A short skirt doesn't equal consent

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Six years ago, a 20-year-old woman, named in court papers only as Jane Doe, went to a bar at Laclede's Landing in St. Louis. She was dancing and someone pulled her tank top down, and it was all filmed by a Girls Gone Wild video crew. The incident was distributed on a video called “Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy.”

On July 22, a St. Louis jury ruled that despite saying “no” when asked to reveal her breasts to the camera, Jane Doe had given “implied consent” because she was there and taking part in the party.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that Patrick O'Brien, the jury foreman, said: "Through her actions, she gave implied consent ... She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing."

Allow me to express my outrage. This kind of reasoning makes me nauseated. If this case involved a guy unwillingly having his genitalia exposed to a video camera, I can guarantee that the outcome would’ve been incredibly different.

There is more than an undercurrent in our culture that says a woman “asks” for rape or other forms of sexual assault. It starts with snide comments about a woman’s wardrobe — a short skirt is apparently some kind of invitation to be harassed.

This is the beginning of a slippery slope, which ends in blaming women for rape. In feminism and feminist theory, the term “rape culture” is used to describe the commonness of sexual violence and how social norms, the media and people’s attitudes condone it.

The culture then teaches women how to avoid rape, through PSAs and self-defense classes and carrying mace and traveling in groups. This implies that not taking these precautions means that a woman deserves what she gets. Not that these precautions aren’t a good idea — I’ve taken a self-defense class myself — but that a woman must somehow be on guard against sexual attack at all times is ridiculous.

I spent one painful evening begging a friend to go to the police after an incident where her date just didn’t stop when she asked. She decided not to inform authorities and press charges against the guy because of the stigma of rape. Upon reflection, I find that a big part of her decision not to press charges was the fear that others would place the blame on her.

The St. Louis Girls Gone Wild case uses the illogic that Jane Doe was asking for it because she was “playing to the camera.” This is the same absurdity that would say a sexually provocative dress is “implied consent” for a man to rape the woman.

A girls' night out usually isn't a big deal. A woman wants a night out on the town with her girlfriends. She wears less clothes and higher heels than would be acceptable in the daytime. There will be dancing and a few drinks. A fun time will be had by all. I’ve been on these nights out, and they’re harmless.

Until someone pulls down a woman’s tank top in front of a Girls Gone Wild video crew.

That Girls Gone Wild, with its owner Joe Francis, is one of the most repellent companies ever to grace late-night television with its commercials is inconsequential. Pornography has been around since history could be recorded. I would even go far as to say that pornography, when made or consumed by consenting adults, can be empowering to women.

This jury’s decision is enshrining in legal precedent that being a woman in front of a camera at a party “implies consent” for having images of your naked breast distributed for profit. Girls Gone Wild made an estimated $1.5 million from the video in question. Someone pulled down Jane Doe’s tank top, and she said “no” to the camera crew. There is no evidence Jane Doe signed a consent form.

As Jane Doe’s lawyer, Stephen Evans, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Other girls said it was OK. Not one other one said, 'No, no.’ She is entitled to go out with friends and have a good time and not have her top pulled down and get that in a video."

Apparently not.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Tuesday, July 27, 2010.

Daily Show accusations of sexism could be as fake as its news

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

“Men hire men,” my dad said to me when I was home for Independence Day.  “And women hire women. That’s just the way it is.”

Whether my dad was strictly accurate or not misses the point.  The gross generalization — that hiring for jobs is largely based on gender — is the center of the brouhaha surrounding the blogosphere and the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” America’s premiere source for fake news.

I love the “Daily Show.” I’ve been watching since Craig Kilborn was the host, and he left the show in 1998. I plan my life around watching the “Daily Show” four nights a week — because if I miss the 10 p.m. airing I catch the rerun at 12:30 a.m., 9 a.m., 1 p.m., or 6 p.m. the next day. My biographers, should I ever have any, will probably point out the influence of the “Daily Show" in my chosen career of pursuing real news (hint hint, biographers).

Thus, when the feminist blog Jezebel decided to make a very thorough, if flawed, critique of the “Daily Show’s” dearth of female on-air “correspondents,” I was devastated. Or, to put it in the 140 characters or less I wrote on Twitter: “This is the most upsetting news EVER!!! EVER EVER!!!” (sic).

Because I was just a little worried that it was true.

Irin Carmon, who writes for Jezebel, went to great lengths, and through a lot of anonymous sources, to make the point that institutionalized sexism, or discrimination based on gender is alive and well at the “Daily Show.” Even if it's not active prejudice, it is a result of adherence to existing social norms and organizational rules.

