When these various stories broke, the public responded with a mix of shock, disgust and outrage. Commentators struggled to make heads or tails of each situation, describing the events as utterly incomprehensible. And to an extent they are.
But when we look further afield, the practice of individuals filming or distributing sexually explicit footage of individuals without their knowledge or consent has a longer history and one that, in certain spheres, has gone largely uncontested.
Captured girls in popular culture
Twelve years before the ADF web cam scandal, the teen hit comedy American Pie (1999) was released. In it, the main character, Jim, is convinced by a fellow student to set up a web cam in his room to film a female exchange student changing her outfit. As the girl strips down, unaware that she is being filmed, Jim and his friends watch on in jocular amusement from a neighbouring home. Jim then returns to the room and attempts to have sex with her. At no point in the film is there any consideration of the legal or ethical issues or the likely emotional ramifications for the girl. Indeed, in the sequel American Pie 2 (2011), the girl returns as a love interest for Jim.
There is a long history of boys in films bonding through the collective consumption of naked women. In Milk Money (1994), three 11-year-old boys who watch pornography after school go on a mission to see a naked woman. They achieve this by paying $100 to a sex worker in exchange for seeing her breasts. In Sleepers (1996), pubescent boys bond by spying on naked women through a hole in a wall of a female change room. In The Virgin Suicides (1999), teen boys take turns on a telescope spying on a teen girl having sex across the street. In Dead Poets’ Society (1989), male students gather in a cave and collectively pore over a pornographic image of a nude woman. In these ‘coming of age’ movies, the collective consumption of female nudity is depicted as a type of rite of passage that all heterosexual boys are expected to go through in their journey into adult male sexuality.
Likewise, in films about adult male sexuality, the collective consumption of nude women is depicted as a means by which men maintain and entrench their homosocial bonds. In Knocked Up (2007), Seth Rogen’s character and his mates spend their days sitting on a couch trawling through movies looking for female nudity. Their dream is to run a Website that states the exact point in a movie that you can expect female nudity. In The Hangover (2009), and various other films, men bond on a bucks’ night filled with nude women.
While such movies seek to naturalise male bonding through shared sexual desire, these films also serve to normalise bonding processes which exclude women. That is, a woman’s body may be served up as an object that men can bond through, but an integral feature of this bonding process is the assumed absence – and agency – of all other women.
Similarly, while ostensibly these films set up male pleasure as something tied to nudity and titillating images of women, arguably male pleasure is really derived from the power imbalance which results from the voyeuristic consumption of nude women without their knowledge or consent. Of course, this isn’t limited to film.
In 2009, an ESPN (worldwide leader in sport) reporter named Erin Andrews was surreptitiously filmed nude while alone in her hotel room. The videotape soon surfaced online showing various video grabs of Andrews as she put on make-up and walked around nude. The video quickly became one of the most searched Google items. Video-blogging on Feministing, US writer, Jessica Valenti, made the following comment:
You know you can see plenty of hot naked ladies on the Internet. It’s not that hard to find. But folks want to watch this and people are interested in this precisely because Erin Andrews doesn’t know she is being filmed. I think that reveals something incredibly fucked up about the way American culture views women. That what we consider hot and sexy is looking at naked pictures of women without their consent.[35]
Looking further afield again we can see many other examples where Internet users have swarmed to download sex tapes of women which have been produced or distributed without the consent of the women involved. Aside from the infamous Paris Hilton sex tape (which was released in 2004 without her consent), in 1995 a sex tape of Pamela Anderson and husband Tommy Lee on their honeymoon was stolen from their home and released online. Model Katie Price, and her then boyfriend, Dane Bowers, had a sex tape stolen from their flat and leaked during their 2-year relationship between 1998 and 2000. Severina Vučković, a Croatian pop star, had a tape of her having sex stolen and released in 2004. Mexican-American singer, Jenni Rivera, also had a tape stolen from her home and released in 2008.
Then in 2010, a non-authorised sex tape featuring former Playboy Playmate, Kendra Wilkinson, was released. The film had been made in 2003 when she was 18 years old and before she had breast implants. In the footage it is clear that she doesn’t want to be videotaped and she says so on a number of occasions. In virtually all these cases, the women have been subjected to vicious character attacks, while those responsible for distributing and consuming the images have gone largely uncommented on.
Aside from the impacts on the individual women, the danger in these cases is that they reaffirm the idea that it is acceptable to pressure a woman (including a drugged woman) into sex, to film that sex against her wishes, and to circulate that footage without her knowledge, let alone consent. The other implicit message in these cases is that women who have sex or who live or work in the public eye, have somehow surrendered their right to privacy and respect – and worse – that individuals who download and watch such material are somehow absolved of all personal and ethical responsibility.
It is against this backdrop that condones female degradation as sport, that teenagers are now picking up cameras and filming themselves.
So while digital technology and social media have no doubt enhanced many aspects of our lives, they have also extended the ways in which women and girls can be violated, humiliated and abused. To deal with this will require more than mere education for young people about the risks associated with technology. It will require an entire cultural shift which, as its starting point, acknowledges and seeks to redress the ingrained misogyny, sexism and degradation of girls and women that underscores so much of our current culture.
Diane L. Rosenfeld1
(USA)
Who Are You Calling a ‘Ho’?: Challenging the Porn Culture on Campus
In the fall of 2008, a fraternity rush chairman (the individual responsible for recruiting new members) at a small, liberal arts college, sent out an email intended for potential ‘rushees’2 that leaked to and was forwarded to others, and quoted in the school newspaper (Rosenfeld, 2008). In describing the party scene for the upcoming weekend and bragging that his fraternity threw the best ‘lodge’ parties, he wrote, “Off-campus party at our house… So bring your favorite freshman skeezas3 so they can get a cock thrown in em by whoever. Hopefully, if you brought em u can finish the deal.”