-ups in Lauren’s life? Cheering her on. Her parents at least tacitly approve of her activities. Her women’s studies professors are probably applauding as they pen articles in academic journals about her courage.
There was a time when society just had to worry about the people on the fringes — the poor, the uneducated. As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal once noted, “These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They’re guardrails . . . But the broad movement that gained force during the [1960s] consciously and systematically took down the guardrails.”
Things are far worse than that today. Forget removing the guardrails. Now it’s society’s elites who are pushing people off the road. They’re providing the intellectual justification as a smart, young, middle-class woman throws away her life.