Jezebel’s article quotes the show co-creator and former executive producer, Madeleine Smithberg, as saying that she doesn’t think the show is sexist and blames “larger societal forces” (Jezebel’s words) for the gender disparity.

And, in some ways, the numbers don’t lie: of the 50 “correspondents” the “Daily Show” has featured over the years, only 11 have been women.

Like my dad said: “Men hire men.”

A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless because I’m still angry with him for even suggesting it, said that maybe women just aren’t as funny as men. Since the “Daily Show” is predicated on humor, it would make sense that more men make it on-air. He sent me an article by Christopher Hitchens from “Vanity Fair” called “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Apparently, a side effect of the ability to grow tiny humans kills any ability to be funny.

“For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing,” Hitchens wrote. “Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.”

Excuse me?

Well, it was all just fuel for the fire. I was furious — not only at my friend for sending me such an odious article, but at my own blindness. How could I have been such a fan of the “Daily Show” and not seen what was right in front of me? Were smashingly good and hilarious critiques of Fox News really enough to justify overlooking such discrimination? Was I condoning the male-dominated media landscape by default because I had not even realized that all of my fake news idols were men?

I thought about it. A lot.

And then the backlash in the media started. Jon Stewart himself mentioned on-air that “Jezebel thinks I’m a sexist prick,” and Slate’s Emily Gould accused Jezebel of using accusations of sexism and the female predisposition to petty jealousy to boost page views. The New York Times wrote a piece on Jezebel’s willingness to take a “media heavyweight . . . to task.”

I found the open letter to “People Who Don’t Work Here,” written by the female staffers of the “Daily Show,” to be most enlightening. “The ‘Daily Show’ isn't a place where women quietly suffer on the sidelines as barely tolerated tokens,” the letter said. “On the contrary: just like the men here, we're indispensable. We generate a significant portion of the show's creative content and the fact is, it wouldn't be the show that you love without us.”

I would rather take their word for it than anyone else’s.

I am, in the end, conflicted. I think that the “Daily Show” could have saved itself a lot of agony if it had not refused to comment for Carmon’s article.  I think Jezebel did a huge amount of reporting, but instead of deferring to a journalist’s obligation to the truth, they decided they had a bone to pick (Jezebel may be a media organization, but it’s a blog of opinion writing with a feminist slant, which can lead to a lack of fairness).

This may have all been blown way out of proportion. Welcome to media in the 21st century.

Do I wish that the “Daily Show” would represent more females on-air? Absolutely.  Do I think that the conspicuous lack of women on the show is a result of deliberate and insidious sexism? Not at all. I will still be watching.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. In her first semester of graduate school, she wrote a (very bad) academic paper on the Daily Show titled “On Reporting, Irony and Fake News.”

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Thursday, July 15, 2010.

Twilight is not for lovers

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I am not one to throw stones about pop culture addiction. I am a devourer of stories.

I’ve been a rereader and rewatcher of stories for as long as memory serves. I watched “Cinderella” every day when I was 4. In second and third grade, I read the “Little House in the Big Woods” series a bagazillion times, and when I was a little older, I probably flew through “Anne of Green Gables” about as many times. In middle school, I was devoted to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Daria” and the entire canon of John Irving.

Then I discovered Harry Potter. If ever there was a series of books to feed my addictive personality, Harry Potter was more than manna for the soul. I came into the series a little late — after the release of the fourth novel, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” when I was 14 years old. I was instantly hooked and in love with waiting and speculating and tearing each book apart for clues about what would happen.

The night the final Harry Potter was released was probably the best night of my life. I read all 759 pages of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” between the midnight release and 9:30 a.m. It was the most thrilling and satisfying singular experience of my life thus far. Chapter 34 gives me the chills just thinking about it.

My ardor for the Harry Potter novels can border on humiliating — especially when I start waxing rhapsodic to the uninitiated. Would you like to hear all about how Harry Potter is a classic mythical hero or an analysis of the philosophical implications of magic?

Sorry, I didn’t think so.

It would perhaps seem, to a casual observer, that I would at least enjoy the “Twilight” novels written by Stephenie Meyer. A series of four very long novels about the supernatural and a bookish girl, with some romance and action, could be perceived to be right up my ally.

And the casual observer would be wrong. Oh. So. Very. Wrong. There is no hatred in pop culture like my hatred for “Twilight.” I have read all the books and even seen the movies. The novels are addictive in the worst way: The prose is awful, the content of the story alarming and the heroine a downright bore, and yet I couldn’t stop reading them. I got no joy from the pages, only a sick compulsion to continue.

I could perhaps forgive this if “Twilight” was merely poorly written with an uncompelling narrator. By the time I got to the fourth book, “Breaking Dawn,” I realized these books were an unwitting assault on any ambition a woman may have in this world outside marriage and children.

