Porn and the age of consent

Garance Franke-Ruta thinks we should raise the age of consent to appear in a pornographic film from 18 to 21.

An 18-year-old can sign the enlistment papers that will send her to Iraq--If she's mature enough to sign up to kill and killed, she can bloody well decide who gets to see her breasts. The fact she can't also buy beer is just another stupid Reagan legacy.

Garance seems to be arguing that the current age of consent for porn is no longer appropriate because the stakes are so much higher today. I'm not sure I agree with her cost/benefit analysis. Sure, a compromising video clip can hang around the internet forever. On the other hand, everyone else's pictures are going to end up there, too. At a certain point enlightenment or mutually assured destruction will kick in and our social mores will adjust to our technological milieu.

Frankly, I doubt that some old untagged GGW clip floating around online is all that much of a liability. Sure, the footage will be out there, but unless Joe Francis identifies his subjects by name, it will be difficult to match today's 18-year-olds to their future selves.

Garance thinks that raising the age of consent for commercial porn will give 18-to-21-year-olds more freedom for erotic experimentation with their peers. She hopes her propossal will let young adults flash each other and take pictures on their camera phones, safe from greedy letches like Joe Francis.

If I were advising an 18-year-old on how to protect themselves from future embarrassment, I'd worry less about GGW and more about friends with camera phones. Compromising pictures taken by friends and lovers are much more likely to end up on the internet with enough context to identify the subjects later.

Comments

[TomK]

Here, here.

Whats wrong with appearing in porn anyways? If people are having safe sex, or appropiate screening procedures, and no one is being coerced, who's business is it anyway?

If you want to protect women from the harms of the production of pornography, make it mandatory that actors are compensated based on sales. So if a woman appears in a porn movie, she gets proceeds and royalties for as long as the movie is for sale (the same way jerry seinfeld does). That would do a lot more to stop women from being exploited then changing the age of consent.

[DrDick]

You are absolutely correct. The morality police need to stay out of other people's business and mind their own. I also agree about the drinking age. That said, it probably is not a good idea for young women to allow nude/semi-nude photos of themselves, as youthful indiscretions can come back to bite you. Still, it is their decision to make, not anyone else's.

[TomK]

The idea that people need to watch themselves if they take nude pictures is part of what gives the morality police their power, Dr. um, Dick.

Instead, it should go like this, 20 or 30 years from now, no one will care about a few nude pics, and the kinds of people who would fire or otherwise hurt you over a few stupid nude pics aren't in touch with reality enough to have much relevance far into the future.

I hope.

[Steve W.]

Lowering the Franchise to include 18 year olds was silly, and even more so now as our culture continues to extend childhood so far that's it's a bit of novelty to find an 18 y.o. who is a responsible worker, let alone who actually takes the time to vote (forget about actually studying the issues...a huge chunk of the country doesn't do that either, but at least the older people are , the more experience they have.)

So, raise the enlistment age, raise the voting age, and keep the drinking age. .......Actually, now that I'm 45 -well, even when I was in my early 30's- I think at least the voting age should be higher, and I wouldn't fight raising the age of any of the others.

Thanks,
Steve W.

[Chris O.]

Dear Steve W.:

As a former-18-year-old who proudly cast his first vote, and as the brother of another 18-year-old who proudly did in 2006, may I humbly suggest that you should your pie hole and stop judging young voters who are very happy to participate in democracy for the first time.

In 2004, I was helping with the Dem machine here, and there were kids in high school who were too young to vote, but were still putting in their time and effort to help out, very responsibly and independently. But thanks to Steve W. I now see that they must have been ignorant brats with no clue what was going on. Thanks Steve!

[superdude]

Steve W:
We should extend the franchise to kids. Then there would finally be a constituency for sensible policies on education, sex, drugs, and alcohol--or at least the voices of those most affected would be heard. Maybe we would stop running up these enormous deficits that will burden those kids in order to provide services to irresponsible 45-year-olds.

The situation our country is in isn't a very strong testament to the decision-making skills of the adults in this country. And anyway, a representative democracy needs to represent *everyone*. And now that I'm adult, I look around and realize that the adults who were around when I was growing up didn't do a very good job of representing my interests in the government.

[superdude]

And the environment. I forgot the environment. I think the attitude of a lot of 60-year-olds is "I'm not going to be around when the ice caps melt, so why should I pay more for gasoline?"

[RickyDomingo]

"Compromising pictures taken by friends and lovers are much more likely to end up on the internet with enough context to identify the subjects later."

There are huge websites and business models built around exactly that(the posting of amateur nude/sex pictures). I think the general rule of thumb for anyone thinking of taking/making those kind of pictures is that, unless you know for a fact that you control the only copies, those pictures will find their way on to the internet.

[Tyler DiPietro]

I find it extremely silly that the person your commentary is in reply to justifies with some "opportunity" 18-21 year olds to engage in "sexual experimentation". It's this sort of obsolete, 50's era thinking that has always annoyed me. When I was in high school, freshmen students were the ones engaging in "experimentation". In my experience at least, between 18 and 21 years of age is usually when your tastes and proclivities begin the catalyze.

