Academic

The Hypocrisy of Fetishizing Sexual Hypocrisy

By Ann Bartow

In a post salaciously entitled “Speaking of Teen Sex,” Duncan “Atrios” Black cackles and crows about a news story reporting: “A Utah retailer of family-friendly tapes and DVDs - Hollywood films with the “dirty parts” cut out of them - has been arrested for trading sex with two 14-year-old girls.”

He’s correct that there is pretty acute horribleness here, if the story is accurate. But he doesn’t seem to care about the 14 year old girls at all. They aren’t even on his radar, other than as a prop for his rhetoric. His mission is to mock and excoriate the man for retailing “family friendly” content, because he wants readers to believe that people who commercially cater to people who prefer to watch edited films are contemptible, even though the films’ copyright holders have agreed to produce (and indeed profit from) these alternative versions of their movies.

Black’s post suggest he believes that this “clean flicks” retailer is abhorent for retailing “clean flicks,” rather than for sexually abusing 14 year old girls. To make his point, he’s misusing the girls too. Pornographers and pornography consumers sexually abuse children in high numbers, but Black never seems to pay any “on blog” attention to this sorry phenomenon. Yet he has plenty of blogular venom for anyone who criticizes pornography. Because to him doing that is a far greater crime than the sexual abuse of minors, apparently.

–Ann Bartow

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on January 29, 2008 (boomark / email).