Under 21 Softcore Porn!

That should jack up the Google hits. And this should disappoint those who follow the links! Garance has a very provocative op-ed on Girls Gone Wild in today's Wall Street Journal. In it, she argues that:

"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."

The digital revolution, of course, intensifies the consequences of participating in softcore porn -- even privately -- at a young age, and so this normalization can do some real damage down the road. "It is time," Garance writes, "to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21--"consent," in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film."

This is where things get iffy for me. I loathe Girls Gone Wild as I loathe few institutions in American life. Joe Francis is puddle-dwelling scum. But if you're an adult at 18-years-old, you should be able to have a beer, or for that matter, flash someone. I may not like the choice, and I certainly hope my little sister isn't going to be flashing anyone, but there's no alchemical transformation at 21 that hugely enhances decision-making abilities. Garance is right that maturation proceeds with age, but if the median 21-year-old is more mature, then 25-year-old is even more mature, and the 32-year-old more mature than that. The line is arbitrary -- what we're really trying to do is guide the decision-making. But if folks are adults at 18, then they're adults at 18. If we want to move that line to 21, that's a different conversation. But I'm very uncomfortable with enacting legislation that denies the ability of young women to exercise rational judgment over how they use their bodies.

For that reason, I'd be much more comfortable with a remedy that sought to outlaw the particular model of GGW, which seeks out girls whose decision-making capacities are severely impaired (because they're drunk) and does so in pressured environments (where groups of guys will be hooting for them to flash). It's an inherently coercive and exploitive approach, and I'd be glad to short-circuit it. But the problem, here, is GGW, not individual teenagers taking nude pictures, and I think the remedy should thus be more limited.

Update: Garance has some smart comments on the problems with defining informed consent and and some further clarifications as to what sort of law she'd like. Read them. I'm still unclear, however, on why we can't just say, "no recruiting for same-day porn videos at bars," or simply enforce a waiting period between signing consent and making your porn so the effects of haste and intoxication are blunted.