SPOILER ALERT: Bella, the heroine, decides to skip college, despite her supposed smarts, so that she can marry her immortal and creepily obsessive boyfriend Edward. Postnuptials, he knocks her up with a half-human/half-vampire. Bella almost dies in childbirth, so Edward makes her into a vampire.

What is the message to the flocks of devoted young women from all of this? If you have sex, you will get pregnant and die.

I know that personal biography can have a profound effect on interpretation of literature. Considering I watched my older sister leave college at 19 to get married (and soon divorced), have three children and work in fast food, glamorizing this epic failure of a life choice seems downright foolhardy to me. It worked out for my sister, who is now a registered nurse and very happily married again (I love you Katey!), but to say that the “Twilight” series managed to push all of my crazy buttons is an understatement.

There are other disturbing things about the “Twilight” series, including Edward’s bizarre infatuation with the smell of Bella’s blood; Bella’s suicidal mindset when Edward abandons her in the second book; really terrible allusions to classic literature ("Romeo and Juliet?" Seriously? Could a literary allusion be less original?); and ickiest of all, Jacob the werewolf falling in love with Edward and Bella’s infant daughter.

My problem is not so much with the content of these decisions but how they are portrayed. I’ll give Meyer credit for making Bella the one who wants to go all the way more than her vampire boyfriend, but the tone of the romance is sexy love without the actual sex. There is no discussion or thought of realistic consequences. The beauty of the best fantasy is that despite its fantastical flourishes, it reveals something true about the human existence. “Twilight” does not come close to this — it is divorced from any semblance of reality.

“Twilight” teaches young girls that skipping college and teen marriage is the very definition of happily ever after. And this is what makes it worthy of my virulent loathing.

Now, please excuse me. I’d like to go watch the new movie trailer for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Again.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her favorite book of the Harry Potter series is “Prisoner of Azkaban.”

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Thursday, July 1, 2010.

A revised version of adulthood

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

From the time I was very small, my mother had rules for my life.

1. You can't get married until you're 32.
2. College is not optional.
3. Get a master's degree immediately after college (because once you get into the workforce, you won't go back, my mother says).
4. No tattoos.
5. No living in California (because they're weird out there, so says my mother).
6. Backpack through Europe.

It goes on and on, and occasionally she makes one up that I know wasn’t on the list when I was 10. And while other parents' desires for their children's lives were perhaps less specific, they reflect the middle-to-upper-class ideal that young people should go to college and establish careers before “settling down” with a spouse, a mortgage and kids.

I think my peers and I bought into this hook, line and sinker.

The Missourian recently asked, Why are Americans taking longer to grow up? Apparently, we young'uns are still dependent on our parents for money and housing and are making our parents wait longer for grandchildren. This makes us an economic strain in hard times on the older generation, or something.

I say just because I don’t have kids and am still in school at the ancient age of 24 doesn’t mean I’m not a real grown-up. Adulthood is simply being defined differently these days.

It’s true that my parents still pay for my car and I’m still on my father’s health insurance plan. It’s also true that I’m putting myself through graduate school with teaching assistantships and loans (also known as mounds of soul-crushing debt).

When societies demand that young people make a small horde of money before becoming truly independent, the age of marriage rises. Stephanie Coontz wrote in "Marriage, a History" that "In England between 1500 and 1700 the median age of first marriage for a woman was twenty-six, which is higher than the median age for American woman at any point during the twentieth century."

The expectations of young adults amongst the commoners during this period were not unlike what seems to be expected today. Although college wasn’t on the menu in 1500, according to Coontz, the ability to independently support children and a separate household was. Not to mention many of the trade guilds required apprentices to remain single, so if a man wanted to learn a trade to support a wife and family, he would have to wait.

There are other pressures on today’s youth that contribute to this supposed delayed adolescence. First, the economy has been rather miserable since 2001 and went from bad to worse in 2008. With unemployment hovering above nine percent, jobs are scarce for young people with thin resumes.

Furthermore, the cost of higher education has skyrocketed in the past 20 years — it has well outpaced the rate of inflation. My mother, who wrote these rules for me, put herself through the University of Michigan in the late '70s working for $2.35 an hour at a gift shop, which along with an $800 scholarship from the state of Michigan and working as an resident-hall assistant for room and board, was enough to pay the $660 per semester to attend school full time.

This is simply not possible these days. Without my parents and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, in addition to the $7-an-hour job I worked at Shakespeare’s Pizza as an undergrad, I wouldn’t have made it through college, much less a master’s degree.

And so here I am: 24-years-old, single, childless, overeducated and on the brink of homelessness and unemployment (or so I think on my cynical days when my job hunt doesn’t go well). My mother was married and gainfully employed at my age.

