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.

Halloween: Destroying post-feminism through costumes

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

The accepted norm of Halloween costumes is that they are an opportunity to be not yourself for an evening. That is all well and good but I can guarantee that there is not enough post-feminist theory in this world to justify the female skin parade that will be on full display this All-Hallows Eve.

Many women my age took the movie “Mean Girls” too seriously when it said: “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

Which is a really lovely sentiment, isn’t it? We’re so post-feminist that dressing to please the aesthetic sexual eye of men is acceptable again. Because I’m sure that all the girls running around in black tights, bustiers and bunny ears and tails will be thinking about Gloria Steinem and her investigative stint as a Playboy Bunny (in the cocktail club, not the magazine) in 1963 (see “I Was A Playboy Bunny” for details).

And do all the professions really need an injection of the erotic? There’s no such thing as being a doctor or police officer or zombie for Halloween anymore. Being those things requires showing lots of skin, as if Halloween will be a dress rehearsal for Spring Break.

This mentality about the acceptability of body-baring costumes on Halloween has trickled down to children.  Reports of young girls sexing it up on Oct. 31 may be slightly over-exaggerated, but I would certainly argue that ladybugs with short skirts and false eyelashes, or pirates in tube dresses and fishnets, or maybe just the devil, are sexualizing girls before they’re old enough to understand what it all means.

Maybe it’s because I am from Michigan, where the end of October is quite cold, but I keep thinking that it must be miserable wearing nothing but a theme bikini as a Halloween costume. Going to a bar or a house party to celebrate with copious amounts of apple cider inherently requires less cold-weather wear than trick-or-treating out in the elements. To maximize the candy grab, at 10-years-old, all Halloween costumes had to be worn over three layers of sweat suits and jackets for warmth, and with the exception of Dorothys with ruby slippers, boots in case of rain or snow.

Now, a Dorothy is more likely to be wearing four-inch spike ruby heels than ruby slippers. Where is the creativity? The scare-factor? Halloween costumes have their roots in the Celt’s fear of being recognized by spirits of the dead, and they wore masks so they would be mistaken for fellow spirits. Or maybe we should all be scared of the cleavage?

The display of too much female flesh on Halloween is merely a symptom of a larger problem. The reclamation of sexual images that previously upheld a patriarchal society’s impractical standard of beauty and a female’s role of servitude is a standard of post-feminism. But this has been perverted into a one-night-per-year display of sex that has no purpose except to please male party-goers. It’s hard to demand respect when a woman is dressed, even on Halloween, like she does not respect herself.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.

Women's fashion magazines are evil, yet impossible to resist

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Every once and again, I do something that I know I should not do. I buy glossy women’s fashion magazines. Yes, those very very pretty manifestations of marketing an unobtainable standard of physical beauty are the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures.

It’s really nice to pretend that with a few flicks of the page I can find the secrets to a perfect wardrobe, glowing clear skin and shiny hair. It’s also really nice to pretend that, on a grad student's salary, I can actually afford the $40 bottle of exfoliating face wash or the $2,000 designer skirt that is required for such easy perfection.

I mean, what exactly makes a skirt cost $2,000? And why do I now lust after it like I would normally lust after a gooey chocolate brownie (that could be achieved in an hour for under $10).

Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of the feminist magazine Ms., wrote in 1990 about the “complementary copy” quid pro quo demanded by advertisers in women’s magazines. Meaning: a lipstick ad should be next to an article about lipstick trends, and preferably the lipstick article should feature the advertised lipstick.

“If 'Time' and 'Newsweek' had to lavish praise on cars in general and credit General Motors in particular to get GM ads, there would be a scandal — maybe a criminal investigation,” Steinem wrote in an essay titled “Sex, Lies and Advertising." "When women's magazines from 'Seventeen' to 'Lear's' (now defunct) praise beauty products in general and credit Revlon in particular to get ads, it's just business as usual.”

Just paging through any of these magazines with glamorous women celebrities on the cover should tell you that not much has changed. And there is very little transparency from the magazines or the advertisers about the practice of “complimentary copy.” But then, there are the models.

Mega-design house Ralph Lauren recently fired a model for being too fat. The model, Filippia Hamilton, had been Photoshopped in an advertisement into a human lollipop — her head was bigger than her waist and hips. Hamilton is reportedly 5-feet-10-inches tall and weighs 120 pounds — she’s a size four and has a body mass index of 17.2, which is considered to be underweight.