[Tyler DiPietro]

Sorry, that first sentence is a bit bungled. Here is a corrected version (changes in brackets):

I find it extremely silly that the person your commentary is in reply to justifies [her idea] with some "opportunity" [on the part of] 18-21 year olds to engage in "sexual experimentation".

[superdude]

"I can sign a contract obligating me to repay tens of thousands of dollars of student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy--despite the inherent riskiness in loaning money to someone with no credit history whose future income is unknown--but god forbid I make any money when I'm at my peak earning potential for a porn star."

Er. That's what I would say if I were an attractive woman rather than a pasty plus-sized gentleman.

From my point of view as someone who delivered pizzas in college, there are many less lucrative and more demeaning ways to make a living than porn. Has Grance Franke Ruta ever scraped maggot-infested pizza crust off the concrete next to a dumpster for $6 an hour? Porn would have been a vastly preferable source of income, if I weren't a pasty male heterosexual geek and the opportunity weren't denied to me (except perhaps in some obscure fetish genre that I don't know about...)

[greensmile]

I like your arguments on consent and the likelihood of suffering a damaged reputation. But most of the girls in GGW seem to be drunk. That is usually grounds to toss claims that there was consent. And I hear these girls get paid virtually nothing even though others will make money from the pictures...they MUST be drunk.

[greensmile]

If the makers of GGW had to pay the women what porn stars make [not much in many cases] They would never have made those movies. The market for titillation is very price sensitive on the low end.
Making payment as strong a legal requirement as consent would be an attraction to the trade for a sober woman with a fantastic body but also a good way to put a lot of low budget pornographers out of business. That would be more like the economics of legitimate acting in feature films or professional sports except all the hopeless wannabes would not be so upfront about their ambitions.

[otherpaul]

The age of majority should be 23. Anyone who has to spend time around undergrads *knows* most of 'em aren't much better than pre-schoolers who've mastered a teensie-itty bit of language (and oodles of angst).

As for on-line porn, the only solution is for everyone to post pictures of themselves bare-&!*'d naked, which will make this a total non-issue (and make my web-surfing more rewarding).

[greensmile]

otherpaul:
thats funny,
The police are on their way.

[Alon Levy]

Anyone who has to spend time around undergrads *knows* most of 'em aren't much better than pre-schoolers who've mastered a teensie-itty bit of language (and oodles of angst).

Yeah, I know. The trouble is, grads and postgrads aren't any better. Thirty- and forty- and fifty-year-olds are as capable of being stupid as any freshman.

[Disgusted Beyond Belief]

The age of majority should be [myAge - 1].

Sorry, the age of majority is 18. At age 18 you are an adult. Stop trying to nanny us, is the message I'd send to the author of that suggestion.

If an 18 year old can be sent to die, either in the electric chair or in Iraq, then they sure as hell can flash a camera if they want to.

[DonBoy]

The fact [an 18-year-old] can't legally buy beer is just another stupid Reagan legacy.

I think it's pre-Reagan, but barely. Data point: my sister, who went to college in MA (Tufts, as a matter of fact) and turned 21 in April 1981, was chasing the legal drinking age throughout college -- it was going up a year at a time in the late 1970s.

[Robert O'Brien]

...raise the voting age...

Absolutely. I do not think the clueless 18-20 demographic should be voting.

[Alon Levy]

Absolutely. I do not think the clueless 18-20 demographic should be voting.

I don't think clueless people of any age should be voting, but until there's a tamper-proof way of telling who should get to vote and who shouldn't, let's not start excluding people.

[C.S.Strowbridge]

"I think the general rule of thumb for anyone thinking of taking/making those kind of pictures is that, unless you know for a fact that you control the only copies, those pictures will find their way on to the internet."

Here's the thing, there are so many nude pictures on the Internet, so, so so many, that unless you later become part of the morality police, no one will care.

[Windypundit]

If we're going to tinker with the age rules for porn, can we start by making it legal for under-age teenagers to make and possess videos of themselves having sex?

It should still be illegal for other people to make, distribute, or possess teen sex videos. It should probably also be illegal for either teen to distribute the videos (thus victimizing the other one). But could we please stop punishing teens as sex offenders for the rest of their lives just because they taped themselves having sex?

That can't possibly be right.

[Olive]

I really can't wait until the day that every single person in the developed world had at least one embarrassing photo on the Internet. This stuff's gonna be so much simpler when a couple naked photos can't end your teaching career.

[Alon Levy]

I really can't wait until the day that every single person in the developed world had at least one embarrassing photo on the Internet.

Lindsay, do you still have that picture of me dancing with Maeve at the 3QD party?

[cfrost]

As I recall –and I could be wrong- in an effort to reduce teenage drunk driving, the feds made highway fund dispersal to the states contingent on the states raising the drinking age.

I can’t remember any election being swung by the 18 to 20 year old demographic, though it may yet happen.

The minimum age of recruitment in the military should be at least 21 and better yet, older still. Cannon fodder should consist of people old enough to have at least some idea what they’re getting into.