Maybe I’m not an adult by the most prevalent societal standards of adulthood, but society is changing. It has given us a revised standard of adulthood.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. Her mother, Carol J. Homkes, lives in Georgetown, Ky., and is a manufacturer’s representative in the gift industry.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Friday, June 25, 2010.

Would you go in front of the lens?

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Would you, dear reader, let a photographer into your life?

Considering Columbia has been over-saturated with journalists since the establishment of the School of Journalism in 1908, many of you have probably been photographed by the Missourian or an eager student.

But I speak of allowing a photographer to have deeper access to the private moments of your life. Would you truly allow a photographer access to your private, intimate moments — for weeks or months at a time?

And if you would, why?

I’ve been asking myself — along with people who have been photo subjects — these questions for the past five months.

I’ve been researching the 61st Missouri Photo Workshop, which took place in September 2009 in Festus and Crystal City and the people who let these workshop photographers into their lives.

The workshop serves as a microcosm for the documentary photojournalistic experience. In one week, a photographer must find a photo story and then spend morning until night with their subject.

As a journalist, I ask to see the most intimate, emotional and sometimes difficult moments of my subject’s life — all in the name of getting the story.

As a photojournalist, this is an even bigger undertaking.

A writer does not need, per se, to bear witness to these moments — for them to be recalled in an interview is enough. But a photojournalist must view and capture these moments in real time.

I was told ad nauseam throughout my education, “People want to have their story told,” but I was suspicious that this was not the case; As much as I loved journalism— I suspected that the profession was infected with a light strain of opportunistic voyeurism.

The nine photo story subjects I interviewed all described the experience as being awkward at first. One of my interviewees, Annette Bauman, said multiple times that she’s “not a picture person.”

Most said that it became less awkward as the week went on, as they became accustomed to their photographer and being in front of the lens.

Jason and Sara O’Shea, who homeschool their four children, were photographed during the workshop by photographer Michele Kraus. The O’Sheas said the experience became a family-like affair.

“I think it very quickly stopped feeling like someone was at our house doing a documentary,” Jason O’Shea said. “It more felt like we had a family member over that we don’t get to see a lot, so she wanted to take a lot of pictures ... I know that it sounds silly, she (Kraus) was only here three or four days, but it was almost like she was more of a little sister and she was just taking pictures of family.”

Jason O’Shea thought the photos that were taken by Kraus were “phenomenal.”

“They capture what our life is really about,” O’Shea said. “I guess in a way (the photos) made a difference because I realized that when I look at those pictures, they really do capture a lot of what is important to me and that helped me to realize, I guess, that the direction our lives are going is the direction I want them to go. ...I felt the pictures were, to a great extent, an affirmation of the fact that our life is really what I want it to be.”

Private moments were also photographed. Laverne Austin, a resident of Crystal City who lives with a rare form of multiple sclerosis was photographed by John Liau during the workshop.

“John didn’t mind coming in the bedroom,” Austin said. “I’d be getting ready to put something on and the he’d be with his camera going, click click click. I’d say, ‘How long have you been here? I’m going to tell on you to your fiancé.’”

To me, the most amazing story I heard was that of the Bauman family. Annette and Josh Bauman have two sons, Jackson and Kade.  Kade, who is now 2 years old, could not support his head, crawl or talk because of multiple medical conditions including epilepsy, cortical vision impairment and hypotonia. The Baumans allowed their photographer, Julia Robinson, to visit the emergency room with them when  Kade had a seizure.

“It was cool of Julia to come to the ER with us,” Josh Bauman said. “Trips to the hospital with Kade are intense. She didn’t back down, she went right with it. ...We thought it was going to get difficult when we went to the ER because hospitals are picky — we thought it may get hairy, but they didn’t mind. ...We wouldn’t have agreed to do it if there was going to be something off limits.”

I’ve been photographed by classmates as a class exercise, but I wonder every time I send a Missourian photographer out on assignment if I would say yes to a photographer in a similar situation. If it was my nine-year-old brother in the hospital, would it be OK with me?

What it comes down to for me is this: The power of these stories is extraordinary. They have the power to inform, to enlighten, to show and examine the nature of human emotion. One could (and I have) debate the measurable effect of these stories but I believe that revealing a common humanity is the highest cause that could exist. Photo stories are unique in their ability to do this.

If my story had the capacity to exhibit something so true, how could I possibly say no?

What would you say?

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. She volunteered twice for the Missouri Photo Workshop, and she is weeks away from completing her master’s project about the people who were photographed during the 2009 MPW in Festus and Crystal City.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Friday, June 18, 2010.