And the Ralph Lauren advertisement is really just a case of an accepted practice taken to an obvious extreme. Every image in a woman’s glossy fashion magazine has been Photoshopped to high heaven for “aesthetic” purposes.  A few pounds shaved off here and there, maybe a blemish removed, it's all standard practice in the magazine industry. For the record, it is absolutely not standard practice at the Missourian.

The supposition that women want to see only beautiful and perfect representations of the models and products on the page so that they can aspire to that standard is downright condescending. I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to look like a human lollipop. In real life, and without the assistance of Photoshop, that lollipop look would probably involve the removal of some ribs, and possibly a limb or two. That would hurt.

But will I stop wasting my money on these rags? Probably not. Because I am hoping that one of them will tell me : first, why all the young women around here are laboring under the delusion that leggings are pants; and second, how I can be pretty and successful and make it look easy too.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on October 21, 2009.

Denying public money to fund abortion unfair

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

On the last day of August, my esteemed op-ed editor handed me a letter from Mr. James D. Miller of Fayette. “A story idea,” my editor said. I really love story ideas. Having something to write about (or photograph, as the case may be) is more than half the battle.

Mr. Miller had written the Missourian, confused about the reportage of a comment by Sen. Claire McCaskill at an Aug. 26 town hall meeting in Jefferson City about health care. Missourian reporter Michael Sewall wrote: “McCaskill also tried to dispel the rumor that abortion would be covered under the new health plan. She said that would be impossible unless an amendment was inserted to repeal the black-letter law, which prohibits the federal government from funding abortion.”

Thus, Mr. Miller wrote in his letter, “What is the ‘black letter law’? When I called Sen. McCaskill’s Washington, D.C., office … the staffer I talked to did not know what this ‘black letter law’ is.”

As far as I can tell, this is a case of jargon making it into a story without explanation. A “black letter law” is a law that is already on the books — a law that already exists and is generally well known. It turns out that Sen. McCaskill was really talking about the Hyde Amendment at the Aug. 26 town hall meeting. I called Sen. McCaskill's office in Washington, and a staffer confirmed that the black letter law she referred to was indeed the Hyde Amendment.

Congress first passed the Hyde Amendment in 1976 as a legislative response to Roe v. Wade, which was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. Nestled into the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (the current incarnation), it forbids the federal government from funding abortions (with some exceptions for rape, incest and the mother's health). It’s long, but here are the important bits:

• SEC. 507 (a) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for any abortion.
• (b) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion.

Which means, in effect, that neither Medicare nor health insurance for federal employees and military personnel paid for by the federal government can cover abortions. In 1993, the language was added to the law to allow funding of abortions in the case of rape, incest or when the mother’s health was at risk.

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided in Harris v. McRae that the ban on federal funding of abortions was constitutional. Justice Potter Stewart wrote: “It does not follow that a woman's freedom of choice carries with it a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices. … The Hyde Amendment … places no governmental obstacle in the path of a woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy.”

Justice Stewart, I respectfully disagree.

First, think of other rights that we have under the Constitution: freedom of speech, for example. In 2007, the city of Columbia spent almost $40,000 on security to protect members of the National Socialist Movement (aka neo-Nazis) while they held a 45-minute rally downtown. That’s public, taxpayer money. Forty thousand dollars is an absurd amount of money spent to protect the speech of very few people with some ugly, vile views.

I hate what they say. But they have the right to say it, and I’ll pay to protect their rights to say whatever hateful poison they want to spew.

Roe v. Wade said women have the constitutional right to choose an abortion. It’s controversial, and it wasn’t as explicitly stated as freedom of speech, but it is unfair to deny public money to protect this right.

Furthermore, the Hyde Amendment punishes women who can’t afford to choose to terminate a pregnancy. The procedure in the first trimester can cost between $350 and $900, according to Planned Parenthood. This can be prohibitively expensive.

But, I defer to Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said it best in his Harris v. McRae dissent: “The Court's opinion studiously avoids recognizing the undeniable fact that for women eligible for Medicaid — poor women — denial of a Medicaid-funded abortion is equivalent to denial of legal abortion altogether. … If abortion is medically necessary and a funded abortion is unavailable, they must resort to back-alley butchers, attempt to induce an abortion themselves by crude and dangerous methods, or suffer the serious medical consequences of attempting to carry the fetus to term. … The Court's decision today marks a retreat from Roe v. Wade and represents a cruel blow to the most powerless members of our society. I dissent.”

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism, and a teaching assistant for the communications law class.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on September 9, 2009.